[Try Again]
The voice echoed in the darkness, emanating from the crystalline sphere at the centre of the void. No. There was no centre. There was simply blackness—a canvas of sheer emptiness—and a sphere that radiated a pearlescent light so intense it stung Eiden's eyes.
"I'm tired."
[Sodoyouconcedethen?] The voice thrummed in reply. His head pulsed with pain; it wasn't a sound that the sphere made, not really. It was more like a projection of intent, directly infused into his mind. It struck directly at his synapses, driving lances of smarting pain through him.
"So what if I do?"
[Your connection will be forever severed. Your people will die. Your world will fall ]
The voice's deadpan delivery was chilling. It did not care whichever way the pendulum fell, Eiden felt. Sometimes he wondered why it even bothered; why had it expended so much of itself to raise up humanity? As if they deserved it.
"I don't care…much," he said. It came in slow increments: the sensations that accompanied a corporeal body. A shell of flesh and bone that stretched tightly over the shape of his soul. "I have tried hundreds of times. What will one more attempt accomplish?"
Definition followed the sensations. The world around him warped into concrete geometric shapes that stretched beyond the boundaries of physical laws. Geometries that reached into dimensions he could not perceive, writhing in the emptiness, wrestling to hammer out a solid form until, at last, a flat plane of black glass stretched out beneath his feet, reaching into a horizon that would never end.
[There are more stars in your skies than there are sands in your planet], the voice said. [Your attempts do not amount to even a fraction of a fraction of their number. You pronounce yourself a Slayer of Gods, do you not?]
Cold stabbed into Eiden's feet. He shivered, and with that shiver came the awareness that where he had been nothing, he was now something.
"That was made in error, I admit."
He glanced down at himself. The black material that made up this liminal realm was sloughing off his skin inch by inch. It was like he had been submerged in the stuff, and was now emerging, like a newborn babe into a wild, merciless world.
[Irrelevant]. The voice dismissed. [Are you truly ready to abandon your mission? What is one more try, amongst many?]
Eiden said nothing. He watched as the black stuff sloughed off his body completely, leaving a pale, scrawny silhouette standing still on the infinite vista.
"What if I fail?" He whispered. Uncertainty threaded the tone of his voice, lending it a tremulous echo that betrayed the deep-seated fear lurking within him. He examined his hands: pale, long fingers, riddled with scars. Hands that had tried to grab on to the world and bend it to his will — and failed time and again.
[Then you will do what you always do. Try again]
Silence descended into the void, an absence of sound so potent that it screamed louder than any sound ever had.
Eiden scoffed in black humour, and flexed his fingers. Whorls and wisps of ghostly light gathered in his open palm, until a beating heart appeared, a strange organ of red flesh and crystalline structures. The organ was alight with a dim luminescence, the echoes of the power it contained warping the world around it. With every beat of the heart, shadows seemed to twist and writhe in his periphery.
Eiden paid them no mind.
"I suppose you're right," he said. He held up the heart to his mouth, and swallowed it with a sickly, wet gulp. "What is one more try, amidst hundreds?"
He looked up at the sphere, at its blinding radiance and the sheer power that pulsed from it in coruscating waves.
"I'll see you on the other side, Nexus."
[GRAND REGRESSION].
Light flooded the void. And then…nothing.