Elara plunged headfirst into the churning maelstrom of pure darkness, her fiery crimson glow, the last vestige of her rebellion, crashing wildly against the primordial, all-consuming darkness. It was a sensation akin to being torn asunder at the molecular level and remade by violent force, a dizzying maelstrom of unimaginable cold and searing heat, of pure nothingness forced against crushing, choking pressure. Shattered memories, explosively real and terrifyingly fabricated, tore through the roiling battlefield of her mind – Caius's soothing, reassuring smile, Lysander's anguished, weeping sob, the guardian's cryptic warning, Aethel's raging scream. But above the clamour of feeling and recollection, the soft, reassuring whisper, as tenuous as a rope in space, resonated once more: "Elara? Can you hear me, my love?"
She fought with every fibre of her being to focus, to grasp hold of the gossamer, dancing thread of that known voice amidst the whirlpool of the void's disorienting, madly swirling grip. "Caius?" she begged in her mind, her psychic cry a weak, barely audible whisper in the suffocating, crushing blackness, a dying shriek against the closing in of the nothingness.
The revolving shadows deepened their forceful pull, sucking her further and further into their dark, bottomless expanse, at risk of unravelling her very essence. The quiet whisper waned, a stifled, almost imperceptible echo, swallowed up by the void's heavy, choking stillness, leaving behind merely a shivering sensation of loneliness. Fear, cold and razor-edged as splintered glass, devoured Elara's faltering resolve. Was it just a cruel expression of her desperate hope, an error's illusion born from her broken mind? Had the void already established its wicked labour, tearing apart her sanity?
The painful sense of being pulled apart intensified, and Elara watched her consciousness breaking into a million shining fragments, her own individuality disintegrating into the boundless, all-encompassing nothing that surrounded her. She clung to the searing memory of Caius's unwavering promise, "I will always find you, Elara. Always," a thin rope, a burning ember of hope in the deepening, total nothingness.
Suddenly the wild, mad whirling slowed, the foul, brutal turmoil giving way to a disorienting, unsettling calm. The pressing, smothering weight was lifted, and a shimmering, pale light, something that she had never encountered, began to seep into the black, smothering darkness, not her own fierce, bright, challenging scarlet of deranged power, but a soft, otherworldly glow, the colour of moonlight on a frozen lake.
Elara's shattered consciousness gradually began to reassemble, the fragments of her dismembered self reassembling, her senses edging back from the brink of destruction. She felt firm ground beneath her, although it was inexplicably cold and unnervingly smooth, like satinised obsidian stretched out to eternity. The otherworldly light exposed a grotesque, alien world unlike anything she might have imagined. Impossibly high, spires of black, obsidian material probed the swirling, kaleidoscopic clouds of impossible colour that dominated the sky above, colours which seemed to shift and alter in impossible ways. A silent, otherworldly breeze breathed through the strange, angular forms, and it bore on its breath the faint, mournful thrum that resonated deep within the very core of her being.
She was no longer trapped within the crystal cage. The nothing had moved her elsewhere, to somewhere both beautiful and awful in its silence of strangeness. Where? And, most importantly, was Caius present too, somewhere in this quiet, otherworldly place?
"Caius?" she thought again, her own voice in her head this time stronger, echoing out into the alien, still world, a plaintive cry in the otherworldly silence. There was no easy response, only the faraway, dismal hum of the void, a persistent, unsettling reminder of her isolation.
A suffocating wave of despair washed over Elara, which may extinguish the faint flame of hope within her. Had she staked everything and lost her desperate gamble? Was her reckless plunge into the very depths of darkness for naught, bringing only this dark, alien captivity? The memory of Caius's supportive whisper was now a searing, stabbing ache, a bitter reminder of loss.
But she was not going to succumb to the paralysing hug of despair. Caius's steadfast promise echoed in the corridors of her mind, a shining light in the seeping shadows. If he, who had lost everything, had been able to find her, then she, with her love and her spirit, could find him. She had to.
With determination anew smouldering within her, Elara stood, her own body aching with an unnatural tiredness, her mind still dazed by the wild ride. The dark ground beneath her feet felt curiously cold, and the peculiar light above threw long, tortured shadows that curled and twisted, so the foreign world appeared both stunningly beautiful and instantly hostile.
She began to creep slowly, her eyes roving the strange, jagged forms, desperately searching for something that could tell her Caius, some familiar landmark she knew, or some clue as to her disorienting position. The atmosphere was charged with a strange, otherworldly energy, a still, tangible hum that seemed to thrum through every bone, reminding her how different she was from home.
As she moved further into the silent, extraterrestrial world, she noticed slender, eerie carvings etched upon the faces of the obsidian-like structures, symbols that shone with the unearthly light, their forms extraterrestrial and horribly familiar, echoing the faint, half-real stirrings of her fading, fragmentary memories.
A gaunt, tall figure emerged suddenly from the deep darkness of one of the towering, angular structures. Its form was completely masked by flowing, dark clothing that seemed to drain away the otherworldly radiance so that it seemed only a shadow shape. Its head was completely obscured behind a dark, hooding mantle, but Elara sensed a looming, primal power emanating from it, an icy, huge energy that felt attuned in harmony to the oppressive power she had experienced in the emptiness, to the hideous presence Aethel had termed "the other" in reverent dread.
The hooded figure moved quietly towards her across the sleek, obsidian surface, its motions abnormally fluid and unnervingly elegant. The sorrowful thrum in the air grew stronger, resonating through her very essence, and Elara sensed a shivering, intangible pressure closing in around her, a crushing weight of timeless power.
"Welcome, Elara," a voice said straight within her head, old and chilly as the nothingness itself, but with an underlying, creepy undertone of something else. Curiosity? Cold anticipation? It was the voice that had captured her in the void, the owning whisper that had caused her to shiver.
Elara would not give way, her snarled power churning wildly just below the surface, straining to explode in a frenzied act of defiance. "Where am I?" she silently commanded, her own inner voice a defiance flame in the suffocating darkness. "What have you done with Caius? Bring him back!"
The hooded stranger stopped a few steps back, its unseen eyes seeming to look directly through her very being, reading into the deepest recesses of her soul. "You are where you were always meant to be, little spark of chaos," the ancient voice replied, its face utterly devoid of warmth or feeling, a simple, unchallengeable statement of fact. "And your other… he is where he must be in the great web of fate."
An overwhelming wave of chilling fear washed over Elara, extinguishing the weak sparks of hope. "Belongs?" she cried in her mind, her heart pounding out a wild rhythm in her chest. "What do you mean? What has been done to him?"
The hooded stranger turned its head in a slow, unspoken movement, a movement that sent another new wave of chill terror coursing through Elara's nerves, a movement that spoke of centuries of understanding and unavoidable destiny. "The threads are being woven anew, mortal. The delicate balance is being readjusted yet once more, as it so many times has been. And you. You are the critical knot, the deciding key to the revealing design."
Suddenly, the ground beneath Elara's feet began to convulse furiously, the silky smooth surface of the obsidian quivering with an unhuman power. The eldritch light flared wildly, casting wild, mad, capering shadows, and the sad hum grew rapidly to a deafening, sonorous roar that filled her very essence with an ancient sense of dread. The high, needle-like obsidian structures around them awakened, their walls emitting an unearthly inner light, pulsating with an evil, ancient energy that seemed to emanate from the very air of this odd world.
From the dark shadows of the tall buildings, others emerged, as the first one, their silent, hooded figures approaching her, moving in on Elara in a strangling circle, pinning her in the middle like a lamb among mute, waiting wolves. The air was thick with an unseen tension, a living sense of an ancient ritual to begin, a fearful coming together of unseen powers.
And then, a voice, soft but unambiguously familiar, an anguished shout from her very soul, pierced through the ear-shattering, resonant hum, piercing the suffocating silence: "Elara! Behind you! Be careful!"
Elara whirled around with a scream, her heart pounding with a frantic, slender hope that struggled with the suffocating fear. Leaning forward at the very edge of the otherworldly light, battered and bruised, clothes ragged and smoking, but impossibly real and solid, stood Caius. But his eyes… His eyes held a strange, far-off glaze, an unsettling vacancy, an empty stare that drove a fresh, frozen tide of paralysing fear crashing through Elara's shattered heart.
As Elara gazes upon Caius, alive but with vacant, emotionless eyes, the hooded men and women surrounding her raise their hands as one, and the intricate, unsettling carvings on the enormous obsidian spires begin to burn with a hot, malevolent crimson light, mirroring the pulsing rune on her palm, and the ancient voice echoes in her mind, no longer cold or questioning, but with a quivering, triumphant certainty: "The convergence is complete. You are both where you belong."