[Kivana Novastia.]
I was adrift in a dark sea, so vast and endless that I could no longer breathe.
It felt as though something greater, something eternal, was gnawing at the very edges of my being.
That greatness was beyond all measure, so grand, so incomprehensible, that my mind began to fracture beneath its weight.
Over and over, I heard it call out to me.
Yet it did not call for my return; it called for my liberation, for my acceptance. But I refused.
I still needed to be with Malachi.
I still wanted to live, to bask in his praise, to feel his lips, to breathe in the scent of his hair.
I wanted to hold him and never let go.
For that reason alone, I resisted. Again and again, I denied that voice, and the greatness laughed.
It laughed at my defiance, a cosmic laughter that could unmake suns and scatter reason.
My name became its riddle, a question that only death itself could answer.
As I drifted in the Astral Sea, I saw all things laid bare.
The veil of ignorance was torn away, and before me stretched the infinite tapestry of existence.
Lamenting over Earth, I witnessed the birth of countless worlds spiraling outward from a single point.
It was singularity that was both greater than I and yet somehow lesser than what I had become.
Among them, I saw our world, the Central World.
It called to me, radiant and ancient, pulsing with the rhythms of divine order.
Its essence shimmered with living thought, a place of higher purpose and impossible depth.
Compared to the others that hung in the cosmic void, our world seemed real, alive.
While theirs appeared as fragile reflections, faint copies unable to sustain the truth of their own being.
They were illusions crafted from borrowed light, hollow and uncertain, drifting without the weight of meaning.
And yet, even as I reached for the Central World, I saw Earth.
That strange and fragile realm glowed with a quiet radiance, a beauty unrefined and painfully real.
I understood then that even the Central World, proud and transcendent as it was, stood as nothing beside it.
For Earth held something deeper, a reflection of eternity within its frailty, a truth that no divine structure could ever mirror.
But Earth too was small before the Astral Sea.
The Astral Sea was not a place but a living infinity, where thought dissolved into silence, and meaning scattered like dust.
Concepts bled together until only pure awareness remained.
It was the breath of God, vast and formless, the origin and the end of all that would ever be.
When I reached out, my fingers curled, and the ocean of nothing folded around me.
For a moment, I felt freedom, utter, flawless freedom. No chains, no memory, no name.
Yet even then, I longed for captivity, for the weight of that terrible world filled with sin and sorrow, because within it, love still existed.
God had given us the freedom of choice, but against His loving nature, I chose rejection. I denied His kingdom and fell.
I fell endlessly, spiraling through weakness, until the world of shackles reclaimed me once more.
When I awoke, I broke through the surface of the ocean, breathless and trembling.
The water clung to my skin as I rose, bare and unashamed, standing at the edge of our city.
My hair hung heavy against my shoulders as I looked down at my trembling hands.
"That was it," I whispered, the words rising from instinct, as though etched into the marrow of my soul. "My last resurrection."
Then I fell, only to be caught by Malachi.
He looked far worse than I.
His body was broken and bruised, mana drained to nothing, his strength nearly gone.
That tricky, tender darkness, it was no wonder I had felt so fulfilled.
He had given me a part of his lifeforce, all so that I would return before him.
This world rejected resurrection. It was a cruel and vile act, for death was the only true key to this prison called life.
To defy it was to steal from the natural law that bound creation.
Malachi coughed, his naked form collapsing beneath me. With me lying atop him, he strained to breathe, yet he still smiled.
"Please, my love," he murmured weakly, "don't die again. I'm not sure I, or we, could bear such a thing once more."
His mark burned against my skin, and so did my heart. I kissed him softly. "Don't worry," I whispered. "We won't ever die again."
He laughed faintly, voice barely a breath. "That's the obvious."
***
[Aubrey Molotov.]
Returning to this place felt cold and dark, as if the air itself were a wound being remade over and over.
The manor loomed before me, sprawling with countless buildings circling a single, small but lavish castle at its heart.
Painted with red flowers and trimmed fields of calm green grass that remained perpetually perfect, it stood like a memory refusing to fade.
I walked the path toward the central castle, its blackish-red bricks gnawing at my conscience as I pushed open the doors.
Inside, silence reigned.
The wind slipped through the halls like a restless ghost, brushing past me as I wandered aimlessly until I reached his room.
There, I sat on the bed and wept.
It was a dark chamber, bare, unadorned, stripped of treasure or triumph.
Only a bed and a dresser remained, the wooden floor rough and cold beneath my feet, smelling faintly of ash and iron.
I had spent so much time on that desolate planet, and in the end, it had proven utterly worthless, a complete waste.
So I destroyed it. I tore through galaxies, burned stars into silence, all in a futile attempt to quiet the ache inside me.
The destruction meant nothing. It only reminded me of how little I believed in myself, how deeply my weakness ran.
I raised my hand into the air, imagining him there, reaching back, pulling me from the dark as he once had.
And then, his voice.
"I'm back," he said softly, his tone bright and familiar. "It was quite the long bath I took."
He smiled, and I could see him taking form before me, faint at first, like smoke shaping itself into memory.
Then he grew sharper, more defined, and yet… he was not solid. Not real. His presence flickered like candlelight.
It took me a moment to understand.
He was real in essence, but not in body, a spirit, yes, though that word felt too small for what stood before me.
There exists a realm parallel to our own, a world not of matter nor illusion, but of unrestrained abstraction.
It is called the Spirit World, an endless plane formed of raw concepts and the pure currents of emotion that precede creation itself.
It is not higher or lower than Earth, but equal in grandeur, existing alongside them as part of the same ineffable design.
Within this vast and radiant domain dwell the Great Spirits, beings who are not simply of concept but beyond it.
They do not embody ideas, they are the totality of what those ideas mean across all existence.
To call one a spirit of fire, or death, or love, is to misunderstand the scale of what they are.
They are the principle, the definition, and the transcendence of the very forces they represent.
Their existence shapes the thought of all that comes after.
The Spirit World itself spirals endlessly, its form a lattice of meaning where each current folds upon another.
It breathes emotion as air, speaks in color and silence, and dreams in patterns that mortal minds could not perceive without breaking.
Even so, it is not alien. It is harmony, the structure beneath thought, the vibration that makes reality sing.
Madikai once touched that absolute.
He had merged, in part, with one of the Great Spirits, the Spirit of Madness and Blood.
But to reach this world, he sacrificed much of that endless divinity.
The weight of conceptual existence cannot pass easily into any lesser realm.
What remained was this: a fragment, an echo, a vessel carved from his will.
His form before me was an avatar of his now pure spiritual self, refined, diminished, yet still terrible in its beauty.
"You're…" My voice broke. "No, it's impossible. You can't come back from something like that."
He tilted his head, a faint, almost boyish grin crossing his face.
"Well, I managed. Though now that I'm in this state, you'd better make sure to train hard."
I couldn't stop the tears that fell as I reached for him.
My hands passed through the outline of his cheeks, rippling faintly as though touching water.
"Why?" I whispered.
He leaned close, not in touch, but in spirit, and with a motion so gentle it almost hurt.
He brushed away my tears with the faintest glimmer of light. "Because," he said quietly, "you have a war to win."