After Kaelith's laughter dissolved into the silence of the Primordial Void, Lucien stood unmoved. His abyssal eyes lingered on the place where the man had vanished, but his mind was elsewhere—sinking, remembering.
It was not the first time he had felt something strange… something that didn't belong to the order of realms, dimensions, or even the White.
The memory rose unbidden.
He had been younger then. Not in years—time had little meaning in the White—but in understanding. His power had begun to stir, fragments of the White threading into his being, whispering. He remembered sitting at the edge of the void's nothingness, staring into the infinite blank canvas of it, when the thought had first struck him.
"Why does this place feel like… words before they're spoken?"
It was an odd thought, strange even for him. He didn't know what had planted it. The void had no shape, no beginning, no end—yet in his gut, he felt as though he were standing inside something that was written, being read.
At the time, he dismissed it. He believed it was his mind straining under isolation, trying to attach meaning where none existed.
But then there were… moments.
Moments when he acted, and the void itself seemed to pause—not in obedience to his power, but as though something unseen had turned its gaze toward him. When he shifted the void, reformed its blank chaos into order, there was a flicker in his chest like he had pulled on a thread larger than himself.
He hadn't understood. Not then.
Later, after Aetherion, after Selene, after the Citadel and his army were forged, he remembered those flickers. He recalled how every decision, every struggle, felt almost like two stories colliding: the one he lived, and the one written somewhere above him.
That was when the realization hit him like a quiet truth.
He wasn't merely shaping the void. He had been aware of the shape of the story itself. Not fully. Not like those who sat in the Metaphysical Plane, clothed in authorial divinity. But… enough. Enough to know when an unseen hand brushed the world. Enough to know when the "narrative" bent, twisted, tried to confine him.
That was the birth of his awareness.
Lucien exhaled slowly, dragging his gaze back to the vast roots of the World Tree stretching across the Primordial Void. His lips curved into the faintest smile.
"Meta-awareness," he murmured, almost to himself. "I had it long before I understood it. Even before I needed it."
The thought steadied him. He wasn't yet Kaelith, wielding the blessings of the Metaphysical Plane. But he wasn't blind either. He saw enough of the threads, enough of the cracks in reality, to know he wasn't just another figure dancing in a story.
And that alone… made him dangerous.