Tartarus made no sound.
It was watching.
The heat neither rose nor fell. It remained constant, crushing, as if the abyss itself were waiting for something to be decided. Siegfried's chains vibrated at irregular intervals, producing a deep, almost organic chant, like the slow breathing of a wounded god.
I stood motionless before him, my obsidian body anchored in the burning rock. The red glow of the lycoris pulsed within my chest, casting bloody reflections along the walls of the chasm. Each beat was an affirmation: I was still here.
Siegfried studied me without haste, like an artisan examining a work he had not shaped, yet instinctively recognized.
"You crossed the Styx," he said at last.
His voice did not pass through the air. It settled directly into my mind—heavy, precise.
"Few souls survive it without dissolving. None emerge unchanged."
I did not answer.
Words were still foreign objects to me. They had weight, direction. I had to learn how to wield them.
"You did not beg Charon," he continued. "You did not submit. You jumped."
A silence.
"That was not courage. It was something else."
"Anger," I replied.
Siegfried slowly shook his head.
"No. Anger burns out. What I sense in you does not fade. It is a structural flaw."
He tugged lightly at his chains. The metal screamed, and Tartarus answered with a low, displeased vibration.
"The gods do not tolerate flaws," he went on. "They correct them. They drown them. They bury them. Me… I was their solution."
I stepped closer. The heat became almost unbearable, but my body held.
"A solution to what?"
Siegfried looked away, and for a moment his single eye seemed older than Tartarus itself.
"To fear," he said.
"The gods feared what resembled them too closely. Titans. Heirs. Wills capable of remembering."
He clenched his jaw.
"They created me to destroy what they could not control. And when I obeyed… they realized they had forged something worse than an enemy."
"A witness," I murmured.
A slow, bitter smile stretched across his face.
"Exactly."
The lycoris pulsed harder. I felt his words engraving themselves into me, carving a new structure into what I now called my mind.
"And you," Siegfried continued, "you were not even created. You were born of a refusal. That is far more dangerous."
I lowered my gaze to my black glass hands, veined with red light.
"I refused nothing. I simply… continued."
"That is precisely it," he said. "The world is built for those who stop."
A long silence followed—not an absence, but a tension. Tartarus tightened around us, as if the conversation itself were an act of defiance.
"Tell me," Siegfried said, "do you know what happens to things without a name?"
I slowly shook my head.
"They are malleable," he replied. "They are bent. Erased. Rewritten."
He struck his chest, where the chains bit deep.
"I had a name. They could not erase me. So they fixed me here, like a nail driven into the foundation of the world."
A shiver ran through my obsidian body.
"And me?"
He looked at me for a long time.
"You have none."
Those words should have meant nothing to me. Yet they opened a strange, dull pain, like a hollow suddenly exposed.
"Without a name," he continued, "you are still raw material. Tartarus does not know what to do with you. The Styx failed. Charon could not classify you."
He smiled then, with a trace of respect.
"That is why you are here."
"To receive a punishment?"
"No. To receive a definition."
The lycoris flared. Its red light intensified, casting violent flashes across the ether-silver chains. Tartarus rumbled, displeased.
"A name is a boundary," Siegfried said. "A limit even the gods must respect."
I raised my head.
"Then give me one."
He looked surprised. Then he laughed softly—a tired, almost human sound.
"You learn quickly."
He closed his eye. For a moment, I had the impression he was plunging into something older than Tartarus itself, buried beneath layers of fire and regret.
"Ancient names are not chosen," he said at last. "They are recognized."
He opened his eye again.
"And yours… I have already heard it."
Tartarus trembled.
The chains snapped taut, as if trying to silence him.
"You will bear the name Jormund."
The word fell into the abyss like a shattered seal.
Jormund.
It did not merely echo in the air—it fixed itself within me. I felt my body respond, the red light stabilizing, my form becoming… more real. More defined.
"Jormund," Siegfried repeated.
"He who refused dissolution. He who grew heavier instead of vanishing."
I whispered my name.
"Jormund."
Tartarus roared.
Not in anger. In forced acknowledgment.
"Now," Siegfried said, "you exist enough to be punished."
"Or enough to punish," I replied.
He burst into a rough laugh.
"That is why they will fear you."
He leaned forward as far as his chains allowed.
"Listen carefully, Jormund. Having a name means you can lose something. Tartarus will demand a price. The gods as well."
"I will pay it," I said without hesitation.
"No," he answered gently.
"You will bleed."
The lycoris pulsed—burning, yet steady.
I nodded.
"Then teach me," I said.
"Teach me what you have become… and what I must become."
Siegfried closed his eye.
"Then the true descent can begin."
Above us, in the upper layers of Tartarus, something shifted.
The foundations of the world groaned.
And for the first time in eternity, Tartarus was no longer merely a prison.
It was a field of decision.