by neuraX
The Void had been silent for three cycles.
Not dead — merely holding its breath.
The tower still stood behind me, unmoving, yet alive in a way no structure should be. Every pulse of my aura made its surface shiver, like it remembered what had been born here.
I had not slept. There was no need.
I had walked across miles of nothing — black dunes that flowed like water, plains of shattered glass that whispered when I passed.
The Black Sun hung above me, motionless, but something new bled from its edges now: sound.
Not noise. Not even vibration.
A harmony.
It called to me like an echo of a thought I'd forgotten.
Power had become familiar. Obedient.
But this was… different.
When I reached into the silence, I felt threads — faint, trembling, alive. Not of the Void, not of creation. Something else.
Something between.
I closed my eyes, listening deeper.
The sound was a voice made of a thousand overlapping tones, neither male nor female. It spoke without language — emotion carried through vibration.
For a moment, I felt something inside my chest tighten. Not pain. Not weakness.
Just… unfamiliar.
I pressed a hand against my chest. My heartbeat — if I could call it that — had changed.
Slow. Measured.
Resonating.
Behind me, the remnants of the Void Village still survived — a scarred cluster of shadows rebuilding from ash. I could sense their eyes even from this distance. They watched me as one watches a storm.
To them, I was no longer a child.
I was a concept they couldn't define.
A few had tried to speak my name in prayer. I had erased their voices before the word could finish leaving their mouths.
Not out of cruelty.
Out of boredom.
Then the whisper deepened.
No longer far — it was inside the hum of my own aura.
"Azael Voidborn…"
I froze.
The voice was delicate, layered with tones that brushed against my mind like silk across a blade. It wasn't speech — it was resonance. A frequency tuned perfectly to the pattern of my existence.
When I looked up, the horizon rippled.
A figure stood there, impossibly distant yet vividly clear — formed of pale, starlit strands woven into a shape that almost resembled a woman. Her outline shimmered like glass reflecting nothing.
"You hear us…" the voice whispered through the air, though her lips never moved. "The one who devours silence."
My aura stirred instinctively, a black mist rising and swirling with violet threads.
"Who are you?" I said.
My voice cracked the stillness — low, metallic, more a vibration than sound.
The figure tilted her head, light spilling from the motion.
"We are the Elyndra — children of forgotten light. And you are the wound through which we return."
Her words were not prophecy. They were memory.
I could feel it.
Fragments of emotion — awe, curiosity, and a strange pull toward her — surged and vanished before I could name them.
My hand clenched. "You speak as if I belong to you."
Her laughter — if it was laughter — echoed like fractured bells.
"Not belong… align. Our existence resonates within yours."
I stepped forward. The dunes melted beneath my feet, forming glassy ripples.
Each step pulled me closer to the horizon where she waited. But the closer I came, the more her shape dissolved — as though distance itself were alive, resisting me.
I reached out.
And in that moment, the hum inside me erupted.
My aura flared into a field of shifting frequencies — waves of black and violet weaving through space like living sound.
The air bent. The dunes rose in spirals.
Something ancient stirred within my blood.
A new rhythm.
A new command.
I whispered a single phrase in the Void Tongue:
"Xhal… reth'un thar."
(All things answer the sound.)
The world obeyed.
The Elyndra's form flickered — not with fear, but recognition.
"So it begins," she murmured. "The Dominion awakens."
Her light burst outward, fracturing into thousands of smaller shapes that scattered across the horizon — each one singing the same haunting melody.
The sound pierced through me, filling the silence with a storm of resonance.
I fell to one knee, clutching my head as waves of memory not my own poured into me — cities made of glass, stars without suns, and eyes that could see sound itself.
Through the chaos, her voice lingered:
"Find us beneath the Black Sun. We await the Devourer who dreams."
When the sound finally stopped, the wastes were silent again.
The Black Sun pulsed once — faintly — then stilled.
I rose slowly, black aura cascading from my shoulders like smoke.
The ground beneath me was covered in sigils — glowing violet, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat.
A new power hummed inside me, vast and hungry.
Not destruction. Not creation.
Dominion.
I could feel the energy of everything around me, waiting to be rewritten.
I smiled faintly, eyes reflecting the pulse of the sigils.
"So this is what lies beneath the silence."
The sigils burned for hours before they began to fade.
Each line hummed with the sound of a universe being rewritten — silent, yet deafening.
I stood at the center, feeling the pulse of the Void tremble beneath me. It wasn't resisting me anymore.
It was listening.
When I raised my hand, the ground responded — a ripple of black energy expanding outward like a heartbeat.
Everything in this realm now waited for my command.
Far to the west, something stirred.
A beast — enormous, shifting, half-liquid, half-bone — clawed its way from the dunes.
The remnants of the Void Village screamed. Their voices reached me faintly, desperate and small against the endless dark.
I turned. My aura flared, and the air trembled.
The creature towered over them — hundreds of tendrils, a maw of light and shadow. Its name echoed through my mind unbidden:
Vharoth, the Unformed.
It was one of the first things to crawl from the Black Sun's shadow… before even I was born.
The villagers fell to their knees, their voices shaking in the dark:
"He has called it forth."
"The Child of the Void commands the Ancient."
"Our world ends or begins again."
Their fear was not misplaced.
For the first time, I wished to test this power — to see what it truly was to command Dominion.
I extended my hand.
"Vharoth," I said, my voice more vibration than speech, "kneel."
The beast roared — a sound that shattered dunes and turned the air to glass. But my voice didn't waver.
I spoke again, slower, the syllables vibrating through my body like thunder:
"Xhal reth'un thar."
The world rippled.
The creature froze — every tendril snapping rigid.
Then, impossibly, it bent. Its massive head pressed into the sand, trembling like an obedient animal.
The villagers wept.
The ground pulsed again, the sigils under my feet blazing brighter. I felt its mind — an endless ocean of hunger and confusion — opening to me.
And for a moment, I saw through its eyes.
I saw the depths beneath the Void, where light never reached.
And there, beneath that infinite black sea… something moved.
A pulse.
A shape.
The same sigil that burned beneath me — older, infinite.
I released the creature, and it dissolved back into mist, scattering like broken sound.
The villagers dared to look up again.
They whispered my name — this time not in fear, but devotion.
"Azael Voidborn."
"The Black Sun's heir."
"The one who commands the formless."
Their worship meant nothing to me. But the resonance of their voices… that I felt.
Their words fed something in the air — a frequency I hadn't noticed before.
Like worship itself had become a source.
I closed my eyes. The realization struck like lightning:
Dominion wasn't only command. It was connection.
Through belief, through sound, through vibration — I could rewrite existence.
The air trembled.
A faint, melodic whisper returned — soft, alluring, layered with a dozen tones.
"You understand it now…"
The Elyndra's voice — closer, clearer, almost touching my mind.
"Dominion is the bridge between what is and what listens. You are both."
I turned toward the sound. "Show yourself."
A shimmer formed beside the horizon, and for a brief instant, I saw her again — radiant, made of light woven through voidstuff.
But this time, there was more.
Two other shapes flickered beside her — faint, translucent, humming in different tones.
They were not like her.
One's form curved like liquid glass; the other pulsed like starlight trapped in flesh.
"You will know us soon," she whispered. "When the void dreams again, you will find what was lost — and who you were meant to love."
Love.
The word felt alien in my mouth.
"Love is for the weak," I said coldly.
But she only smiled — the sound of her laughter like the breaking of stars.
"Then perhaps the weak will make you remember what it means to be divine."
The light vanished.
Silence returned.
But her voice lingered in my mind — soft, infinite, eternal.
And the word love echoed there like a curse.
I looked down at my hands — at the violet lines now carved into my skin, glowing faintly with each pulse.
Dominion's mark.
Each throb of light whispered the same truth:
Power wasn't just about control.
It was about being heard.
I raised my gaze to the horizon where the Black Sun pulsed faintly.
Somewhere beyond that darkness, the Elyndra waited.
And among them — if her words were true — the ones who would one day defy even my godhood.
A faint smile traced my lips.
"Then let them come."
(End of Chapter 3 — "Whispers Beneath the Black Sun")