Chapter 281: Nythrakar[5]
For a moment, silence failed.
Azrael blinked, genuinely caught off guard. "Morgan..."
"I can do it," Morgan interrupted, his voice dropping into a quiet, unyielding tone.
"You don’t have to," Azrael insisted softly.
"I know," Morgan replied.
"I know I don’t have to. But I want to."
He took a step closer to the phantom.
"I’ve spent months being told what I am. A vessel. A prince’s ghost. A fragment of a cage. A weapon forged by a dead kingdom. But down there, on that rock, bleeding out under a giant eye... nobody is doing the bleeding except me. Not Modric. Not you. Me."
Morgan gestured to his own chest, his eyes burning with a fierce light.
"I’m not going to let you step in and save the day, Azrael. Because the moment I do, I stop being Morgan. I just become another tool, you picked up."
Azrael stared at him. The open hand remained hovering between them for a few agonizing seconds.
Then, slowly, Azrael’s fingers curled into his palm.
He lowered his arm.
A deep and profound silence stretched between them.
Then, a profound change came over the phantom’s face. The bone-deep exhaustion seemed to lessen, replaced by something frail, delicate, and fiercely human.
A small, proud smile touched Azrael’s lips, a smile so forlorn and soft it made Morgan’s chest ache.
"Very well," Azrael whispered.
"Very well?" Morgan repeated, his brow twitching, his eyes widening in confusion.
"That’s it? No dramatic speech about the fate of the world?"
"You’ve earned it," Azrael said simply.
Morgan stared at him in confusion, his eyes narrowing slightly.
"Earned what?"
Azrael didn’t answer, instead, he took a step backward, and as he did, his figure began to blur.
The dark tunic, the silver-streaked hair, the ancient scars, they began to dissolve into countless, brilliant motes of pale golden light, floating softly into the surrounding void.
Morgan’s eyes widened slightly in bafflement.
Azrael—he looked...relieved.
Like a man who had been holding up a heavy burden and it had finally been lifted off his shoulders.
He gave Morgan one final, quiet look through the golden mist.
"Live, Morgan."
Then the phantom dissolved completely.
"What the hell?! Wait—!"
A moment later, a flash of searing heat pierced through his being.
"Aargh!"
Within the Void, the golden sun flared brightly. It slowly expanded smoothly, like liquid gold pouring into a cast.
Beside it, the Void surged upward.
It blended into the gold, light and shadow intertwining like rivers of silk, creating a deep, incandescent, shimmering pitch that defied description.
Morgan’s eyes snapped open in the physical world.
"I’m alive..."
His entire body felt absurdly sluggish.
"Aaah, that hurts..."
The crushing pressure of Nythrakar was still there. The air still felt like solid lead. The stone floor beneath him was still crumbling into the abyss.
Blood still pooled cold against his cheek.
But as Morgan’s fingers twitched against the shattered slate, he felt a rush of strength flow through him.
Slowly, deliberately, Morgan pulled his left arm beneath his chest.
"Come on...get up..."
He gritted his teeth.
"Get up!"
The muscles in his shoulder screamed, his broken right leg throbbed with white-hot agony.
With a silent groan, he pushed through the pain. Gritting his teeth, he stood up.
His boots planted firmly on the vibrating, cracked stone.
His back straightened. Blood dripped steadily from his chin, staining the front of his coat, but he lifted his head, his jaw set like iron.
The synchronized aura around him clung tightly to his skin, a subtle, shimmering mantle of liquid gold and deep shadow that absorbed the kinetic weight of the titan’s presence.
Inside his head, a profound silence reigned.
"Morgan," Sarenus’s voice was barely a whisper.
" ...What... what just happened?"
Morgan didn’t answer him.
He didn’t fully know what was happening himself.
All he knew was that the crushing weight that had almost flattened his skull seconds ago now felt... manageable.
It was heavy, terrifying, and vast, but no longer fatal.
High above, the colossal golden eye of Nythrakar narrowed. For the first time since Morgan had entered the abyss, the slitted pupil expanded slightly.
The ancient god’s gaze sharpened. The passive indifference was gone, replaced by a deep, dangerous curiosity.
"You’ve survived," Nythrakar’s voice rumbled, the sound shaking the remaining archways into powder.
"Your flesh remains intact. The vessel did not burst."
"I told you," Morgan rasped, wiping a smear of blood from his lips with his sleeve.
"I’m stubborn."
Nythrakar hissed, a wave of crushing malice rippling through the cavern.
"Then let us see if your mind is as unyielding as your bone."
The atmosphere in the abyss vanished entirely as Nythrakar unleashed a telepathic onslaught born of ten thousand years of continuous, lightless existence.
It hit Morgan’s mind like a tidal wave of molten iron. A billion images erupted behind his eyes at once.
He saw soaring cities of marble and bronze collapsing into oceans of fire, he heard the screaming of millions of souls burning.
He felt the bone-chilling, eternal cold of the subterranean dark where Nythrakar had lay chained for eons.
He saw Modric, a young man with golden hair, screaming as his flesh burned away into white ash while trying to hold back the Vault.
He saw Azrael, standing alone on a mountain of skulls, watching the horizon burn, his golden eyes completely dead, devoid of hope.
He saw a thousand vessels, a thousand names, a thousand deaths, all drowning in an endless, suffocating ocean of despair, time, and useless sacrifice.
"Join us... a million ghostly voices wept inside his skull... You are nothing... A speck of dust in an endless tomb... Give up the vessel... Fade away..."
The sheer volume of the memories threatened to dissolve Morgan’s consciousness. His sense of self began to fray at the edges.
He felt himself slipping, his mind confusing his own childhood with Modric’s training, his own memories with Azrael’s infinite exhaustion.
Who am I?
Am I the prince?
Am I the jailer?
Am I the shadow?
His vision blurred. His knees trembled slightly under the tremendous burden of the psychological weight.
The ancient ocean of grief and time pulled at his soul, trying to drag him down into the dark depths where no individual thought could survive.
Morgan reached deep into his mind, driving a spike of pure, unadulterated stubbornness into the bedrock of his consciousness.
He didn’t try to fight the memories.
He didn’t try to erase the images of dead cities or burning princes.
He simply let them wash over him, like water flowing around a jagged, unyielding rock.
I am not Modric. I am not Azrael.
He closed his eyes for a split second, picturing his own hands, his own coat, his own scars gained in dirty alleys and forgotten ruins.
I am Morgan.
The chaos inside his head slammed into that single, unshakeable thought and shattered.
The screaming voices faded into dull, background noise. The images of burning cities lost their color, turning into harmless, distant grey paintings.
The overwhelming weight of ten thousand years of grief washed past him, failing to find a single crack in his sense of self to cling to.
Morgan opened his eyes.
The golden radiance in his irises was brilliant, steady, and terrifyingly clear.
He stood on the crumbling edge of the precipice, battered, bleeding, his coat torn and his right leg throbbing with sharp pain, but his posture was absolute.
The shimmering aura of gold and darkness draped over his shoulders like the mantle of a king who had looked into the abyss and found it lacking.
Nythrakar’s massive skull lowered until it was mere yards from the ledge.
The dry heat radiating from its dark scales scorched the air between them, but Morgan didn’t take a single step back.
The serpent stared at him, its lake-sized golden eye reflecting the small, unyielding mortal standing before it. The titan was silent for a long, agonizing second.
"Interesting, something has changed about you. You’re far more interesting than vessels that came before you."
"I’ll have to admit, your capabilities are a bit more than I’d imagined." Nythrakar rumbled, its voice quieter now, carrying a cold, heavy weight that reverberated through the bedrock.
"You reject the memories of origin. You hold your own shape against the tide of millennia. Truly impressive, son of Thane."
"I’ve already said this before , but I’ll say it again" Morgan said softly, his voice clear and steady despite the bloody stain on his collar.
He raised his hand, casually wiping a fresh bead of crimson from his cheek, his lips curving into a small, sharp smirk.
"I’ve got enough people living in my head, old snake. You’re going to have to do a lot better than a bad slideshow if you want to push me out."
Nythrakar’s slitted pupil contracted into a hairline sliver.
"How preposterous, a mortal challenging a god..."
The titanic serpent reared it’s head back, it’s golden eyes boring into his own.
"Once more, truly mpressive, Morgan Thane. I acknowledge your resolve. You pass."
Morgan paused then blinked.
"Wait...what?!"