She looked up from the plate she had been pushing food back and forth on. Her eyes met mine, curious but wary.
“I am an Arkhevari,” I continued, my aura flickering faint gold. “We were not always what you see now. Once, there were females among us. Once, there was a balance.”
Her brow furrowed, and I pressed on before she could speak. “Our Aelyth,” I tasted the word, heavy and bitter. “Soul-bound. The balance that tethered us. When the bond was whole, we were not monsters. We were… complete.”
She leaned forward, her eyes filled with a careful curiosity that didn't let me forget that she was still wary of me. “What happened?”
My jaw tightened, and my aura rippled red; anger bled through the gold. The anger was directed against our ancestors, not her, but she didn't know that. “We strayed too far. The Dark Abyss was always there, a wound in the universe. We believed we could master it, plunder its knowledge, conquer its void. But inside Nox Eternum… it severed our Archegene. It cut the bonds. The males were untethered and became immortals in the void. The females—” I forced the word past my teeth, “—died off eventually. With no more females, the balance was ripped away. We were cursed for all eternity.”
"Archegene?" She raised one beautiful dark eyebrow.
I sighed; the sound was heavy in my chest. If she were to understand what she was—what she meant—I could not stop here. “The Archegene was… is… balance itself,” I said, keeping my voice low, and the anger against my forefathers out of it, to give the word the reverence it deserved. “It's the lifeblood of the bond. It tethered each of us to our Aelyth, binding strength to compassion, fury to grace. It was not something we created. It was woven into us, older than the Arkhevari, older than this universe itself.”
Her lips parted, but I pressed on. “When we entered Nox Eternum, the void gnawed at it. The Abyss consumes everything—memory, time, life. The Archegene didn't survive there, or maybe it decided that, to survive this world we had chosen, we couldn't keep it. We had to become ruthless and lethal. So it severed. Or perhaps it was out of mercy. It cut the bonds between us and ourAelyth, unmooring us rather than letting us drag them into the Abyss. It preserved them for as long as it could.”
I closed my eyes briefly; the weight of the words sat heavily in my chest. “But separation is not survival. The Aelyth were mortal. Without the bond, they withered. They died. And we, their sons—immortal, cursed—were left behind in the void. Empty and filled with rage, without anchor. Strength without balance.”
I could have explained more, told her that outside Nox Eternum, our mortality was only a distant, abstract thing. That every few eons, Aelyth-bonded chose to rejuvenate. A kind of rebirth without the indignity of infancy. A purge, really, a cosmic data-dump that wiped the body clean and quieted the mind.
But I didn’t. I held my silence.
I didn’t want to flood her with truths her mind wasn’t prepared to hold. I didn’t want to watch confusion turn to fear. And, gods help me, I didn’t want to risk her stepping away from me when all I wanted was for her to stay. She swallowed hard, her hands curled in her lap. “And you’ve been like that ever since.”
“Yes,” I said, opening my eyes, letting my aura pulse faintly. Gold. Red. A shadow of black. “That is what you see in us. The flicker of the Archegene remains, but it is fractured. Corrupted. We are shadows of what we were meant to be.”
Her eyes searched mine, the fire in them tempered now with something else—pity, maybe, or horror.
“And me?” she asked, her voicequieter now.
I leaned forward, unable to stop myself. “You are proof the Archegene was not lost. Proof that the bond endures. That balance can be restored.”
For a long moment, the silence between us pressed heavy. Her eyes searched mine, trying to make sense of a truth no mortal was ever meant to hear. I inhaled deeply, and my aura dimmed to a simmer. “Even without the Aelyth, we didn't collapse into nothing. We found purpose within Nox Eternum. The Abyss is not empty—it festers. The Mmuhr’Rhong were born of its shadow, bred in its hunger. They have always clawed for a way out, forever searching for cracks into Auris Prime. For millennia, we kept them contained, hunting them in the dark, slaughtering them when they swarmed too near.”
Her face paled. “Those things…”
“Yes,” I growled. “The monsters you saw last night were only fragments. In their true numbers, they are legion. When we built the Celestial Portal, it gave us the means to slip beyond the Abyss, to walk again in Auris Prime. But it also gave the Mmuhr’Rhong their chance. A path. A door. They seek to corrupt and conquer everything your kind calls existence.”
Her hands tightened on the edge of the table. Predictably, she asked, "Celestial Portal?"
"A portal we built, hoping to return to Auris Prime and find our Aelyth on other worlds. We succeeded in returning, but, again inadvertently, we played right into the Dark Abyss' hand and gave the Mmuhr’Rhong a way out as well. We've been defending it since.
“The Arkhevari stand as the only barrier,” I continued, my chest tightened with the familiar weight of it. “We fight them back, battle after battle, to keep the Portal sealed, to keep Auris Prime safe. It is the only thing that gives this cursed immortality meaning.”
Her lips parted, but no words came. I could see it in her eyes, the horror, the dawning understanding, the realization that her universe was nothing more than a battlefield balanced on the edge of the Abyss. Still, despite all the wars and all the millennia, I found my gaze drawn to her. My Aelyth. My balance.
Perhaps we had not been forsaken after all.
Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. Finally, she whispered, “And me? Where do I fit into this?”
My eyes locked on hers, my voice dark. “You are the impossible. You are proof that the bond was not destroyed. That our Aelyth live. That balance can return. And that, little Earthling…” I leaned forward, “changes everything.”
She recoiled slightly, her knuckles turned white on the table’s edge where she held on for dear life, but her chin stayed lifted.
And damn me, that fire in her eyes only made the storm inside me roar louder.
I listened.I didn’t interrupt, didn’t laugh, didn’t argue, because how could I? After everything I’d seen, after living through the impossibility of an alien abduction, after watching a planet get swallowed by a black hole and walking away breathing, afterthose things… I couldn’tnotbelieve him.
Maybe this Dark Abyss—Nox Eternum, as he called it—washell. Maybe the Mmuhr’Rhong were demons, born from the void, clawing their way toward the living. The thought made me shiver so hard my teeth almost clicked.
