Larson turned toward him.
Ithan still knelt in the ashes, Sophia's body cradled in his arms. Her hair, once golden from the sun, now hung limp and gray against his sleeve. Her skin had gone pale, lips blue, eyes half-open but empty.
He didn't move. Didn't blink. The only sound was his breathing—shallow, uneven, like a man drowning in air. The tremor in his shoulders said everything his voice could not.
"She was dead…" the thought beat like a drum in his skull. She was dead. Because of me. Because I thought I could save her.
Larson limped closer, clutching his side. "Boy… It's over."
No answer.
"Ithan." His voice cracked now. "Kid—are you alright?"
Still nothing. Then Ithan's fingers tightened around Sophia's hand. His lips moved, barely a whisper. "She believed in me…"
The air changed. A faint shimmer rippled through the cave, bending the firelight. Larson's instincts screamed at him to step back. And then it happened. A low hum, like a heartbeat shaking the world. White-gold light bled from Ithan's chest—first as veins of molten glow beneath his skin, then as tongues of flame bursting outward in every direction.
"Mystery of Prometheus…" he whispered, voice hollow. His eyes blazed white, tears vaporizing as they fell. "Logos Pyros—Truth of Flames."
The cave ignited.
A surge of divine heat tore through the air, consuming shadow and stone alike. The flames did not burn red or orange, but white shot through with gold, too pure to be mortal. They erupted from Ithan's body like wings of molten glass, spreading over the ground, the walls, the ceiling.
Larson shielded his face, the heat biting through his armor. "Ithan! Stop—!"
But the boy didn't hear him. Sophia's body was engulfed first. For an instant, her skin glowed as if lit from within, her form suspended in the radiance—peaceful, untouched by pain. Then the light took her completely, turning her to embers that drifted upward like falling stars.
The flames spread outward, bending space itself. The walls rippled, and the air warped like a mirage. For a brief, searing moment, Larson saw it—the illusion unraveling. The cave wasn't whole. None of this was. Layers of falsehood burned away, revealing the faint afterimage of another's power woven beneath it.
Anipather's sigils—the hidden snare that had trapped them here. The white-gold fire devoured them. Cracks split the air like shattered glass, light piercing through. The illusion buckled, collapsing around Ithan as the last threads of Anipather's Mystery burned into nothing. When it was over, the flames dimmed, leaving only smoke and silence.
Awakened from the haze of memory, Ithan looked up at Anipather. His body burned—not with pain, but with purpose. The Prometheus Mystery stirred deep in his core, spiraling together with the Survival Mystery that pulsed in his veins. The two forces intertwined like twin flames, one radiant, one relentless.
He invoked their synthesis—Ashen Reprieve—a fusion of fire and will that burned away weakness itself.
Flames rippled through him, not from the outside but from the marrow outward. His shattered bones knitted back together, the fractures sealed by molten light. His breath steadied; his muscles, torn and trembling, reforged themselves under the discipline of endurance. He rose slowly, each motion deliberate, defiant—white-gold fire spilling from his shoulders like a cloak.
He gripped his weapons again—Stormheart in one hand, his spear in the other—and his eyes glowed with intricate white-gold sigils, turning like constellations brought to life.
"Mystery of Survival: Logoi Hypomonḗ—Endure."
The invocation thundered through the Forge like a heartbeat. The flames around him flared higher, shifting hue as the Survival Mystery lent its essence to Prometheus' fire. For an instant, the gold deepened to amber, then to searing white. The heat did not consume—it refined.
Then the world fell away.
The roar of the Forge vanished, replaced by the mournful howl of wind. Ithan found himself standing on a jagged mountain, its peaks lost within storm clouds that bled lightning. Chains thicker than ship masts ran down the slopes, their molten links anchoring a colossal figure to the rock. Each link burned with divine fire, forged of thunder and punishment.
The chained giant's face was hidden in shadow, but his broken frame radiated unbearable power. His chest rose and fell in ragged breaths, torn wide by an unhealed wound that glowed like a forge wound through his ribs.
Above, the air screamed.
A white eagle, vast as the sky, descended from the clouds. Its wings beat with the rhythm of tempests, its feathers burning like shards of sunlight, its eyes twin orbs of molten thunder. The storm bent around its cry.
It dove.
The beak plunged into the giant's side. Flesh split like stone under a hammer. Fire-blood rained down the mountain, hissing where it struck the rock. The giant convulsed, but the chains held, their links ringing like the laughter of gods.
Ithan gasped, agony searing through him as if the eagle's beak had torn through his ribs. His knees buckled. He felt every bite, every heartbeat of divine suffering.
The eagle fed until the mountain reeked of ozone and burning blood. When its hunger was spent, it lifted its wings, scattering sparks, and vanished back into the storm in a single, blinding flash.
Silence fell.
Then—slowly, inevitably—the wound began to mend. Flames licked through the giant's veins, crawling across his body, closing the rent flesh until fire and thunder fused into living flesh once more.
The giant raised his head. His eyes were hidden beneath shadow, but his voice rolled from the mountain like the sound of creation itself—a low rumble swelling into a roar. Words of fire. Words of rebellion. Words that made the world tremble.
Ithan couldn't understand the language. It wasn't mortal—it was the syntax of gods. Yet the meaning struck him deep in his marrow, reverberating through every cell of his body:
Defy them. Defy the tyrants. Steal back the flame.
And for the first time since awakening his lineage aspect, Ithan understood. Not just the fire. Not just the endurance. But what it meant to bear Prometheus's will—the rebellion that defined survival itself.
If Anipather's actions were what it took to be a hero in this age—sacrifice by tyranny, salvation through control—then that word had lost its meaning.
Then I will oppose it, Ithan thought. I will oppose everything that calls itself righteous but feeds on the weak.
The vision dissolved. The mountain, the eagle, the chained god—gone in a shimmer of light.
Ithan opened his eyes.
He was back in the Forge, the stormlight pulsing through the crystal chamber once more. The air around him crackled with faint, dying embers. His body was no longer aflame, but thin wisps of smoke rose from his skin, and beneath it, the faint traceries of burn marks glowed—patterns etched like runes across his flesh. They weren't scars. They were signs—the living marks of Resonance.
His breath came slow and steady. He felt heavier, but stronger for it. The weight of his Mysteries no longer fought each other—they wove together.
His eyes flared open fully.
The white-gold light within them burned cleaner, sharper, the geometric sigils rotating with smooth precision, reconfiguring like divine machinery. For the first time, he could look directly at the truths they revealed without his mind fracturing under their weight.
He understood the rhythm of his body and soul now—the survival instinct that had once just kept him alive now fed his flame, refined it, strengthened it. Both his Mystery of Survival and Mystery of Prometheus had broken through, ascending into the Resonance Stage. The two no longer burned separately—they resonated, feeding one another like twin engines.
But Stormheart's Mystery—the divine fragment of Zeus—remained still, dormant in comparison. He could feel it within the lance's core, its lightning coiled like a sleeping serpent. It hadn't yet advanced.
That was fine.
He hadn't earned it yet. He had barely touched its truth—only once, when he first claimed it. But now, with the steady fire of Prometheus and the iron will of Survival flowing through him, he could feel the Lance's mystery answering faintly, waiting.
Waiting for him to command it.
Ithan rose, lightning flickering faintly beneath his skin, a quiet glow blooming behind his eyes. The stormlight of the Forge bent toward him, drawn as if recognizing something new—something no longer just defiant, but inevitable.
Anipather felt it before he understood it.
A low hum rippled through the floor beneath his boots—steady, rhythmic, alive. The light coursing through the crystal veins of the Forge no longer pulsed in the cold, mechanical pattern it had when the Magus guided it. Now it moved organically, like a heartbeat echoing through stone.
He turned, eyes narrowing.
"What—"
The sound deepened, vibrating through the air. The seven halos circling the core began to tilt again, but not westward this time. The Magus, still standing at his runic console, cried out as the glowing rings jerked violently out of sync with his gestures. Sparks flared from the control conduits; the air filled with the smell of ozone and scorched metal.
"The sequence—it's changing!" the Magus shouted over the thunder. "Someone's overriding the command pattern!"
Anipather's gaze snapped toward Ithan.
The Ashborn was standing again.
Not just standing—rising. The burned marks etched across his skin were glowing now, pulsing with a rhythm that matched the Forge's new heartbeat. Every breath he took drew threads of white-gold light from the air, feeding them into the sigils spiraling around his body. Stormheart's dormant energy shimmered faintly in his hand, arcs of lightning licking up the haft toward his shoulder.
"Impossible," Anipather muttered. "You shouldn't even be alive."
Ithan met his gaze. His voice came low, steady, carrying beneath the storm's roar. "You said this place was built for war. You were wrong."
The air crackled.
"The Forge was built to refine."
At those words, the lightning veins running through the crystal walls flared brighter. Every line of power that had once obeyed Anipather's command now bent toward Ithan, converging like rivers to their source. The storm above roared—not in chaos, but in resonance.
The Magus staggered backward, his eyes wide, unable to tear them from the sight. "It's—reacting to him. The Forge is recognizing a new command signature!"
Anipather's teeth clenched. "No! It's mine! I woke it—I guided its rise!"
He raised his sabers, but the resonance cracked through the chamber, throwing him back as if the Forge itself rejected him. The halos above rotated in unison, forming a vast circle of white-gold light around Ithan, lightning and flame intertwining in its heart.
Ithan stepped forward, the storm bending to his will.
The world around them seemed to hold its breath.
Anipather stared at him—at the man who moments ago had been bleeding at his feet—and for the first time, a flicker of uncertainty crossed his face.
"You…" he whispered. "You've taken the Forge."
Ithan's grip on Stormheart tightened, his eyes still burning with those rotating sigils. "No," he said quietly. "It remembered who it belongs to."
"You bastard!" Anipather roared, voice echoing like thunder through the crystal chamber.
He thrust his arms outward, his Mysteries flaring to life. The air around him twisted and boiled, Aether lines coiling like serpents before detonating outward. From the stormlight above, a tidal surge began to form—not water, but condensed vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere. It folded upon itself, dark and immense, until it became a wall of living sea.
The Forge shuddered under the weight of it. Lightning flared within the tide's depths, caught in the current of Anipather's will.
Ithan's eyes burned white-gold as his sight shifted—sigils and runes spiraled across his vision, tracing every thread of motion within the captain's body. He didn't just see Anipather anymore; he read him. Every pulse of Aether, every circuit of grafted energy, unfolded before his gaze like a diagram written across the soul.
Then he saw it.
That's not a Mystery, Ithan realized, his breath catching. The vibration field, the resonance through the sabers—it wasn't divine truth or personal enlightenment. It was artificial. Something buried deep in Anipather's flesh. A graft. A machine grafted to his core.
Just like the Aether crystal that had fused with me.
He barely had time to think before the force hit him.
The air collapsed, folding inward as the Tidal Crush formed—a roaring wall of oceanic mass summoned from vapor and raw Aether pressure. The wave didn't just fall; it imploded, crushing the air itself as it surged forward.
Ithan's body buckled under the pressure. The sensation was suffocating—his skin burned, his bones groaned like the hull of a ship dragged beneath the sea. Gravity twisted. Each breath felt like drowning in liquid stone.
From across the stormlight, Anipather's laughter cut through the chaos. "Tidal Crush summons a wall of water from the atmosphere itself," he shouted over the roar. "It consumes a mountain of Aether—but with Abyssal Pressure, I can pin you beneath it!"
He thrust both hands downward. The water twisted, compressing into a gravitational tide that sought to drag Ithan to his knees. He felt his energy drain, his Aether reserves sinking fast. Even for him, the graft's strain was unbearable.
But Ithan refused to break.
He steadied his breathing. Pain became rhythm. Fear became focus. His white flames burst through the cracks in his skin—and then changed.
The heat deepened, shifting from white to crimson. The flames no longer lashed outward but sank inward, embedding themselves within his flesh. His body became the forge, every cell burning, tempering, reforging.
The oppressive weight above him began to buckle.
Steam hissed from his arms, glowing veins of molten light tracing up his skin. His muscles coiled tighter, the strength building beyond what Aether infusion could ever provide. He could feel the Prometheus fire and Survival will converging, rewriting him from the inside out.
Anipather's eyes widened, sensing the pushback through the pressure.
"What—what are you doing?" he shouted, his voice cracking.
Ithan lifted his head through the storm and met his gaze, flames rippling across his body like living armor. His voice was quiet, almost calm, but it carried like the crack of thunder.
"Enduring."
The pressure intensified—the weight of an ocean pressing down upon a single man. Every breath Ithan took felt like inhaling fire and salt. His knees trembled, the Forge floor cracking beneath his feet. The air vibrated with the frequency of collapse, a low hum that devoured all other sound.
But in that sound, Ithan found rhythm. He matched his breathing to it. Slow. Measured. Relentless. His crimson aura pulsed in time with the vibrations. The heat of his core built higher, not outward, but inward—folding upon itself, compressing into a single, burning locus.
Anipather saw it too late. The tidal crush above Ithan began to steam. The walls of condensed vapor wavered, their surface rippling as if reality itself were heating from within. Aether lines snapped under the strain, the field unraveling.
"What—" Anipather's eyes widened. "You can't—"
The temperature spiked. The crimson flame deepened to molten gold. The gravitational field collapsed with a sound like thunder shattering glass. The pressure that had once crushed Ithan now burst upward, turning to an explosion of superheated steam that tore through the Forge chamber.
Ithan didn't move with fury; he moved with control. Every step was precise, deliberate—the footwork of the spear art he had tempered through countless trials, refined by fire and pain.
The flames sheathing his body spiraled, compressing along his spear. Lightning from the Forge converged on him, drawn like metal to a magnet. The heat became light, the light became motion—his body and the spear moving as one.
He thrust.
A single strike.
It met Anipather's wall of Aether-formed water head-on—and split it. The tidal surge parted instantly, evaporating from the core outward as though the world refused to contain the fire he wielded.
Steam blanketed the chamber, rolling like clouds across the crystal floor. The stormlight dimmed, and in the haze, Ithan's silhouette emerged—wreathed in red-gold fire, his eyes glowing with the rotating geometry of his Resonance.
Anipather staggered back, coughing, his armor blackened, steam rising off his skin. His grafted core pulsed erratically beneath his chest, the artificial resonance fighting to stabilize.
"How—how did you—"
Ithan's spear ignited again, the flame burning quieter now, almost serene.
Pyric Clash.
Ithan's spear flared to life. White-gold fire erupted from the haft, ribbons of light wrapping the weapon as Logos Pyros surged outward. The heat sang in the air, burning ozone and ash together, colliding with the stormlight of the Forge.
Across from him, Anipather straightened, his eyes hollow with conviction. The false tide of his graft dimmed, and in its place came something older—something born from within.
"Mystery of the Lotus-Eater," he intoned, voice low and melodic, almost reverent. "Lógos Lōtophágou — Anthós Lḗthēs."
From his sabers bloomed lotus-shaped bursts of light—petals of radiant oblivion. They opened like flowers underwater, each one a fragment of dream and decay. The lotuses met Ithan's flame, and both mysteries howled against each other. Fire seared illusion; illusion devoured fire.
The clash pushed Ithan backward, boots grinding against the glass floor. Anipather's resonance overwhelmed his—the older man's Bathos-stage Mystery pressed with layered truths Ithan hadn't yet reached. The lotus field shimmered, unraveling his Pyric technique strand by strand.
But Ithan's flames shifted. White turned blue. The temperature spiked, the air cracking with expanding energy. The blue flame detonated in a rippling shockwave, compressing his fire into explosive bursts that tore through the lotus petals. Anipather's eyes widened as the explosion drove him back, forcing him to reinforce his stance.
He drew deeper. Aethertech veins pulsed beneath his armor, the grafted core humming like a heart forged from machinery. With it, he drew not only Aether but the pressure of the deep sea itself.
Ithan felt it—his bones screamed as gravity warped around him. The Forge floor groaned, crystalline slabs bending under the invisible weight.
"You're drawing from the Forge's field," Ithan spat, his voice strained. "That vibration—It's not a Mystery, is it?"
Anipather smirked. "You shouldn't concern yourself with things that don't belong to you."
He stepped forward, sabers vibrating, the pressure building again.
"You think I care about your philosophy?" Ithan said, his voice rising over the wind. "Is this how you plan to become a hero?"
He vanished in a burst of blue fire—Cinder Steps. The afterimage burned in Anipather's eyes as Ithan appeared behind him, Stormheart already descending in a blazing arc.
Chains of black-violet mist exploded from Anipather's sabers, coiling through the air like serpents. The illusion-chains of the Lotus Eater—dreams turned weapon. They sought to pull Ithan into a trance, to drown him in false peace.
But the white flames burned them away on contact. The air filled with the smell of smoke and iron.
His flames sear both flesh and spirit, Anipather thought, grimacing. White burns the soul, crimson the flesh, blue detonates both.
He countered. A shockwave burst from his sabers, a sonic implosion shaped like the jaws of a beast—Orca's Maw. Ithan leapt aside, using blue fire to multiply his speed, his body flickering through the shattered air.
But Anipather had already adjusted. He pivoted, sabers crossing in an X, and from that intersection, a lotus of black light bloomed—Oblivion Bloom.
The lotus expanded, reality bending around it, a flower made of erasure. Ithan felt his existence begin to fray at the edges, his consciousness dissolving like sand in the tide. Yet from within him, another light flared.
He spun Stormheart in his grasp, the divine lance humming with a voice older than Olympus itself. Words came unbidden to his tongue—Logoi etched into the marrow of the world.
"Mystery of Zeus: Logoi Keraunós — Thunderbolt!"
The Forge roared.
Lightning and flame converged, a spiral of white-gold power shooting from the lance. The beam struck Anipather head-on, hurling him upward through the crystalline vault. The explosion filled the chamber with blinding light; thunder rolled through the mountain, shattering smaller veins of crystal.
When the glare faded, Anipather still stood—but barely. His armor smoked, the graft within his chest flickering and sparking, struggling to contain the divine current.
His breath came ragged, yet his eyes burned with something beyond rage—something hollow, desperate.
He remembered fragments of his campaign in the Western March, faces of comrades, the banners he had once carried—but they slipped away like dreams upon waking. His past was fading. His reason. His purpose.
The Lotus-Eater's Mystery was consuming him, feeding on the very desire that had birthed it. His wish to be a hero—the one thing that had defined him—was being devoured by the truth he sought to grasp.
The lotus sigil behind him opened wider, radiating an eerie calm.
Anipather smiled through the blood. "So that's it," he whispered. "To reach Aletheia…I must forget why I wanted it at all."
The petals flared. The resonance inside him broke open.
And Anipather—Warrior of the Western March, butcher of Volos—ascended screaming into the Aletheia of Oblivion.
~
Within his mindscape, The sea was quiet that night. Not in the way of calm waters, but in the way of forgetfulness — as if the world itself had taken a long, unbroken breathand chosen never to exhale again.
Anipather knelt by the black tide. His reflection stared back at him, hollow-eyed, rippling faintly in the glass-dark water. His fingers trembled as he reached toward it — not to touch, but to remember what touch meant.
The waves did not move. The air did not stir. Even the stars above hung in stillness — watching, but no longer remembering why. He whispered the name of his Mystery. And the world whispered it back.
"Μυστήριον Λωτοφάγου — Ἀλήθεια Λήθης."The Mystery of the Lotus-Eater — Truth of Forgetfulness.
The lotus bloomed beneath his knees. Not of petals, but of light — pale, soundless, unending. Each fold unfurled into a memory.
His laughter. His pain. His first oath beneath the burning sky. Somebody's voice — her soft insistence that he could be more than the sword he carried. The scent of fire. The weight of guilt. The small, stubborn hope that one day he would be a hero.
Each memory shimmered in the air like a mirror of living glass. And one by one, the mirrors cracked. Silver dust drifted down, dissolving into the sea that did not move.
He did not resist. He only watched. At the Protos stage, he wanted to save people. At the Bathos stage, he had drowned others. At Aletheia, he drowned himself.
He reached inward, past every illusion, every scar — toward the last ember that refused to die, that single, unbroken spark of will: his desire to be a hero. It flickered there, in the hollow of his chest — frail, but warm. The only thing left that still burned.
He could have kept it. He could have remained human. But truth demanded equivalence.The price for clarity was everything that clouded it. So he took the ember in his hand—and crushed it.The world collapsed into light.
The ocean inverted, sky folding into sea, sea into sky. Every molecule of his being screamed in silence as memory folded inward, rewriting itself as pure observation.
He saw everything — not as moments, not as feelings, but as truths. The shape of sorrow without sorrow. The geometry of love without warmth. The equation of heroism without meaning.
It was all so beautiful. So utterly clear. So terrifyingly hollow.
"I understand now," he said. But his voice carried no sound. It was thought, unbound — a resonance that trembled through the aether. "There was never a hero. Only the dream of one."
His body dissolved into a bloom of pale light. Veins became rivers of glass; flesh, translucent ash. His eyes — once gold with conviction — dimmed to the color of still water.
Behind him, the Lotus of Aletheia opened. Petals of starlight expanded into infinity,a radiant flower blooming across the horizon.
All along the coast, those who looked upon it forgot. Forgot why they had come. Forgot why they feared. Forgot even the name Anipather. The Lotus-Eater had reached the truth of his Mystery. And in doing so, became what all seekers of truth must become — a mirror that remembers nothing.
In the silence that followed, the waves resumed their breath. The stars blinked again. Life moved on, unaware that something divine had bloomed and died within it. Only the sea remembered. But even that, too, was beginning to forget.