Kallen rose from the sea, a ghost through a terrible storm. Salt clung to his lashes and his hair hung in ropes down his back. The water, once a cradle, now felt like a shroud peeling away. He did not gasp for breath. He did not need to. The sea filled his lungs and left no room for panic. It had taken his fear, his fury, his name, and now gave him back as something else.
Kallen stood in the shallows as waves lapped at his thighs. The sky above was slate-gray, heavy with falling rain. A distant wind tugged at him like memories of what felt a distant past. He knew he hadn't been gone long—only that the version of him that emerged from the sea was not the same that had entered.
He had not drowned, but the boy who'd tried to hold the world in his hands had.
The tide receded, and Kallen began to walk.
~~~
Surviving weeks alone in the inky depths of the Asian Sea had not been easy. In those depths, Kallen hadn't needed to sleep and thus hadn't ventured to the dream realm.
Therefore, he hadn't seen the namesake of the House of Night: The Storm sea. Of course, if he had been rendered unconscious, he might have paid the dream realm a visit, while his true body would be mangled by whatever leviathan found him first.
But he hadn't.
What he had done, was spend weeks engaged in brutal combat, tactful escape, and ruthless domination. Kallen had honed his new Awakened strength, bathing in his home domain.
His element. The sea by which he was blessed.
And he rose from the sea a new man, baptized by the simplicity of kill or be killed. There was no betrayal on the seafloor and nor was there frivolous human interaction. Just crushing pressure and horrifying sea monsters, vying for the chance to rip him limb from limb.
Kallen had not forgotten about his sister's affliction. He hadn't gone off on an underwater crusade to avoid the issue, and he hadn't done it out of rage or indignation or spite. He did it because he had to. He had to grow stronger. He was going to challenge the Second Nightmare and make Seren a Master no matter what.
It didn't matter that Nephis had deemed it pointless. He'd try anyway. It didn't matter that his own clan would stop him from ascending so quickly. He'd try anyway. Kallen would try until the end. He would not go down quietly, and he would wage war against that which bound him because he was done being drowned by the whims of fate. Whatever it had in store.
Light of the Last Horizon, he thought, trudging through the sand. Seren's true name.
It carried a powerful fate, but a dreadful one as well. She was the North Star. Her light endured when all others faded, but it may very well be the last thing he'd ever see. That was how Kallen had interpreted this true name. It fit very perfectly with that flaw of hers.
The storm above mirrored the one inside him.
Kallen walked. Each step was heavier than the last. He was not exhausted, but the knowledge of what awaited him was a heavy burden to bear. Seren's time would run out. A curse gnawed at her that even transcendents couldn't cure.
Catastrophe follows her, and that was what was killing her.
But Kallen refused to let it.
Sand gave way to jagged rock, the coastline rising in cruel, uneven teeth. He climbed without hesitation, fingers digging into rain-slick stone. The wind howled, but his grip did not falter.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
The words played in his head. He didn't know where he'd heard them—some half-remembered verse from a world before the nightmares. Before the dark ages and before the Awakened had carved their names into history. But they fit.
Pulling himself atop the cliff's edge, Kallen stood. Lightning split the sky. For a moment, the sea below writhed like a furious beast, dark and endless.
The old him was a thing of the past. The boy who had knelt in the tide, hollow-eyed and broken, had drowned. What remained was someone harder. Someone who would rage. Rage against the dying of the light.
Light of the Last Horizon.
Kallen turned his back on the sea and summoned the Gilded Warden. The echo enveloped him, and his flying Leviathan, Torch, appeared in a puff of smoke.
Standing nearly as tall as an old African Elephant, Torch huffed a plume of smoke as Kallen leaped on top of him. The dragon's scales were warm to the touch, and he patted them twice.
With a beat of his two powerful wings, Torch took to the skies. Kallen activated his Awakened Ability, [Eye of the Abyss], getting a lay of the land.
Kallen's vision inverted. Light, shape, and distance disappeared, replaced by a heavy and hollow feeling of absence.
He no longer saw the cliffs, the trees, or the mountains of the distance. Instead, he felt their absence. Where the trees weren't, there was openness. Where the mountain shouldn't be, there was stone. And where danger refused to be absent, something stirred.
A joke about the missiles of old came to mind. Missiles knew where they were by knowing where they weren't. It was jest to help the layman understand targeting systems, but there was some merit when compared to [Eye of the Abyss].
It was exactly how his ability worked.
His soul reached outward like some abyssal sonar, not painting the world with what existed, but revealing it through subtraction. Every hollow, every vacancy, every refusal of space told him something.
Torch banked left, wings dragging soft trails behind him. Kallen adjusted course away from a powerful Nightmare Creature some dozen miles away.
Instead of tracking sound or light, he sensed a void in the expected flow of absence. An interruption in nothingness.
It was far more beneficial than normal sonar or perfect sight. Something like sonar would need a pulse, a signal, and something to bounce off of. It could be jammed, it could only work in certain mediums, and it had a sort of limited detail.
Kallen on the other hand, sensed the world passively. His awareness flowed from an inherent attunement to voids; to the structure of the world's absence. There was no signal to jam or energy to detect.
He simply knew. Ethereal threats, and hidden enemies were no issue. They all left a wound in the fabric of void. If something subtly intruded into space, Kallen sensed it.
It was a truly sinister ability and as such, there were lethal drawbacks to something so powerful. He was a terrifying opponent, but he was also someone who possessed the capability to find even more terrifying opponents.
Horrors beyond comprehension… they were all potentially laid bare before his eyes and that was not a good thing.
As a form of existential exposure, it connected him directly to a deeper truth about the world: what should not be seen, and what should not be known. The human mind was not mean to see nothing, and thus he needed to be selective with how he used it.
Both how often, and when.
There was, however, something Kallen had been wanting to try. As the wind whipped through his free flowing hair, he summoned the Null Meridian. The black book fell into his hands, and he rubbed his fingers against the strange leather.
Legacy Relics were meant to fit in perfectly with one's own Aspect. The Null Meridian was a perplexing tome, given that when he had received it, Kallen hadn't been able to discern any connection it bore to his element.
Now, he knew that his element was not just water. It was more akin to the depths, which seemed to accompany both water, and the abyss… whatever that meant.
In his state, he could still not read the runes that were on its ink dark cover. Wordlessly, Kallen opened the book.
There wasn't a tremor in his hands this time, nor any compulsion he couldn't resist. Still, the world shuddered. Not outwardly—not in the wind or the lightning, or the dragon beneath him—but to the invisible lattice of reality itself. A latch snapped open.
The sky stilled. Torch's wings beat only twice before slowing to a stop. Kallen wasn't falling, but he also wasn't flying. The world peeled.
It was an erasure of what was real. For a moment, everything became inverted absence. His eyes already saw the world by what it wasn't. Now, the world responded in kind: showing him what it refused to be and what it tried desperately to hide.
He stood between moments. Between states and stars and space. Kallen stood between the seen and the impossible. The Null Meridian was a filter. And through it, he saw.
Lines emerged—cracks of faint, silver logic in a sea of voided darkness. They curved, intersected, spiraled, and crossed, forming a hidden geometry; fragments of space that existed between footsteps, behind shadows, and beneath that which was forgotten.
Kallen was in a void.
Within it.
The grace of sound and gravity and horizon was absent. Only the shape of un-shapes. It was all so… confusing. But eldritch and beautiful as well.
Places where things refused to be, and yet, there they were, carved as the perfect outlines on the contour of nix. He lifted a foot and space did not respond. Not like it normally did. The void beneath him simply acknowledged the motion and let him move. He didn't feel any weight or traction, but neither did he drift.
It felt so wrong. He shouldn't be here. But the inescapable curiosity to stay and explore eliminated the possibility of leaving so soon from the boundless, eternal abyss.
Kallen did not breathe within the void.
He tried to summon his echo to cover his face, but found that strangely, his runes weren't present. He frowned, trying to check them, but couldn't. He was… somehow separated from the Nightmare Spell.
Despite this, however, the Null Meridian lay open in his left hand.
Pushing that oddity to the side, Kallen glanced around. He didn't need to physically move his head to see, but it was a natural reaction to being in an unfamiliar place. Or rather, the place he was in was both familiar, and unfamiliar at the same time. It was then that it all clicked in his mind.
This… he thought, this is what my eyes have been seeing. This place…
It was like a long forgotten truth unearthed with painful simplicity. His Awakened Ability had shown him the null—this layer of understructure. The negative of reality. A void that warped beneath and behind and through things like a metaphysical second skin.
Before he could only perceive it. Map its outline. Feel where things weren't, but now, here, inside wherever he was, he could walk it.
"To open it is not to read, but to descend." That was the succinct description of the Null Meridian offered by the spell. Now, Kallen understood.
He could feel the shapes left behind. Distant cities, glowing outlines, embers drifting in his mind. Landmarks and people and settlements of the real world. As the shapes left behind… anchor points. Instinctively, he understood that every single one of them was itself a door.
Kallen approached one. Or rather, he pointed at it with his intent and was rushed toward it.
There, in the real world, he sensed the small raindrops of a dying storm filter in overhead. All it would take was a simple thought directed at the book in his hand and there he would be, standing beneath that rain.
Through the impossible, something spoke.
It imposed itself within his mind.
"Fire Bearer."
The words struck through Kallen's soul. A vibration that bypassed his defenses and cascaded down the structure of who he was.
He froze.
Something in the abyss was watching him. Perhaps it had been this whole time. Kallen couldn't find it. There was nothing there, just void. Nothing beside him. Nothing below. Nothing in the distance. Nothing at all.
"You tread across the void. Flame, yet still… how curious."
The words snapped something from him. His fingers slipped from the book. It hit the absence beneath his feet and the whole world collapsed.
Kallen was yanked through space like string pulled through a needle's eye. A sudden violent pressure built within him and he fell. Wet concrete met him hard. Kallen's body splashed against ground, lights assaulting his vision as his aspect was stolen by the vicious claws of his flaw.
Petrichor invaded his nose. The sound of a PTV horn blared. Kallen looked up and saw the grill of an armored car mere moments away. With a quick burst of essence, he shoved himself to the side, rolling across the open road and onto the sidewalk.
Kallen panted, eyes wide. Gaze snapping in every direction. He suddenly found himself very indecently dressed in the middle of a city. Onlookers stared with a blend of curiosity, fear, and confusion.
Looking down, he saw that he was wearing a simple skin-tight wetsuit from the waist down. What should have covered his top half had been torn to shreds days ago by a vicious Nightmare Creature.
A woman nearby met his gaze. She glanced down at his glistening chest, then back into his strange eyes. Her gaze lingered, blinking fast, then slower as if her brain had restarted.
Kallen offered a small, sheepish nod as a garment Memory formed out of white sparks, wrapping him in a high-collared weave. Its enchantments were useless, but it covered him.
Looking up at the woman, he said, "Uh, sorry to startle you, miss. Just a mishap of my aspect."
Her lips parted. Around her, other people began to stop and stare at Kallen as he sat on the walkway, breathing heavily.
"Right," she replied. "Of course." Her lips closed, but she opened them again. "Are you… alright?"
Kallen followed her eyes as they flicked to the spot on the road where the armored car had nearly hit him. He exhaled sharply, adrenaline and essence still coursing. Then he ran a hand through his wet hair, glancing up at the bruised grey sky.
"Yeah. I think."
The woman didn't stop looking at him. There was a pink tinge to her cheeks, and an odd excitement veiled beneath her face, when she should have been shocked or surprised.
Suddenly, she said, "You're… you're Prince Kallenir, aren't you?"
"Huh? Prince?"
"The new prince of the House of Night," she said. "You are. They announced it like a month ago. I've seen your picture everywhere."
Kallen didn't know how to respond to that. Prince of the House of Night? What kind of lunacy…
The Great clans of Valor and Song had royalty, operating under a sort of monarchial hierarchy. But the House of Night did not. It was more of an oligarchy. There was a council of Saints… not royalty.
What the hell had happened in the last month?
Kallen sat there for a moment. He was a man who'd just been dragged from the abyss, there was already too much going on…
A passerby snapped a photo of him. Another, he noticed, was recording the interaction. He looked around, tentatively staring at the small crowd forming around him.