(Warning: This chapter is a heavy read, so read it carefully as it reveals part of Shade's true nature)
The minutes passed inside the Immortal Mansion wrapped in a warmth that Uriel had almost forgotten existed. Laughter resonated against the stone walls, interspersed with pleasant conversations where the young immortal caught up with the Cohort.
He listened with genuine and intense interest to the feats, the sorrows, and the small moments that his friends had accumulated during the years he was absent.
In turn, Uriel shared strange and almost surreal anecdotes about his experience having to erect and lead a new civilization from the foundations. He narrated with a light tone—almost humorous—what it meant to negotiate with millions of frightened survivors, coordinate the construction of an entire citadel, and fight to the death against aberrations born from the deepest darkness.
However, despite being physically present, laughing with Effie and discussing tactical details with Nephis and Jet, a part of Uriel's consciousness remained distant.
Throughout the entire conversation, a persistent thought circled his mind: Where was Shade at that precise moment and what was he contemplating?
Far, painfully far from any citadel, fortress, or settlement protected by humanity, the Dream Realm stretched out in an endless horizon of ancient ruins and ashen skies.
In the middle of that desolate wasteland, the figure of a young man stood erect on the cornice of a half-ruined building. He was of a cold and aristocratic beauty, with skin as pale as marble, hair as black as a starless night, and red eyes that glowed with a penetrating and unsettling light.
He wore robes of a dense black, reinforced with pieces of dark armor that did not reflect the faint light of the environment.
It was Shade. And from the dense shadow of the ruins, he observed in complete silence a small group of three Awakened who fought desperately for their lives against the Nightmare Beasts.
While the icy wind stirred the folds of his dark robes, Shade observed those men and women of flesh and blood. The vision of their struggle ignited in his mind a spiral of reflections on the nature of humanity.
He thought about how humans were infinitely curious creatures.
Throughout the eons, in every era and in every world that Corruption touched, mortals always ended up asking themselves the same fundamental question: What is, in reality, humanity?
Was humanity merely the most advanced evolutionary form of a primitive ape that learned to stand upright and use tools? Or were they the direct and molded creation of the Great Gods, beings who in their arrogance gave themselves an appearance to imitate the divine and pretend they governed the cosmos?
Shade philosophized in silence, keeping his gaze fixed on the valley of debris below.
The trio of Awakened fought with blind fervor against their executioner: a Fallen Tyrant. The creature was a grotesque mass of muscular power, a monstrous great ape with mangy fur, provided with a long articulated scorpion tail from which corrosive venom dripped, and multiple tentacles sharp as blades that burst violently from its back.
Shade observed the inevitable outcome.
The first Awakened, driven by a mixture of bravery and foolishness, let out a war cry and threw himself frontally against the beast with his sword raised high.
The Tyrant didn't even flinch; the tentacles on its back unfolded in a blurry whip-like motion, wrapping around the warrior's body in mid-air. With a dry and muffled sound, the appendages contracted, crushing the human's bones, armor, and organs until he became a deformed mass of blood that fell to the ground lifeless.
The second Awakened, seeing his companion perish, let blind fury cloud his judgment. Letting out a scream of agony and hatred, he lunged without any strategy against the monster.
The Fallen Tyrant simply raised one of its gigantic stone fists and let it fall with brutal force. The impact rumbled on the earth like thunder; when the beast lifted its hand, only a crimson stain flattened against the rocks remained.
The third, a woman, witnessed the instantaneous annihilation of her group. A heart-wrenching scream escaped her throat as primitive terror took absolute control of her body.
She turned around and began to flee foolishly, stumbling over the stones in a desperate attempt to cling to life. However, the speed of a Fallen was not something a mortal could escape on foot.
With a fluid and lazy movement, the Tyrant's scorpion tail shot forward, impaling the woman through the back and piercing her chest before she could take three more steps.
Shade, seeing that scene of carnage and desperation, felt absolutely nothing.
There was not in his chest a single beat of pity, nor a shiver of horror, nor a flash of rage against the creature. He had seen death in countless forms, eons before those mortals were born, and he had experienced it in his own flesh so many times in the past that the concept of the cessation of life had lost all dramatic impact for him.
Seeing humans die in such a pathetic way was, to his senses, equivalent to watching a passerby accidentally step on a line of ants in the mud. There was no hatred, no anger, no sadness, but neither was there a malignant happiness. It was an absolute indifference, empty and crystalline.
There lay the abysmal distance between him and the beings that inhabited that world. He was not like humans. Humans were chaotic vessels, saturated to the brim with all kinds of unstable things.
They possessed fluctuating emotions: they laughed with hysteria, cried over insignificant losses, became enraged to the point of self-destruction, and forgave with a weakness that defied logic.
They allowed anger, fear, and hatred to guide their daily actions, letting the suffocating heat of their feelings cloud their judgment and lead them to commit the greatest stupidities... just like the three Awakened who lay mutilated on the ground.
In that instant, contemplating the fresh blood that soaked the earth, Shade remembered an ancient reflection that resonated with the darkest and most hidden nature of the human race:
"Man is a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary for the entire universe to arm itself to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even when the universe crushed him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought... but from that same thought are born the abysses of its own perversion."
Shade meditated deeply on the weight of that philosophy and the dark side it entailed.
If human thought was inevitably intoxicated by its own impulses, and if the essence of all humans was nothing more than a disordered set of selfish desires, then someone who harbored no personal desires became, by definition, something everything but human.
The answer to his own existence was painfully simple: he had simply stopped being human, or perhaps he had never been one in the strict sense. By detaching himself from all emotional ties, from the need to be loved, from greed and the fear of extinction, a being could rise and see far beyond what mortal minds could ever reach.
Although philosophers, sages, and poets of thousands of civilizations had tried to define "humanity" by assigning it sacred virtues, the truth was infinitely simpler, more cynical, and devoid of magic: humanity, as a whole, was only a form. A mutable facade.
Humans adopted the form of whatever they needed at the moment to survive or prosper. They knelt and worshiped the divine form that best suited them according to their fears; they could smile warmly at someone and speak ill of them behind their backs a second later, feigning false empathy to maintain appearances and social peace.
They were intrinsically envious creatures, desiring with a sick voracity to have everything others possessed: money, power, dominion, women, status, happiness. All those desires were nothing more than chains of flesh that they forged for themselves.
To get what they wanted, they could take any form: that of a loyal friend, a selfless companion, a wise teacher, a passionate lover, or a pious hermit.
They could lie with astonishing ease because they had mouths designed to articulate falsehoods; they could deceive, manipulate, and betray their fellow beings solely to benefit themselves or their small circles.
Just as he himself did at that very moment.
After all, he was not a human. Shade was not a man of flesh who breathed and feared death. He was only a facet, a fragment detached from something much older, darker, and vaster.
He was a simple empty shell that adopted the form of a handsome young man to fulfill a specific purpose on the great board of existence. His morality was not measured in terms of good or evil, of piety or cruelty, but in the pure execution of a function.
Shade let out a soft sigh that dissolved in the cold air of the ruins.
Below, the Fallen Tyrant had begun to noisily devour the shattered corpses of the Awakened, breaking bones with its massive jaws and making the flesh crunch.
While the bloody sound reverberated in the canyon, a small and almost imperceptible smile drew on Shade's lips. It was not a smile of sadistic pleasure, but the calm grimace of one who contemplates an inevitable truth: the comedy of life and death performing its usual act.
A moment later, Shade turned around. His figure began to blur, becoming a fluid shadow that stretched and slid silently across the cracked ground, abandoning the ruins to return to Uriel's side, the only anchor that still tied him to the world of the living.