{Rosen Vernesta.}
It came as a flash of the unholy. A sudden unveiling of something obscene, stripped bare before my eyes without warning or mercy.
My mind fractured instantly. My heart convulsed so violently I thought it might tear itself apart.
Her death returned to me again and again, repeating until repetition lost meaning.
Each instance was the same and yet unbearable in its precision.
My blade entering her chest. Her weight collapsing against me. The moment of resistance, then the absence of it.
Every detail was preserved. The exact way her breath caught. The tension in her fingers as they failed to close.
The pattern of blood as it escaped her body. Nothing was blurred. Nothing was softened.
It was too exact to be memory.
Too exact to be imagination.
The repetition broke something fundamental in me, and I fell into a darkness that did not resemble sleep, unconsciousness, or death.
There was no warmth, no distance, no relief. Only presence without form.
I recognized it not as darkness in the mortal sense, but as the Darkness beneath the world. Not an absence, but an accumulation. Not empty, but overfull.
Existence fractured there. Space had no direction. Time did not advance. Cause and effect were meaningless concepts.
Something ancient brushed against my skin. The sensation carried intent, not motion.
Nails dragged across my back from every direction at once, though direction did not exist.
They were not seeking to harm me. They were demanding something.
Submission. Yield. Acceptance.
And then I saw them.
A vast brood curled within the Darkness, shapes shifting without form, bodies overlapping without boundary.
Life without structure. Motion without purpose. An infinite mass sustained not by order, but by endurance alone.
They were not born. They persisted.
At their center was Gaia.
She did not regard me as prey, nor as a worshiper, nor even as a nuisance.
Her gaze passed over me the way one might notice a flaw in a calculation, something incorrect, but not important enough to fix.
That gaze stripped layers from my mind with surgical indifference.
The Darkness around her expanded and contracted, not as a living thing, but as a function. Like breath without intent.
With each expansion, despair spread. With each contraction, something was taken from me that I could not identify.
It was life magic. Enormous in scale. Perfect in execution.
And utterly revolting.
I understood it immediately. That was the worst part.
I attempted to dismantle it the way I dismantle everything else. Scale, source, limit. Input and output.
I searched for the point where excess entered the system, for the inefficiency that would justify revulsion as error rather than intent.
There was none. Every component aligned. Every exchange balanced. Nothing was wasted. The structure was closed, complete, and internally consistent.
That realization angered me more than the vision itself. Horror I can dismiss. Chaos I can weaponize. But this was coherent.
This was reasoned. It obeyed rules I could trace but not alter.
I had always believed that if something could be understood, it could be controlled. Here, understanding only sharpened the blade against me.
There was no mystery to hide behind. No unknown mechanism to dismiss. I could see the structure, the logic, the efficiency.
And that made it unforgivable.
Such precision, wielded for this. Such power, applied without restraint. A miracle reduced to an engine for horror.
Even I could not reconcile it.
I have always trusted what could be tested, repeated, mastered.
I have always dismissed what could not be explained as ignorance masquerading as truth. And yet this was real. Measurable. Structured.
And still, my mind recoiled from it.
I understood then that I had been shown something not meant to be integrated. Something that did not expand understanding, but damaged it.
The sensation intensified until my body no longer felt like a single thing. Heat and drowning coexisted. Pain arrived without injury.
My nerves misfired, searching for rules that no longer applied.
I thought of her then. Of how she had endured this willingly.
Not by accident. Not by force.
By choice.
She bypassed every defense I had refined over a lifetime by offering something I refused to acknowledge as real.
Love, deployed without hesitation, without calculation, without the safety of reciprocity. It was not mercy. It was an intrusion.
A weaponized sincerity aimed at a man who trusted only what could be measured. That was the insult. Not that it hurt me, but that it worked.
That was the part I could not reconcile.
I searched for an explanation that did not involve meaning. Conditioning, perhaps. Delusion. A miscalculation of risk. Anything that preserved causality.
But none fit.
For most of my life, I had treated love, sacrifice, and goodness as narratives—useful lies designed to keep societies functional. Stories we told ourselves so we could endure what we were.
Because humanity is not kind. It is efficient. It survives. It consumes. It betrays.
We destroy what we revere. We corrupt what we touch. We replace gods with ourselves and call it progress.
Claims that we were made in God's image always struck me as vanity elevated to theology. A convenient excuse for our contradictions.
And yet, if God does not lie, then the contradiction cannot be dismissed so easily.
If the source is flawless, then the reflection should not fracture without reason.
I had spent decades avoiding that conclusion.
I buried it beneath intellect and certainty and the satisfaction of being correct. I trusted only what I had seen, what I had tested, what I had mastered.
But here, stripped of distance and control, there was no mechanism to retreat into.
If God made us in His image, and if God cannot lie, then the capacity for love I had just witnessed could not be illusion.
It was real.
Terrifyingly real.
So real that it reached into the Darkness and tore through me with more force than Gaia's gaze or the claws that raked at my skin.
That realization did not comfort me. It destabilized me.
Because it meant goodness was not a myth. Sacrifice was not weakness. Love was not a malfunction.
It meant something I could not predict or control existed at the core of humanity.
And that frightened me more than monsters ever could.
I accepted it, not because I wanted to, but because resistance no longer served any function.
The moment I did, the Darkness released me.
I stepped back into the world.
Such an event, if my thoughts did not ground me, if I did not cling to reality to the little reason I could muster in such a world, I would have gone mad.
Rain struck my skin immediately, cold and real. Mud clung to my boots. Night pressed close.
Nicole stood before me, her expression alight with a triumphant glee that suggested she believed she had won something.
I noticed the runes on my body then. Complex. Layered. Impressive. They must have taken days to prepare.
Jennifer stepped forward and placed a hand on Nicole's shoulder before she could speak.
"Why else would a princess wait for a prince?" she said. "It could never be love."
I laughed. The sound surprised even me.
They were irrational. Both of them. I could no longer sense my army. Only death lingered at the edges of perception. The war had moved on without me.
I stood and broke the runes with casual precision. Each one unraveled cleanly, exactly as expected.
"Yes," I said, brushing rain from my face, "you are terrible. And yet you love. God must have plans for you. Terrible plans."
They remained close together. They understood what I was capable of. That with a step or a breath I could rewrite them entirely.
I did not.
Instead, I bowed.
"For this," I said, "I will live. And you will live again."
They recoiled beneath my gaze, as though I were death itself.
"I do not believe love is possible," I continued calmly. "So you will prove me wrong. The next time we meet, you will defeat me with it."
And with that, I turned away.