Nightblade (Darkest night)

Morgan paused.

​Then blinked.

​"Wait... what?!"

​ He stared up at the titan’s gargantuan face, wiping another streak of half-dried blood from his chin.

"What do you mean? You were just trying to melt my brain two seconds ago!"

​Nythrakar silently stared at him for a few moments. Then the abyss fell completely, terrifyingly silent.

The glowing, molten-orange fissures cutting through the titan’s obsidian scales flickered, then dimmed.

Thousands of tons of ancient stone began to slide over themselves with low bone grating sound.

The colossal body was folding in on itself.

The mountain range of obsidian scales bled outward into golden mist and dark shadow, collapsing inward toward a single, localized point in space directly before the ruined ledge.

Morgan’s body reacted before his conscious mind could process the visual anomaly.

​He staggered back half a step, his shattered right leg shrieking in protest as he threw up his hands, the synchronized aura of gold and darkness flaring defensively around his chest.

A muffled, pained groan escaped his lips as a flare of white-hot pain lanced through his injured limb.

Shit," Morgan hissed through his teeth.

"What now?"

​The collapsing mist condensed. The lightless void of the cavern seemed to bend around the focal point, compressing an existence that spanned miles into something small enough to stand upon the slate.

The mist snapped inward with a small explosion.

​Where the mountain-sized skull had loomed a moment before, a figure now stood.

​Morgan’s breath hitched, his eyes widening lightly.

​It was a man. Or, at least, something shaped like one.

​He stood roughly eight feet tall, towering over Morgan, but his proportions were lean, long, and impossibly precise.

He was wrapped in a simple, floor-length tunic of woven, black cloth that bore no crests, no jewels, and no ornament, yet it hung on his frame snugly.

His skin possessed the pale, lifeless tone of crushed slate, but along the column of his neck and down the backs of his broad hands, delicate, flakes of iridescent obsidian scales caught the faint golden light of the golden dome around Morgan.

Beneath the ash-colored skin, hairline fractures of faint, molten-gold energy pulsed with a slow, deliberate rhythm, like liquid fire flowing through stone veins.

His hair was long, black as a starless sky, falling over his broad shoulders.

​When he tilted his head down, his face was revealed, strikingly sharp, carved with high, ancient cheekbones and a narrow, cruel mouth that looked as though it had never once formed a smile in ten thousand years.

His eyes were identical to the lake-sized orb that had just stared down at Morgan from above, incandescent gold, split by razor-thin, vertical pupils of absolute blackness.

Nythrakar didn’t look like a monstrous demon.

​On the contrary, he looked old.

Unfathomably, unnaturally old.

"He’s smaller,"Morgan thought, his mind racing wildly as his eyes tracked the tall figure.

"He’s infinitely smaller...so why does he feel ten times more dangerous?"

When Nythrakar had been a giant serpent miles long, his power had been vast, spread out over an entire cavern.

But now, that entire primordial existence, the weight, the malice, the ancient decay of a forgotten age...was compressed into an eight-foot frame standing mere feet away.

The air within ten feet of the humanoid entity vibrated so intensely that tiny pebbles on the ground were hovering, suspended an inch off the slate in defiance of gravity.

​Morgan’s boots slid back another inch.

"Well, this is... new," he muttered, keeping his voice light despite the pain and the sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

"You’re now considerably smaller than advertised."

"This shape requires less effort to maintain," Nythrakar murmured.

"And is much more convenient, wouldn’t you agree?"

Nythrakar’s voice now a smooth, low, impossibly deep baritone, cold, resonant, and entirely devoid of human warmth.

Yet, it carried a strange, heavy weight that made Morgan’s ears ache.

Morgan straightened his back, wincing as his broken leg sent a sharp spike of agony up his side, though he stubbornly refused to show it on his face.

He could already feel his body slowly trying to mend itself but even then it’d probably take a while for him to fully recover.

But at the very least, the bleeding had stopped.

"So... I passed? You’re not going to try to melt my brain again?"

You withstood a fraction of my killing intent," Nythrakar said calmly, taking a single, silent step forward.

"You anchored your identity against the tide of ten thousand years."

You survived because you simply refused to care for it. You remained yourself."

​"I like being myself," Morgan replied dryly. "It’s a comfortable fit."

"Surviving the weight of my existence is one matter, Morgan Thane," Nythrakar murmured, stopping a few paces away.

His golden eyes flickered with a faint, molten intensity.

"Containing it is another. Your Void has synchronized its light and its darkness. But your flesh... is still mortal."

He paused staring at Morgan somberly for a few moments then bit out.

"If I were to pour my essence directly into your Void now, your physical frame would turn to ash before the transfer completed."

​Morgan’s brow furrowed, his lips twitching slightly.

"Then we’re back at square one. You want an end, I want answers, but if I take your power, I explode. That sounds like a terrible deal, no?"

​Nythrakar did not answer immediately.

​Instead, he lifted his right hand. His fingers were long, tipped with dark, obsidian-like nails.

As he raised his palm, the space between his hand and Morgan’s chest warped. The air distorted, bending light and shadow until a faint, dark orb materialised above his slate-colored skin.

​It was an egg.

​Or, at least, it resembled one.

It was roughly the size of a human heart, oval and heavy.

Its shell was made of a deep, light absorbing darkness, a dense, petrified crystal that seemed to pull the faint light from Morgan’s golden tinted dome directly into its surface.

Fine, spiderweb-thin fissures of glowing gold cut across the dark shell, and beneath those cracks, Morgan could see something faint, violet, and rhythmically pulsing.

Morgan stared at it, his eyes narrowing in awe.

"I’ll be damned..."

Deep inside Morgan’s chest, the Void reacted instantly, the Golden Sun flared alongside it, humming in a strange, resonant harmony with the dark egg.

What is that?" Morgan asked, his voice dropping into a tone of intense suspicion.

He instinctively held his ground, his hands clenching into fists.

"Tell me you didn’t just pull a demon chick out of thin air."

It is the bridge," Nythrakar replied softly, holding the dark egg out toward Morgan.

"A human vessel was never constructed to absorb a god directly. To attempt it is,frankly, suicide," he explained patiently.

" This anchor was forged in an age before your sky bore a sun. It is a vessel within a vessel. It will hold my essence in a dormant state, translating the weight of my existence into a form your Void can swallow without burning your flesh."

​Morgan stared at the egg, his mind racing

It was a bridge. An anchor.

​He remembered the visions—Azrael’s quiet, exhausted words in the void of his mind.

​"You carry the light that builds civilizations, and the darkness that swallows them whole..."

​"Who made it?" Morgan asked, his eyes darting up to meet Nythrakar’s golden slitted pupils.

"Did Azrael make this?"

"It was the first cage," Nythrakar said coldly.

" The one built before men learned to speak to the light. It has waited through a hundred cycles for a vessel that would not shatter upon touching it."

​He extended his hand further, presenting the egg directly to Morgan.

​"Take it, Morgan Thane. And leave this abyss. The choice, for the first time in ten thousand years, is yours."

​Morgan looked at the dark, pulsing egg.

His instincts shrieked at him. Every survival mechanism he possessed told him that touching an ancient, god-containing artifact in the depths of an abyss was the height of foolishness.

He had spent the last few days, or thousand years, give or take, trying to avoid being controlled, trying to avoid being turned into someone else’s pawn or vessel.

"​If I take this... am I just becoming what they want?" he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs.

"Am I just taking the next step in Azrael’s grand design?"

​Then, he remembered what he had told Azrael in the dark expanse of his mind.

​"...I’m not going to let you step in and save the day... Because the moment I do, I stop being Morgan..."

He wasn’t doing this because a dead king willed it.

He wasn’t doing it to save Elaris, or to fulfill an ancient prophecy.

He was doing it because he was standing at the bottom of a dark hole, broken and bleeding, and this was the only way forward.

​He was the one choosing it.

​"If this turns me into a giant snake," Morgan muttered, reaching out his right hand, "I am going to find a way to haunt you."

​His fingers brushed the cold, light-swallowing surface of the egg.

​Then—BOOM!!!

​A shockwave of heat detonated through his fingertips, an overwhelming, terrifying surge of warmth that flooded up his forearm, through his shoulder, and straight into his chest.

The egg felt blindingly hot, yet, surprisingly, mind-numbingly, it didn’t scorch his skin.

It felt like holding a living, beating heart made of liquid sun and petrified shadow.