The sigils throbbed beneath his feet—black veins of living night, each beat echoing like a distant drum inside the earth. Mist folded inward, thick as velvet, until the clearing felt less like forest and more like the hollow between worlds.
Do not resist, Keros's mind pressed through the link, a deep vibration that rattled bone. The seed must test you.
The boy—Valen, though the name hung in him like an unlit star—did not answer. His black eyes were steady, his breath a metronome.
A coil of darkness, thin as a blade of grass and cold as iron, lifted from the serpent's body. It quivered, caught some invisible current, and slid toward him. When it touched the bare skin of his chest, the world vanished.
Sound died first. Then light. He fell—or rose—into a void without direction. There was no ground, only a skyless black that bent around his mind like water around stone.
Shapes stirred in the dark. Not visions of memory. Not dreams. They were tests, honed from the core of Keros's ancient power.
A storm of knives swept toward him: screams of rage, claws of shadow, beasts of nightmare stacked upon nightmare. They came not to kill but to unmake.
He did not flinch.
The first blade passed through his arm—pain like molten glass—and he watched its arc with a calm, predatory precision. The next spear of darkness split his shoulder. His breath never broke. One after another the illusions tore him apart—bones unbound, flesh dissolved—yet his black eyes remained as still as a frozen sea.
Keeps enduring… the serpent's distant thought trembled along the bond. But for how long?
The void thickened. The seed pulsed faster, each beat a hammer against the cage of his mind. Still he did not resist. The storm faltered. Darkness itself seemed to hesitate, as if the test found no place to strike.
Something deeper woke.
A second darkness—older, hungrier—stirred inside him. It had no name, no shape. It simply was, an infinite well buried beneath even the serpent's ancient shadow.
The seed of Keros's power paused, as if sensing a predator greater than itself. A single pulse erupted from the boy's core, silent but absolute. The testing storm shattered. The seed tried to retreat. It could not. The nameless void within him opened wide and swallowed.
Power that should have grafted itself to flesh was devoured whole, stripped of every trace, not stolen but claimed.
For an endless heartbeat there was only the soundless clash of two nights—Keros's millennia-old shadow and the ageless dark rising from the boy. His will did not waver. He simply consumed.
Back in the clearing, Keros's three heads snapped upward. The ground lurched. Trees groaned as if pulled toward an unseen center. Mist spiraled into a single column, collapsing skyward like a reversed waterfall. The serpent's emerald eyes widened—an expression it had forgotten it could make.
Impossible… The thought rattled the bond. He is not merely taking the seed. He—
A thunderless shockwave rolled outward. Every glimmer of starlight died, as though the heavens themselves blinked.
From the boy's still body a new darkness rose. Not the cold gleam of Keros's ancient power. Not the simple absence of light. This was deeper—a darkness that seemed to drink the concept of light itself, a silence that devoured even memory of sound.
The serpent recoiled despite itself, coils scraping soil. This is… beyond the lower domain, it thought, awe threading fear. This is not my night. This is the night before night was named.
The three heads lowered instinctively, compelled yet terrified.
Valen's eyes remained closed. His chest barely moved. But the newborn power circled him like an old companion returned from exile. It twined around his limbs, slid across the sigil-marked ground, and rose in columns that bent the mist into rings of nothingness.
No crackle of energy. No blaze. Just a silent, swallowing dark that felt eternal.
Keros searched the link for the seed he had offered. There was nothing. No shard of his own power remained. It was as though the boy had eaten the night itself and left behind only a sharper edge.
And still he slept, face calm, breath steady, as if the ordeal were no more than an uneventful dream.
He devoured it… and reshaped it, the serpent thought, each word a tremor of disbelief. What manner of being—
The question never finished. A single ripple of that new darkness brushed Keros's mind. For the first time in centuries, the great serpent felt something colder than fear.
The mist settled slowly, as if unsure the world was allowed to move again. The boy remained at the center of the circle, unconscious, but the unseen power wound around him like a silent sentinel—a shadow older than the forest, older than the lower domain, older than even the exile of gods. And though Keros's coils spanned half the clearing, he felt impossibly small.
The rite was complete.
But something far greater had begun.