In the darkness plastered in all parts of the forest around him, the singularity churned–investigated, and observed the knight–even as time paused, the entity spectated. The disturbed being watched through the great bodies it lived through–saw through. Its omnipresent gaze saw nearly all things in existence in the center of its all seeing blindness, despite being a realm parallel to it, and now, it observed the knight and his new companion fly off at speeds that would make lesser beings shudder in fear. The shadow always watched–even in its own, separate, stark plane of existence. It was many–but it was also one, and just as the many watched in fascination, with great gluttony–the true being of black–scarce as it may be–the singularity watched. It held no hostility, yet it did not hold love either. Just a blank, inexplicable, tangentially related ennui.
For a moment, he felt light as a feather. There was a weightlessness to the knight as the bird took off to the canopy, or maybe it was an effect given off by the brief, nearly undetectable, yet horizontally infinite depiction of time slowing to a stand still, but it remained that–a moment. After floating, the knight felt gravity fight to reclaim him–and the absolute law fought hard.
As the bird flew upward, continuously beating its wings, forcing the wind to bend to the bird's will as he flew higher, deeper, into the second layer, further into the dredges of the forest–seeking the nightmares above the canopy, yet the pair were not even a quarter of the way to the third layer. The knight found the ride to be far more treacherous than enjoyable, with a never ending, nearly impossibly strong wall of wind trying to shove him back to the surface, but he resisted. The knight held tightly onto a handful of pitch black feathers as the bird twisted, ducked, and dodged around the leafless foliage–the maze of wooded barriers.
Sometimes the knight found himself clutching harder at the feathers than he would ever care to admit, as the bird flew upside down through a spiral as it bulleted through a particularly small gap in the foliage, yet it never truly stopped and slowed its pace, only increasing. When the knight could no longer make out the world around him–appearing more to be blended shadows and light, diced and shaved into a salad of frolicing grey scaled colors. In his pale bones, beneath the flesh, skin, and metal shell, he knew this would only get worse as the blistering moments in between himself, and the halfway mark to the third layer, and it did.
He could not hear the bird squawk in discomfort as the winds were too loud, but he did notice the noticeable reduction in the speed of the great king of the understorey. In the blank canvas of the dying forest, lost from its heart, The knight looked into the bleary world through equally bleary brown eyes, with something akin to contempt; he wasn't prone to motion sickness but he was beginning to feel the tint of green in his stomach has he flew from side to side across the grass land of feathers making up the back of the fire manipulating bird, but it ended when the world finally detailed itself to his vision, the vision that could see for miles and still make out spiders extremely thin webs against the blackened, charred bark of the forest, yet the only thing he could focus on was bright orange lights cast right in front of his eyes via pyrokinesis reading: "It hurts. Please release me." It was only after finally realizing what the words were, and what they were indicating, did he realize how hard he was clutching the black feathers. In the sparks of light that flooded the understorey, the knight was quick to pick up on the red that streamed down his gauntleted hands and up his arms, whilst also staining some of the midnight flavored feathers around where the knight had been painfully pulling at.
A small welt of guilt bloomed in the knight's heart that seemed to have been sensed by the giant raven, so, it quickly reformed the fire that had appeared in front of him, and after reading it, the knight sighed a little in relief.
"I'm fine. Regeneration factor. Just–uncomfortable." After reading out these words, the knight sighed then looked around his surroundings. The raven had stopped ascending at some point–maybe the discomfort it felt was greater than it was letting on–something else the knight had noticed was that he no longer needed to clasp onto the back of the titanwinged bird as they weren't exactly stationary–they were instead flying straight. With the occasional dip beneath the branches, or gliding upward to avoid another branch, the knight found this form of floating in the thicket to really calm his nerves–which was quite possibly why the bird had resorted to it. It wasn't every day you pick up flight lessons outside of your will–let alone on the back of a bird so horribly upscaled it felt akin to a feverdream, yet it wasn't.
As the knight began to regain his bearings, the words once again reformed into something new. It took him a moment to realize, but in his frazzled state it still wasn't hard for the knight to force his attention back onto what mattered. "Speed draws attention–we shall approach the rest slowly–quietly." The knight was in no mood to argue. The rapid change in speed was jarring, and then an even more sudden decrease in speed only added more disorientation to the pile–completely shutting him down momentarily, yet still he remained with thought.
"Do what you must, bird," The words themselves were frigid, and the knight would admit that he could have phrased it better after the words slithered their way out of his lips, but tired, almost exasperated tone that gave context to the biting words seem to have quelled whatever annoyance the bird felt after the remark–if any as the bird did not respond to the words–or even acknowledged it understood the knight, instead deciding to continue flying through the forest shrouded in darkness it shouldn't be cast in. There was a silence between the pair as they flew off, dodging more and more chaotically as the moments went on that seemed to absorb the forest as everything around them grew eerily quiet; smothering the land like death itself. The echoing crickets of the surface had died, the sounds of fellow lords of cinder across the second layer which had once enriched the dim, phosphorescent forest with the sounds of life had quieted alongside the crickets like the cells of the forest had suddenly gone of strike–and the knight wasn't sure if he was thankful for it or not, because now, he heard it all.
In the all consuming, thick, viscous silence, the raging, primordial battle ravaged the skies, and the knight could only shiver in freight. The throws of blazing fire, the crackling of fire on wood, a faint scent, something akin to scorching charcoal burned his nose. A thin snow of ash hailed gently in the wind in the silence, something the knight had never noticed while stationed here–however long he had been in here for, yet somehow when he did, it never left. In the pulses of bright fire from the faintly visible sky, the knight saw the raining ash, he saw it cover everything, it was across the charred branches that blocked their path to the top, it was across the few creatures he had spotted in the second level–it was even stained onto his red armor–like he was being consumed by the forest, like it was trying to make himself another obsidian avatar of it, no different from the mindless husks that roamed the surface, and leeched off of the fire of the pyrotheos' that reigned the skies for a very, very long time, forever clashing, forever disagreeing, forever hating.
The knight was sure he would never fall to such a fate, but it didn't mean the idea couldn't linger for a while. There wasn't much for him to do at the moment. It seemed like the creatures of the forest feared the one he was riding on–which was something relieving to the knight–he could simply relax through the flight, for at least until they had reached the third layer.
"Inform me before you consider going full speed again. I would rather not fall from orbit, and crash land back to the beginning of this annoyingly hellish journey." The knight said, both bored and anxious at the same time. The bird once again did not seem to hear the knight, and only continued to flap its wings, pushing them forward into the forward while elevating slowly.
A considerable amount of time had passed since the pair had started at their leisure pace. The knight was almost certain that they were moving further inland, moving to the center of the forest–to whatever lay there. He knew that high above laid the phoenix, a creature that the knight still found that he was disbelieving of to be existing still, so he found himself still wondering what it was they were going to find as they slowly ascended into the canopy–the youngest, yet most dangerous part of the forest, not that the knight knew of the dangerous territory he would be treading upon. The small horns adorning the bird skull had brightened in the short time they had been together–the knight wasn't sure what that meant, but it was a change he had been observing a good portion of their flight–when light was given to the forest, at least. There was such a stark contrast between the forest with and without light; it was like night and day in the world beyond the barrier of ash, yet it happened so often, like a sputtering fire trying to gain its strength again, and it was that line of thought that led the knight to his upright, cross-legged position on the ravens back, question in mind, and an answer forged in fire in front of him.
"Was this forest always so–dark?" The knight was hesitant to ask the bird any further questions, as the pair had been a comfortable silence for however long they had been flying together for, yet this question, which had already been cumulating since the very first flash of light in this forest, and was now culminating–finally reaching an idea of an answer.
There was a pause. It was short, yet in the heat of the moment, it felt irrationally long–like time had paused, but eventually, sparks formed in front of him, and like a natural fire, the flame slowly engulfed the air in front of him, before reducing, solidifying almost into words the knight could easily understand.
"No. Father was the life of the land, now that he rests, the land has been claimed by the rogue." The knight didn't know how to respond to this. The phoenix that he was going to wake up was the metaphorical battery of the land. It was not exactly easy to understand, but he wasn't given much of a reason to not believe the bird. Sure this bird was too young to experience the flame of rebirth reign over the land, but that didn't mean there weren't others that did know the truth and told this horned bird.
He wasn't able to continue processing this information as his nose caught onto something: there was a whiff of that strangely familiar tangy smell of burning gases in the air–specifically from the left, which coincidentally had lit up.
The knight wasn't exactly happy when his neck whipped to the left to see a ball of white fire hurling towards himself and the bird–and the fire ball itself was greater in size than the bird he was flying on. He noted numbly that the raven's feathers shone a deep, rich red wine beneath him, and even glowed like rainbows on the primaries and secondaries.
'No rest for the weary it seems.'