The age-old voice, with its heart-stopping, icy finality, echoed in the barren halls of Elara's mind, every syllable a funeral bell for the gossamer strands of her hope. "The convergence is complete. You are both where you need to be in the grand design." The convolutions, unsettling carvings upon the towering, obsidian-like spires, hummed with a hot, wicked crimson light, the otherworldly glow resonating with the frantic, wild throb of the crimson rune seared into the palm of her hand. The hooded, wordless figures about her lifted their bony hands over their heads in a shared black ritual, and the otherworldly mood burst with unseen, palpable power, a sense of crushing, ancient strength clicking impossibly into place, binding them all to one, horror-struck purpose.
Elara's heart thrashed against her ribcage, a mad, frantic drumbeat against the crushing, suffocating quiet that had once again fallen on the alien planet. Her relentless gaze was fixed on Caius, his battered and bruised body a desperate, guttering ember of hope amidst the hellish landscape, but his vacant eyes were twin wells of icy, cold emptiness. That piercing, shining spark of life that always used to dance in his eyes, that unyielding love that was always so hotly burning for her, was brutally smothered, replaced only with an uncomfortable, unsettling silence that was as agonising as a wound in the flesh, an open wound in the very fabric of their shared reality.
"Caius?" she breathed, her voice close to a pained gasp in the dense, otherworldly air, a soundless, begging moan for so much as the smallest spark of consciousness. "Caius, I am here. Elara. My love. Hear me, a whisper, I beg of you?"
His vacant look still stared straight ahead, blind, his eyes glassy as if she were nothing more than a detail of the strange, geometric world, a shadow in his barren life. The warm, comforting feeling of his presence was brutally overpowered by an icy, impenetrable coldness that was like a stinging, sickening ice dart thrust into her very heart.
The hooded figures began chanting in a low, rumbling language, their thick throats vibrating and producing a deep, bass note that thrummed through the silky black floor and resonated deep in Elara's own bones, a shuddering music of primaeval power. The ruby-coloured light from the pulsing carvings intensified, bathing the alien landscape with an otherworldly, blood-red light that cast long, twisted shadows, distorting the familiar into the monstrous. The air grew heavy and swelled, full of an unwholesome, cloying sweetness that was both appealing and deeply unsettling, a sensory contradiction that added its weight to Elara's growing fear.
Fear, cold and paralysing, struggled with a hot, frantic surge of protectiveness that flared in Elara's heart. No matter how vile this monstrous "convergence" was, whatever this ancient, evil force had intended for them, she would not, could not, let it take Caius away completely. The abiding love they had known, the unconquerable bond that had weathered so many impossible trials, had to still be present within him, deep down below this sickening, paralysing hollowness. She would dig it out of him, no matter what it cost her.
"What have you done to him?" Elara centred her mind in angry fury on the chanting, motionless figures, her own churning power boiling perilously near the surface, a stormy tempest eager to break loose. "Bring him back! Release him from your hold! Let him go!"
The voice of the ancients spoke again in the empty halls of her mind, and this time it was tinged with a cold, scornful laughter that made her shiver. "He is now far beyond your puny grasp, little key. He is a part of a far grander work in the tapestry that is being woven. So will you, in time."
The hooded ones' chanting swelled to a frenzied crescendo, the rasp of their voices resonating with unadulterated strength, and the scarlet glow pulsed with a burning, eye-blinding intensity that forced Elara to lift her hands to her eyes. She felt filled with some otherworldly, inescapable pull, as if an unseen force was drawing her irresistibly towards the centre of the frozen ring, towards Caius and the ominously shining obsidian rings. Her restless energy blazed in furious rebellion, a restless, fiery outburst against the unknown, all-powerful force.
She fought in vain to move nearer to Caius, to bridge the agony of distance which had become an unbridgeable abyss between worlds, but an invisible, impenetrable wall slammed her with feral force, a shield of naked, seething power that blazed with the same wicked red radiance. She cried out in savage despair, beating at the unyielding strength with her fists, her frenzied efforts futile against the older magic.
Caius remained horror-stricken and motionless, his vacant gaze unbroken, his eyes glued to some distant, unseen horizon. But when Elara's hysterical screams echoed through the blood-red air, a spark, a hesitant, barely perceptible flame of something unmistakably familiar, flared to life in the bottomless pit of his eyes. It was momentary, a flash of lively spirit she knew, but Elara caught sight of it, a small, hard glimmer of the man she so desperately loved struggling against the engulfing might of the void.
Hope, frangible but unwavering, broke into her shattered heart, a tenacious flower in the desolate, extraterrestrial wasteland of her grief. He was not gone, bound but not extinct. Somewhere within that vacuous shell, the Caius she knew was fighting, however silently, however desperately.
"I shall never lose hope in you, my love," she swore to herself, her unrelenting gaze locked on his vacant eyes, an unspoken promise carved deep in her heart. "I shall find you again, Caius. I swear to you, I shall bring you back to me."
The ancient voice rang out again in her mind, its derisive laughter now tinged with a crisp, irritable tone. "Your emotional connections are utterly meaningless in the presence of destiny, mortal. The convergence is absolute. The portal to planes beyond is opening."
As the ancient voice spoke its dread sentence, the tall obsidian spires that surrounded them began to shift silently and reorganise themselves with an unnerving, fluid motion, their angular, jagged forms gliding and clicking into new, geometrically impossible configurations. The vermilion light increased to a maddening brilliance, coalescing at some focal point in the churning, non-earthly sky above, where the kaleidoscopic nebulae seemed to coalesce and boil with mounting speed and horrible energy.
A tear in the very fabric of reality formed above the sky, a churning, insane storm of impossible hues that pulsed with a limitless, heart-stopping force that lessened Elara's wild power as though it were child's play compared to it. The air vibrated with unfettered, wild power, and the plaintive whine increased, gearing for a cacophony of screams and shatters that threatened to blow her eardrums apart.
The hooded forms ceased their eerie chanting and inclined their hooded heads in one motion toward the horrific, expanding chasm. The voice of the ancients spoke for the last time with an unyielding, icy discipline that brooked no defying. "Behold, mortal. The doorway to that which lies beyond the veil of your finite comprehension."
Elara froze in sheer terror as the bubbling rift spread, tearing open the sky and offering fleeting, awful glimpses of other worlds, bubbling and turbulent, blurring and angrily colliding, echoing the torn, hellscape world she had seen in fleeting glances within the crystal prison. This terrible merge wasn't all about this alien, desolate world; it was something endlessly larger, something endlessly worse, an apocalyptic dismantling of the very reality of things.
And from the seething maelstrom of the original schism, a figure emerged, defined against the impossible colours of the void. It was impossibly tall and colossal, shrouded in seething darkness that seemed to fight the otherworldly illumination, its very presence seeming to radiate an ancient, incalculable might that dwarfed even the cumulative, malevolent power of the hoods and the thudding obsidian needles. Its face still completely obscured beneath deep shadow, Elara felt its attention, cold, ancient, and keen, focused unblinking on her, a wordless possession.
The old voice echoed in her mind for the second time, this one lacking all arrogance, weighted instead with an icy, complete reverence. "Master."
Fear, colder and more absolute than anything Elara had so far known, a primal fear that sought to snuff out the very light of her resistance, enfolded her soul in smothering folds. This was the "other", the timeworn something Aethel had so ravenously feared, the unthinkable power that had claimed Caius so effortlessly and now sought to do the same to her.
But even as paralysing fear sought to envelop her entirely, Elara's steadfast gaze remained upon Caius. The faint spark of what he used to be, which had lain coiled in the hollow of his empty eyes, ignited stronger this time, with it a barely perceivable, yet unmistakably wilful, clenching of his fist. He was fighting a silent, desperate battle waged within the walls of his own mind. And as long as there was even the slightest spark of his will left in her, she would fight as well.
In a surge of desperate, adrenaline-fuelled determination, Elara focused all of her raw, uncontrolled power, not outward onto the impassable barrier, but inward, bringing it into the very core of herself to prepare herself to make a desperate last, perhaps suicidal, act of defiance against the ancient power now facing her.
As the impossibly tall, dark figure steps out of the swirling rift fully, its unseen, ancient eyes fixed intently upon Elara, Caius's hand closes into a hard fist, and a single word, barely a shattered whisper on the alien wind, escapes his lips, a word charged with desperate longing, a flicker of his former brilliant self struggling through the void's grasp: "Elara… run… please…" At the very same moment, the scarlet light spilling from the obsidian buildings rises to an intolerable, blinding level, and the invisible, impenetrable shield around Elara shatters into a million harmless shards, and she stands alone, before the ancient, unimaginable power with nothing but her raw chaotic energy and the faintest, most desperate glimmer of hope.