Nightblade (Darkest night)

A sudden, sharp jolt of electricity jolted Morgan, coursing through his body.

"Azrael..." Morgan repeated instinctively.

As he spoke it, a wave of nascent energy hummed through his veins.

Morgan stared at the man—at Azrael.

There was no godhood in the way the man carried himself, no sense of divinity.

Up close, standing beneath the dim, ancient stone of the ruined temple, he looked profoundly, excruciatingly tired.

He looked—mortal.

The immortality Morgan had witnessed in the visions wasn’t a glorious ascension to a higher plane; instead, it was a relentless, grinding sentence.

Azrael.

He was a man who had been forced to watch the entire theatre of human history play out from the front row, over and over again, long after the play that was his life had lost its meaning.

"How long have you lived?" Morgan asked, the question slipping out before he could think about it.

Azrael looked down at his own calloused hands, turning them over slowly in the pale light.

"Long enough...far longer than you could possibly inagine..." he said quietly.

" But then again,you already knew that..."

Morgan swallowed hard, the suffocating atmosphere of the chamber pressing in on him.

He thought back to the memories—to the primitive tribes huddling around dying campfires in rain-swept caves, terrified of the dark, long before the First Awakened were ever born.

He remembered seeing Azrael standing among them, pouring threads of golden light into a sick child, igniting a slumbering darkness within the child’s blood.

"In the memories..." Morgan began, his voice barely more than a whisper.

"I saw a time before Elaris. Before the First Awakened ever walked the earth."

"You were already there. You were giving them light. You were touching their blood."

Morgan took a step toward him, his eyes wide with a sudden, horrifying realization.

"The First Awakened... they weren’t the beginning... The world thinks they were the progenitors of this power, the first mortals to touch the divine, to be truly godlike. But they weren’t."

Azrael lifted his head. His golden eyes were calm, but deep within them lay a dark, ancient truth that offered no comfort.

"They were children playing with embers left behind by a fire that had already gone out," Azrael said softly.

"They found the ruins of things they could not comprehend and built a civilization on the scrapings of my past."

"They called themselves ’First’ because humanity has a desperate, pathetic need to believe it is the start of its own story."

He paused, letting the silence settle between them.

"They were not the beginning. They were merely the most arrogant iteration of a story that began long before the thought of them first formed."

The implication hung in the air, heavy and terrifying.

If the First Awakened were not the origin of power, then the entire foundation of human history, cultivation, and the structure of the world was a lie...a brief, shiny illusion built upon the forgotten ashes of Azrael’s endless existence.

"And Nythrakar?" Morgan asked, his voice dropping into a harsh whisper.

The atmosphere in the subterranean temple instantly shifted. The ambient temperature plummeted.

Morgan remembered the colossal serpent rising above the ruined Zeregran Ranges, the gargantuan black scales, the horns like petrified trees, the golden slitted eyes that carried the same ancient exhaustion as the man standing before him.

He remembered how the creature had looked at Modric.

"You were Modric," Morgan said, his chest heaving as he pieced the fragments together.

He vividly remembered the way the creature had regarded him...remembered the way it regarded Modric, or rather—Azrael.

"Modric was the vessel that contained it. He dragged it back down into the earth when the First Awakened broke the seals."

Morgan stared directly into Azrael’s eyes. "What are you to that thing? Did you create it? Is it your beast?"

Azrael remained silent, indifferently, but his gaze drifted past Morgan, looking down into the absolute, lightless depths of the dark fissures surrounding the temple ruins—toward the subterranean abyss where the earth still groaned with a low, rhythmic pulse.

"It is not my prisoner," Azrael said, his voice dropping so low it was almost a whisper.

He paused, a long, agonizing silence filling the space between them before he finished the thought.

"And I am not its master."

Morgan felt a cold sweat break out along his neck.

"Then what are you to each other?"

"I am the cage it has spent eternity trying to break," Azrael answered quietly.

"And it is the anchor that prevents me from fading into nothingness. We are two sides of a coin that was struck before your sky was born."

" It cannot sleep while the world above tears at its seals, and I cannot rest while it threatens to turn the world back into the cold ash from whence it came."

In that moment, several images came together in Morgan’s mind, like pieces of a ginormous jigsaw puzzle, reconciled with alarming clarity.

The way Nythrakar had held Modric’s gaze, not as a beast looking at a knight, but as a force of nature acknowledging its counterpart.

"Damn..."

He still remembered the memory vividly, when the titan had uttered his name, its voice ringing with suffocating, overwhelming power.

"Modric."

The deep, ancient vibration of the creature’s voice echoed in Morgan’s ears once more.

"You have returned."

A cold sweat broke out along Morgan’s spine as the true scale of the horror unveiled itself.

Now he knew. Morgan, now, carried the burden of knowledge.

Modric hadn’t just been a prince possessing an extraordinary anomaly of an affinity.

He hadn’t just been a prodigy among the royal bloodline.

"The Vault didn’t contain Nythrakar," Morgan breathed, his eyes widening as the final piece of the ancient puzzle fell into place.

"The Vault was just the doorway. The seal... the thing keeping that monster asleep beneath the mountain..."

Morgan looked directly into Modric’s golden eyes.

"It was you."

He stared at Azrael with a mixture of shock, awe, and horror.

"You... you’ve been containing it forever?" Morgan asked, horror creeping into his voice.

"Not just in Elaris?"

"Elaris was merely one cell in a prison that spans ages," Azrael replied, his voice flat, devoid of emotion.

"When one cage rusts, I build another. When one vessel breaks, I forge a new one. Over, and over, and over again."

He looked back at Morgan, and for the first time, the quiet, restrained mask of the ancient being cracked slightly, revealing the sheer, suffocating abyss of his reality.

"I do not defeat Nythrakar, Morgan. You cannot defeat the bedrock of creation. You can only hold the door shut. And every time the door breaks, a piece of my soul is left behind in the dark to hold it."

Azrael paused.

"But you...you’re...different. There’s something within you that perhaps could end this tenuous journey of mine..."

Morgan backed away a half-step, his mind spinning out of control.

The psychological vertigo was nauseating.

If Azrael was the cage... if Azrael was Modric... if Azrael was the ancient being who had walked through a million lives, leaving fragments of his power and his soul scattered across human history...

Then what was Morgan? And how was he supposed to defeat a creature that not even a god who’d lived for literal aeons had failed to defeat?

Madness!

It was the very definition of insanity!

And why the hell was he revealing all this to him?

Of course, he’d wanted answers, but to think that the burden of that knowledge would be so damning.

"You should know, son of Thane, you carry the light that builds civilizations, and the darkness that swallows them whole."

"Whether you become the next cage... or the thing that finally lets the world burn... is a choice that belongs to the man you choose to be."

The chamber around them began to distort. The stone pillars blurred into streaks of dark grey, the damp cold of the air wavering like heat waves rising from a desert road.

The ancient temple was dissolving, pulling back into the quiet fog of forgotten memory.

Azrael stood amidst the collapsing reality, his golden eyes burning through the gathering dark—a lonely, ancient figure who had outlived every god, every kingdom, and every love he had ever known.

"The name is spoken, Morgan." Azrael’s voice echoed one last time, vibrating in the very marrow of Morgan’s bones as the darkness of the black mist claimed the vision.

"The anchor has settled. Remember who you are... before the world demands you become what I once was."

The vision shattered into absolute, lightless silence, leaving Morgan suspended in the dark.

He looked down at his hands.

He felt the golden sun and the Void pulsing within his chest, perfectly synchronized, moving together like two halves of a single, ancient coin.

He had lived Modric’s memories.

He had felt Modric’s grief.

He recognized Azrael’s true name with a certainty that terrified his very core.

Was he a descendant?

A distant vessel carrying a fragment of Azrael’s scattered soul?

A new incarnation forced into existence because the old cage was finally breaking down?

Or was he simply another nameless, temporary mask that the ancient being would eventually wear, live through, grieve over, and discard when the next age burned to ash?

"What am I?" Morgan demanded, his voice cracking with a desperate, sharp edge.

"If you are Azrael... if Modric was just one of your faces... what am I to you? Why am I here?"

Azrael watched him, his expression completely unreadable, then slowly, like a phantom, he faded away, vanishing without a trace.

"Aargh, damn it!"