Ella's body went still. Enough so for Selkaris to inquire in alarm, "Ella?"
That's when, out of nowhere, as if he had felt her discomfort, Zapharos emerged.
"What is it? Ella?" He pulled her into his arms and snarled at Selkaris, "What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. He did nothing." Ella placed a soothing hand on his arm, and I watched in fascination as Zapharos' aura turned from black to red. Zapharos' temper was famous, and once his aura turned black, there was usually no stopping him until blood flowed, a lot of blood. Interesting. Was this what an Aelyth did to us? Controlled our emotions?
Before I could mull this over more, Ella announced that name again. "Ashera. She is mentioned in Earth's history. Well, someone with just about the same name is. She was… a goddess, a very old goddess, a mother goddess. The wife of El…" She broke off and looked confused for a moment, the rock shivered, and the fog pulled back into the stone with a soft hiss, as if the rock had exhaled for the first time in ages. The hall's normal sounds crept back in the low thrum of the archives, the faint chime of Selkaris' console.
Zapharos put a protective arm around Ella as she continued, "On Earth, Ashera was erased, scrubbed out of scriptures, turned into anidolinstead of… instead of what she was, a goddess. But there are fragments, inscriptions that sayYahweh and his Asherah. AndEl—El is one of our oldest words for god." She turned from one to the other, but none of them saw me. "What if Caelor became El? What if Ashera… is Asherah?"
Selkaris didn't breathe for a few heartbeats. Then his eyes lit like they hadn't in a long, very long time. "Names erode," he murmured, almost to himself. "Stones keep their bones; tongueskeep their breath. Caelor to El. Ashera to Asherah." His gaze found Ella's. "Your world remembered them, even as it forgot."
Zapharos brushed a knuckle along Ella's cheek, reminding me of how I had caressed Nadine's earlier. Remembering how soft her skin had felt.
"If these are your first seeders," Selkaris mused, "then Earth is not an accident. It is a sanctuary."
Ella shuddered, "A sanctuary planted by runaways. By the ones who refused the Abyss."
Selkaris moved with sudden purpose, palms sweeping across the console. Glyphs rose and rearranged, a star-map peeled open like a flower. "If they fled into the living veil, there will be residue," he said. "Bent routes. Quiet lanes. Places where memory thins. You and I will chase their wake through archives and artifacts. We will test your Earth stories against our broken songs."
Zapharos' voice was thick with emotion, "You will not do it alone. While you hunt their path, I will prepare the others."
What I did next was dangerous. There are limits to how far an Arkhevari mind can extend without consequence. If my awareness locked fully into this place, my body would remain behind—breathing, intact, and empty—while my mind became a permanent fixture of Nox Eternum. A prisoner. I understood the risk. Yet I stepped forward, allowing my presence to resolve. To the others, it would look no different than if I stood there in flesh and bone.
"Good," I announced, "Chase your saints through dust and lullabies." I stepped away from the pillar. "I will chase the ones who profit from forgetting. The Ohrur keep ledgers longer than their consciences. Somewhere in their accounts, there will be a mention of us."
Zapharos' eyes narrowed at me. "I thought you were hunting Nythor."
"If he is still Nythor to hunt," I replied darkly. Who knew what had become of our Oracle? Each time he made contact with me, he sounded more… deranged than the last.
I wanted to keep abreast of what Selkaris and Ella were finding, and turned to Ella, "When your myths point to a door, little historian, send for me. I prefer to open such things from the inside." I paused, "Tell me something, little historian."
She blinked. "What?"
"Human females." I resigned myself to ask. "Are they all as… defiant as you?"
Zapharos stiffened beside me, a low rumble curled up from his chest in warning. "Careful."
Normally, I would have enjoyed enraging him further, but my time was short. I could already feel the shadows closing in, not as pursuit, but as consolidation. Nox Eternum does not hold visitors. It absorbs them. The longer a conscious mind remains partially anchored within it, the more insistently the Abyss asserts coherence. What begins as observation becomes residence. What begins as presence becomes classification. I had entered through a narrowing window, a temporary allowance, sustained only by deliberate withdrawal.
Once it sealed, there would be no return. I had to disengage now, before the tether collapsed completely. Before I left Nadine alone aboard the ship, with nothing but an empty husk for company.
"Relax, Praetor. I've already found mine." I tilted my head with the truth of my words. A statement I hadn't even allowed myself to acknowledge yet. But seeing Ella and Zapharos... itclarifiedthings, not that I liked what I saw. "She just hasn't accepted it yet."
Ella asked, "She's human?"
"Oh, she'ssomething." I nodded. "Stubborn. Infuriating. Soft in ways that make you forget the war outside your ribs. You'll like her, little historian, if she doesn't stab me first."
Selkaris hid a smile behind his hand. I looked Zapharos' human up and down, and something inside me softened. "Your kind has teeth. I like that." Then to Zapharos, because even though I wasn't sure yet, a suspicion was growing inside me that the Abyss wouldn't like us finding our Aelyth. "Keep her close, brother. The dark eats more than it swallows these days."
The shadows thickened around me, tugging insistently. The window was closing.
The stone had pulled me because itrememberedme. Not as a god, not as a weapon, but as a witness. I had walked the swallowed worlds. I had catalogued their last truths. Where my brothers felt reverberation, I feltrecognition. That was the difference.
Zapharos felt the flare of danger. Selkaris felt the awakening of memory. The others felt only unease. I felt the hook because I hunt what is erased. Because I listen where silence is manufactured. Because when something forbidden remembers how to speak, it speaks first to those who have survived hearing it before.
The Hall of Knowledge allowed me passage not because I was powerful, but because it was already fractured. I stepped where something had been broken long before I arrived. Now the seam narrowed.
