"Elara… my Elara…" The whispered words, a spectral echo of a voice from a past she had believed irrevocably lost to the ravages of time and the void, drifted through the heavy, suffocatingly crimson-lit air, a fragile thread in the stifling gloom. Elara stood frozen, her breath catching hard in her throat, the suffocating, tormenting weight of Caius's selfless sacrifice momentarily eclipsed by a disbelieving surge of hope, fragile but insistent.
Lysander. The voice resonated powerfully within the empty halls of her soul, a melancholy, wistful note from an existence she barely clung to in her shattered memories. Could it be him? After his heroic, selfless act in the crystal prison, consumed by the void's oncoming, boundless darkness, how could a whisper of his presence reach her now, in this alien realm?
Hot, scalding tears streamed down her face, a deluge of mingled grief for Caius and profound, muddled bewilderment. She whirled around, her demented eyes wildly searching the choking, blood-soaked desolation, the great, jagged obsidian spires looming above, casting long, writhing shadows that danced like malignant spectres of her despair.
"Lysander?" She panted, her words barely more than a forced rasp in the hot, vibrating air, a hopeless, soundless plea for confirmation in the echoing silence. "Is that truly you?"
Only the foreboding, humming hum of this otherworld and the crazed, pounding sound of her own bruised heart answered her tormented question. Had it all been a cruel joke of her grief-addled mind, a spectral false memory of a love lost not once but twice to the devouring void?
But the whisper had sounded so irresistibly real, so dreadfully, intimately familiar, pulsating with a warmth that cut through the chill that lay around. The fragile connection with their lost past, freshly, lyrically awakened in the crystal cage, stirred within her once more, an elusive, obstinate ember refusing to be completely extinguished by the night.
Driven by a desperate, irrational hopelessness, Elara pulled herself to her aching feet, bruised and battered, her wounded heart to its core. Caius, her steadfast rock, had sacrificed his life to save hers, an act of selfless love that cut deep to the soul. She could not, would not, allow that sacrifice to be in vain. And if there was even the remotest, most infinitesimal chance that Lysander, a ghost of her repressed history, existed somewhere in this infernal world, she must find him to understand.
"Lysander!" she shouted once more, more insistently now, echoing through the stagnant, blood-coloured atmosphere, a cry in opposition to the emptiness of the void.
Still, only the sinister hum and the whispering alien wind answered her plaintive cry. But Elara refused to succumb to despair. She began to creep ahead, her tear-stained eyes scanning the bizarre, angular terrain, searching for any indication, any otherworldly flutter, any glimpse of his phantom presence.
The obsidian spires rose above her like silent guardians, their twisting, unsettling carvings pulsing with a sick, rhythmic red glow. The hooded, silent men stood immobile, watching sentinels in this hellish realm, their unseen eyes like a heavy, crushing weight upon her weary back.
The ghostly memory of the lost long power, its cold, possessive eye that had claimed Caius so horribly easily, ran a shiver of cold fear down her spine. It would surely be seeking her out, its possessive cry echoing through the silence. She must be cautious and remain hidden in the shadows if any semblance of safety was to be achieved.
And as she moved stealthily past the dark patches of shadow cast by the black buildings, the soft whisper was heard again in the heavy air, closer now, with a desperate urgency to it that quickened her breathing. "Elara… follow me… quickly… before they catch you again…"
An intense flash of hope, irrational but all-consuming, coursed through her body, temporarily paralysing her debilitating fear and crushing weight of grief. It was him. He was still there, at least in some otherworldly way.
With the otherworldly aid of the desperate whisper, Elara delved deeper into the dizzying, maze-like patterns of the obsidian buildings, the jagged corners and choking shadows creating a dizzying maze. The air was dense, the dark, evil red light more brilliant, and the despairing hum of the void resonated with a growing, unsettling power, thrumming through the very ground itself.
She took a crisp, angular turn, her heart pounding with anticipation, and stopped abruptly, her breathing caught in her throat. Half-concealed in the black shadows, standing behind a huge, razor-edged obsidian spire, stood Lysander. But he was recognisably different from the living memory she bore. His form shifted and fluttered like heat haze on a summer's day, as if he were fashioned out of starlight and darkness, a being between worlds. His eyes, though still the same profound, loving depth she vaguely remembered, were bright with a vacant, ghostly desolation, an otherworldly awareness of his existence as a ghost. "Lysander!" she cried, her voice a constricted mixture of ecstatic disbelief and boundless sorrow.
"Elara… you came back… I… I felt your return," he panted, his voice a whisper, an ethereal touch that brushed the very centre of her soul. "But… I am no longer what I was, my love."
"What happened to you, Lysander?" She panted, her heart closing like a vice around his ghostly, wispy presence. "The void… when it took you in the crystal…"
"A part of me did fall victim to its insatiable hunger," he replied, his radiant form blinking brighter, as if speaking itself drained his otherworldly existence. "But a fragment… an unbreakable cord, bound to the enduring echo of our vows… remained. I can only be here, in this world so profoundly touched by the caress of the void."
A wave of profound relief washed over Elara, a faint heat amidst all the coldness surrounding her, even when confronted with his ghostly presence. He was there. She wasn't entirely alone in this hellish realm.
"Caius… he… he died for me, Lysander," she whispered, her throat constricted by fresh sorrow, the cold scars of his loss tearing her fragile hope apart.
A profound, long-standing sorrow danced in the depth of Lysander's gleaming eyes. "I saw his noble act, Elara. His passion for you is strong, a fierce and lasting bond, proof of a true heart."
Suddenly, the cold, ancient voice thundered in Elara's head, cold and biting as shattered ice, a dark incursion into their tenuous, ghostly reunion. "The little key thinks it can hide in the shadows of my domain. Foolish, worthless mortal."
The ground beneath their feet began to convulse violently, the glassy obsidian shuddering with a malignant power, and the foul red light spilling from the carvings increased in intensity, engulfing the darkness in an even more choking brilliance. The hooded, silent forms began to advance on them with a ghostly, swift purpose, their red-lit bodies like spectre hunters closing in for the kill.
"They are aware that we are here, Elara," Lysander whispered urgently, his spectral body trembling at an alarming rate. "We must move quickly. This place… it is a powerful nexus of the ancient one's power."
"Where do we go, Lysander?" Elara asked, her heart pounding a desperate beat within her ribcage, the icy aura of the ancient power closing in.
"There is another way, Elara," Lysander replied, his spectral form appearing to ripple as though caught in a surprise gust of wind. "A hidden way, woven through the dying breaths of old commitments and ancient pacts. But it is fraught with risk, filled with peril."
"I do not concern myself with the danger, Lysander," Elara announced fiercely, her voice charged with a desperate fervour. "I need to find a way to bring back Caius from that nothingness. If you know of even the farthest hope, I will cling to it no matter the cost."
Lysander's ghostly gaze possessed hers, a vast, eternal grief and a spark of the eternal love that had been between them blending in their shining depths. "Come with me then, Elara, my heart. But you've been warned. The darkness within holds a thousand secrets, not all of which are welcome. Some speak of things long past and much, much worse than even that which is pursuing you now."
He faced back and began to creep noiselessly through the obsidian labyrinth, his ethereal, glowing form swimming unchecked through the sweltering darkness. Elara followed behind, her heart burning with a fragile, forlorn hope and a new sense of resolve, grasping at this ghostly fragment of her past as a lifeline in the nightmare of the moment. She had lost Caius to nothingness, but perhaps, under the ghostly leadership of Lysander, she could somehow recover him from its limitless clutch. But still, the old power remained abroad, its unseeing eye always there, always pressing, a suffocating force, and the shadows in this strange realm held horrors beyond her capacity as yet to even begin to conceive.
As Elara follows Lysander's shining, ethereal form deeper into the maze-like blackness of the obsidian labyrinth, they arrive at a hidden, circular room, whose walls are adorned with beautiful, pulsating carvings that eerily echo the red rune burnt onto the palm of Elara's hand. In the middle of the room, a churning whirlpool of raw, blinding white light pulsates with a solid, gigantic energy, releasing a warmth that is both familiar and curiously alien. As Elara instinctively offers a trembling hand to the hypnotic radiance, the voice in her mind speaks again, no longer amused or frigid but weighed down by a nauseating, enraged anger: "No! The balance cannot be disturbed! You will not interfere!" At the same time, the darkness around them starts to twist and thicken with terrifying speed, taking on grotesque, somehow familiar forms that hiss unremembered names and reach out with cold intent.