There are places even the gods dare not name.
A space unmoored by time, detached from memory, severed from all laws of reason, gravity, or hope. It has no shape, only a sensation that is oppressive, infinite, and wholly alive in its hunger. It devours light and thought, compresses eternity into an endless now.
No wind to comfort you, ground to tread upon, sky to gaze at.
Just layers upon layers of a shadow so absolute it seems to claw at the soul. A darkness so real it presses into the skin like a cold knife.
This is where he was born. Or rather, where he was discarded. Or maybe perhaps where he always was.
He had no name to be called by.
He was not alive, neither was he dead. He simply was. a formless instinct encased in obsidian armor, a being wrought from primal brutality and unshaped madness.
The darkness gave him shape: a towering knight of steel so black it shimmered violet, a deathly silhouette rising fifty meters high. Hooded by a cape woven from smoke and void, he bore a sword the size of a collapsing tower about sixty meters of unyielding darkness, engraved with ancient runes that glowed faintly like dying stars.
He did not dream. How could a sleepless one dream?
There was only the fighting. Extreme violence and bloodshed that dictated his existence.
The entities that disturbed the silence of this realm came in droves, figures not quite human, not quite monstrous either, crawling through the cracks of forgotten dimensions and eldritch seams of reality. Some had wings of glass like gems. Others walked on their hands. Some spoke in harmonic choirs while bleeding molten gold. He didn't know what they were. He didn't need to know; perhaps he didn't want to know. They bled like everything else. So was there any need for him to know?
And so, as if he was expected to, he fought.
Again, and again. Slaughtering them with brutal and almost machine-like certainty and brutality. Not for survival or for the promise of escape. But because the void whispered in his ears like a pest that wouldn't shut up, a voice in the back of his mind, ever-present, ever-watching, urged him to kill. And he obeyed, he couldn't disobey.
Time passed in unmeasurable loops. A thousand years could've been a breath. Or maybe it had truly been millennia upon millennia, and still he fought, knees buried in corpses of the unnameable. Some of them cried as they died. Some laughed it off like it was just another part of life. Others begged as if their voices would cause him to show mercy. But the void was merciless, and he was the void, so how could he have shown mercy? None of them survived. Not one would ever see the world they had left behind.
His mind dulled as he forged his path of dread. His will frayed from a kind of pity for those he killed. But the whisper remained. A low growl in the marrow of his thoughts: "Kill them all. Destroy what enters. Burn the Impressionisticintrusions with the might of my rage. You are the Warden of the Forgotten, the herald of he who nocks, and the progenitor of shadows. Will you allow them to soil your name? My name?"
All this continued for as long as he remembered. Until one entity came and upset the balance.
The intruder was small. A man, by all appearances. No wings, no tentacles, no shifting skin or grand titan-like wings. Just a cloak of white and eyes like suns. He walked through the void as though it were sand, as though it didn't press and scream around him like it did to everything else.
And for the first time in a very long time, the knight felt something unfamiliar. An emotion he had probably long forgotten.
Interest.
The whisper of the void came louder now, more urgent even: "Destroy him. Kill him now." Perhaps this man was someone that the void deemed to be too dangerous to be left alive, perhaps the void actually feared this man's unknown power. The knight didn't really care.
But for the first time, the knight didn't obey immediately. He wanted to fight. Not because of the voice, or because of instinct. But because something in him stirred up. Perhaps this man could actually entertain him, and maybe vanquish his boredom.
He raised his sword. And pointed it at the man who seemingly ate away at the darkness.
The man looked up and smirked. His slight smile instilled an unconscious fear in the heart of the Dark Knight.
Both parties seemed to be unable to contain their excitement of the impending battle. Both seemed to not care about whatever wounds they might receive. Especially the light enveloped man who seemed to boast a confidence only an unconquered warrior would emit. The dark knight was no slouch in battle either, but he certainly didn't seem as self-assured as the man of light.
After a moment of silence, the knight lunged forward like a falling mountain, sword cleaving downward with apocalyptic weight. The man sidestepped with impossible grace, flickering out of the way like light dodging a shadow. The blade struck the void, if you could call it that, and erupted with an explosion that shattered the bones of the dimension and seemed to tear through the fabric that was the flesh of the realm. Black lightning crackled across the nothingness.
The man responded not with a weapon, but with a gesture. A flick of two fingers, and beams of pure energy shot forward, carving burning runes into the knight's armoured chest. It staggered, but did not fall.
It couldn't. How could the knight fall when he had finally tasted pain after all these years?
Winning all those battles filled him with nothing. But just this single attack from this man of light created an orchestra of unnamed emotions to be played beneath the confines of his armor.
The knight roared, not from a mouth, but from within the hollowness of his helm. A terrible, iron clashing on iron sound that bent reality with its pitch. He charged again, swinging his blade in wide arcs. The sword's passage tore gaps in the dark, revealing glimpses of places not meant to be seen. Gardens made of screaming mouths, stars crying blood, oceans of glass, seas of pure holy light, a citadel of Gods who seemed to be watching their every move in this battle, and many more places all cascaded around the fractured sky.
The man leapt, dancing atop the falling debris of forgotten realms, kicking off floating islands of elapsed memory. He reached the dark knight and struck with open palms, each one crashing into the knight with titanic force, sending ripples of burning light through the fractured void, sending the knight back and slightly cracking his breastplate.
The knights way of thinking adapted. If his large sword was too big to catch this insect, he would restrain him in webs of darkness.
He turned the hilt of his sword, and it split into chains. Writhing, obsidian chains wrapped in glyphs, they lashed outward in every direction. They sought to bind, crush, and anchor the man in place. One chain caught his leg, and for a moment, the light dimmed. Ostensibly being corrupted by the darkness.
The knight assumed he had won this joust of unyielding men, but his thoughts were short-lived as the man of light began to smile, and the darkness around him began to dissolve.
With a single pull, he yanked the chain and dragged the knight forward. And then he punched. Not with fists or fury, but with a force of holy light, a stigmata of judgment. The blow shattered a portion of the knight's helmet, revealing only the black smoke inside. No face, skin, flesh or skull, absolutely no features. Just pain and dark smoky images of the souls of all that had fallen to him.
The knight's scream was a bell toll from the end of days. And his weapon fell from his hands, causing all the chains of darkness to disappear.
And yet he still chose stand. Unwilling to lose this battle, he took hold of his weapon and lashed at the man once again.
He fought harder now, faster. His strikes became unpredictable, spinning, erratic, and impossible to predict, even for those with foresight. The sword bent in mid-swing. The void responded to him. The shadows helped him for the first time ever. They formed hands that pulled, knives that stabbed from behind, faces that screamed distractions. The darkness was on his side.
The man's white aura flared in response.
Light cascaded from his body in massive waves. Each time a shadow surged to strike, it was disintegrated by his brilliance, he clapped his hands together and the void itself flinched. The knight tried to back away, but his own home betrayed him. The shadows no longer obeyed perfectly. They trembled.
Cracks began to form in his armor.
Not from the man's fists.
But from within. He was being destroyed from the inside
And then, with a final cry, the knight unleashed everything. The sword grew three times in size, burning with corrupted energy, and he brought it down in a slash meant to split eternity.
But even this was not nearly enough as the man of light caught the knights blade mid swing with one hand and spoke.
"I had hopped this would end your suffering, but I know now that it will not. Be silent when you find yourself before the council. Trust in my words and you might make it out alive."
He touched the knight's helm.
And light flooded the darkness. Vanquishing the void, and destroying the knights body.
There wasn't an explosion of any kind, no scream of agony nor grand death of a fallen warrior who made a difference.
There was only silence.
When it was done, all that remained of the dark knight was a single, floating helmet his hood still attached, cape still flowing. No body or soul remained, Just the remains of something that had once been almost a man.
The man looked at the helmet for a long time. His eyes softened, ever so slightly.
Then he turned and walked away.
Leaving the helm adrift in that eternal, suffocating bath of light.
A battle well Faught, with the light once again trampling the darkness. The divine nature of a God pulling down and squashing the obscure values of the knight, as if the very nature of the universe was being upheld.