— Die! Erasa screamed as she rushed at her father.
Bakuzan swallowed hard.
The situation had clearly crossed a dangerous threshold.
Galaad's very body began to transform, as if the world refused an attack of such absoluteness. Space distorted, laws wavered.
Erasa reached her target but, suddenly—
Srrshhh.
The blade pierced Lucifer.
Everyone's eyes widened.
Even Erasa remained frozen, surprised by what had just happened.
Lucifer spat a spray of dark blood, then sketched a smirk.
— I see that as long as you haven't taken my life… you won't know calm, will you?
Erasa's face hardened. She drove her blade even deeper into his belly.
Blood spurted again.
— Die, idiot!
Lucifer slowly lowered his head. His long hair slid in front of his face, almost entirely hiding it.
— Erasa… all this is mere vanity. You should know that better than anyone.
She didn't respond.
She observed.
Silent.
Lucifer then grabbed Erasa's sword with his bare hands. The blade was still saturated with Mü Thanatos's Blood — Ex Nihilo. On contact, his skin tore, burned by absolute non-conceptualization.
Yet, he didn't let go.
— Attacks from Anarchetypes that recognize each other… have no definitive effect on other Anarchetypes.
Erasa furrowed her brows violently.
— Shut your mouth and die, old fool!
She forced again, piercing her father's body even further.
Lucifer spat blood again… then smiled.
— It is true that there exists a hierarchy in the Father God's Dream…
And in this hierarchy… I can suffer.
Exactly as you are making me do.
Erasa stared at her father, struck by this revelation.
No words came out of her mouth.
— However… Erasa, Lucifer resumed in a lower voice,
we may no longer be capable of imposing the nothingness before the Dream, for our true bodies are ignorant even of our existence…
He slowly raised his head.
— But reality, it, does not change.
When Anarchetypes recognize each other…
Lucifer's body suddenly began to regenerate.
Flesh reformed.
Blood receded.
The wound closed — slowly, inexorably — even as the sword was still planted in him.
Erasa's eyes widened.
Lucifer finished his sentence at the very moment Erasa's sword withdrew from his belly.
— There is nothing left to wound when one recognizes each other.
The notions of strength, weakness, injury or healing are merely constructions posterior to the domain from which we truly originate.
When one remembers our origin… the wounds one tries to inflict on us are nothing more than illusions tolerated by the Dream.
Erasa stepped back, breathless, visibly troubled.
— Don't make that face, Lucifer continued calmly.
Even Mü Thanatos and Shad Ruhvaël, despite the entirety of their skills, are incapable of destroying me definitively.
We all come from the same place.
And they know it as well as I do.
He fixed her.
— Your attacks, even strengthened by their powers, were doomed to failure.
Save that for the Dream's natives — those from the first to the fourth zone.
We, the out-of-zones, come from the Fog.
His voice grew graver.
— The Fog is not an origin, but a coherence restriction.
A concession imposed so that we would be compatible with the Dream.
Without this passage… our mere presence would have made existence impossible.
Standing in the Dream would have destroyed it.
Erasa remained silent.
Her gaze, behind the mask, was now charged with confusion.
— Normally, Lucifer resumed,
we, the original gods, have neither emotions nor attachments.
Not even toward the children we create.
He paused.
— …But I understand your rage, Erasa.
In the mythological immensity of the Father God's Dream, the names of demons, gods, and dragons had become symbols.
They embodied the greatest feats ever accomplished within the Dream: impossible conquests, collapses of laws, partial rewrites of reality.
Yet, beyond these legendary figures existed a domain that no ascendant of the Dream had ever reached.
The Domain of the Dream's Priors — that of the primordial gods — remained inaccessible.
And beyond even that domain existed the Out-of-Dreams, the Domain of Silence, whose entities remained immutable, indifferent, mute in the face of the Dream's upheavals.
Until the day some decided to act.
Lucifer, driven by the irrepressible desire to return to the origin, undertook a forbidden project:
to transform beings from the Dream into Ineffables — not through spiritual elevation, but to make them soldiers capable of existing outside the Dream's laws.
At the head of this army, he wished to place his only daughter, Erasa.
But time revealed that nothing was so simple.
Erasa, unlike the other demons of Hell, aspired neither to domination nor to destruction.
She loved peace.
She protected humanity, which she considered her own, sometimes acting as a silent angel watching over fragile beings.
After her defeat against the Black Angel Wamy, she met her father, Lucifer, for the first time.
He revealed a part of the truth to her… while still concealing his true intentions.
For Lucifer's design was clear from the origin:
to make Erasa an Ineffable, bearer of his will, destined to destroy the Father God's Dream and command an army of Ineffables.
The Ineffables are beings who have left the Father God's Dream after transcending all its strata.
They are no longer truly existences, but absolute absences, impossible to describe in their true form.
They no longer pertain to laws, nor even to meaning.
Among those Lucifer elevated, the first was Zar'Khan —
the very first Ineffable in history.
As for the Ineffable Leon, his origin remains an even deeper mystery.
But Zar'Khan, gnawed by pride, sought to dominate the Dream rather than serve Lucifer's project.
Lucifer, who had raised him like a son, was deeply disappointed.
So, he turned to his only daughter.
Erasa.
He trained her deliberately, patiently, to make her a perfect Ineffable.
Later, he confessed the entirety of his plan to her.
And Erasa refused.
Lucifer's ultimate project was even more terrible.
He wished to reawaken the Anarchetypes —
the true Priors of the Dream.
Entities that no being of the Dream can conceive, for they have never been part of the Father God's Dream.
They are naturally exterior, prior, incompatible with it.
The awakened Anarchetypes would have the mission to blow upon existence itself,
bringing back the Original Nothingness before the Dream.
A total annihilation.
Including the Ineffables.
Mü Thanatos, the Son of God, and the other original gods of the Dream are not first entities.
They themselves are echoes of the Anarchetypes.
But unlike the other Anarchetypes, their existence does not destroy the Dream.
They neither protect it out of compassion, nor attachment, nor pleasure.
They maintain it out of necessity, compatibility, ontological coherence.
The other Anarchetypes, they, destroyed the Dream simply by their presence.
Not out of malice, but out of absolute incompatibility.
Some Anarchetypes — those called today the true original gods —
are the only Anarchetypes whose breath is coherent with the Dream.
It is their indifference, not their will, that gave birth to the Dream itself.
To sort the incompatibilities, a separation was made in the Fog.
In this primordial Fog, the Father God — avid for Absolute —
voluntarily cut the origins and ties linking the other echoes to their prior forms outside the Dream.
This act took place even before the entities emerged as symbols within the Dream.
The incompatible echoes were reduced, fragmented, then assigned secondary roles.
They were integrated into the Dream, but subordinated to the Father God.
For them, it seemed natural.
Although their category of existence was extremely high within the Dream,
they remained prisoners of a fundamental illusion:
that generated by the Father God's echo in the Fog.
A false coherence.
A borrowed Absolute.
Later, some were fortunately reconnected to a part of their origin.
But none sought to become Absolute again.
They remained faithful to the Dream's principles, accepting their limits.
It is in this context that Erasa intervenes.
When she understood that her father's goal was not only dangerous, but profoundly selfish,
she chose to flee him.
She was not yet Ineffable,
but she sought Mü Thanatos.
She revealed everything to her.
Mü Thanatos — who was also her aunt — then made an irrevocable decision:
she made Erasa her Apostle.
Not to dominate.
Not to punish.
But to protect the Dream…
and monitor Lucifer.
Lucifer was deeply affected by what he considered a betrayal.
If that word even still had meaning for a being like him.
But this wound did not prevent him from pursuing his design.
For even after all that followed,
his goal remained intact.
Lucifer continued to stare at Erasa.
His voice, grave and steady, did not tremble.
— Our category of existence is even more fundamental than that of the Dream's entities.
Emotions… are foreign to us.
He slowly placed a hand on his chest.
— At least… that's what I believed.
A silence settled.
— Yet, when you turned your back on me, I felt something.
A pain.
A turmoil.
He furrowed his brows slightly, as if seeking to name the impossible.
— It should never have existed.
I should have been indifferent to it.
Totally.
He took a deep breath.
— And yet… the fact that you abandoned me… to go to Mü Thanatos…
hit me.
His voice grew lower.
— A sensation I still don't understand.
Something that resembles… almost… jealousy.
He slowly shook his head.
— It's not normal.
It's not possible.
Erasa looked up at her father, troubled.
Lucifer had always been cold —
not out of cruelty, nor rejection —
but out of absence.
He did not love.
He did not hate.
He acted.
But his proximity to her may have created something else.
An unexpected coherence.
A tiny deviation… but enough to give birth to a feeling.
Not a human emotion.
Not yet.
But enough to hurt.
Erasa understood then.
It was doubtless the same anomaly that existed in Sakolomeh.
He too, in his true state, should never have felt anything.
Lucifer approached.
He placed a foot on the cracked ground of Galaad's corpse,
then crouched down in front of her —
a gesture almost unthinkable for a being of his category.
— I don't want to fight you, Erasa.
Erasa remained standing.
Her hands trembled slightly on the hilt of her sword.
— I don't want to destroy you.
He lowered his head.
— I want… for you to be able to forgive
the bad father I have been.