Zane was deeply immersed, admiring the craftsmanship of the two statues when Lady Sylvia's voice emerged, breaking the spell.
"That is Alphina, the Divine Ancestor—also the creator of Milgardia and all gentlets."
She pointed at the angelic radiant sentinel as she spoke, her tone carrying the weight of recited scripture.
"The other is Asgrodiphus, the Fallen Ancestor whose body became Milgardia."
This time, her finger settled on the tenebrous abomination, and Zane felt something cold trace down his spine at the gesture.
"Together they are called the Founders. Without either, Eryndor would never exist—could never have come to be. That is but one of their many names, though it's the most widely known." She paused, and her voice took on a more contemplative quality. "Nothing is truly known about them save for what appears in the depictions within the Holy Memorium. We can only speculate from our limited understanding. Everyone... well, not everyone—the votaries and venerators all agree on calling them the Founders, at least."
Now this was the sort of information Zane craved. Not redundant technical specifications about memory storage, but mythology. Origin stories. Cosmology. The foundational narratives that gave meaning to an entire civilization. Moments like this were what had made him fall in love with web novels in the first place—the grand revelations, the slow unveiling of world-shaking truths.
Come to think of it, if his life were a web novel, he'd read it voraciously. It had all the elements he loved: mysterious artifacts, cosmic powers, strange realms, transformation. It just lacked some action. Wait—was it possible that—
"Let us go."
Lady Sylvia's words echoed, disrupting his spiraling thoughts. The too-familiar clink-clank of her armored stride resumed as she moved toward the crowded entrance.
Zane followed.
As he approached the arch, passing beneath the opposing gazes of angel and demon, he felt their conflicting pressures like physical weights pressing against his consciousness. The angelic radiance of Alphina washed over him first, leaving a sensation of heavenly grace upon his skin—warm, clean, uplifting. Then came the demon's influence: an eerie void that seemed to drink from the depths of his soul itself, leaving a cool, dark sensation settling beneath the surface of his being like sediment sinking through water.
Gentlets streamed in and out of the Cathedral in steady flows—too many to count, too densely packed to avoid contact under normal circumstances. Yet somehow, miraculously, collisions never occurred. A path, thin and narrow, was deliberately created for him and Lady Sylvia as they approached. The gentlets squeezed themselves to the sides without complaint or apparent instruction, making way for the "ancestor" to pass.
He crossed the threshold, leaving the duality of the evening sky for the unified mystery within.
The true heart of this eternal dream awaited.
…
Beyond the entrance lay an arched hall filled with gentlets of all apparent ages—children and elderly alike, though he knew their agelessness made such categories meaningless. They stood in silent reverence, gazing at the walls where—
'The depictions.'
On both sides of the hall, Zane could make out intricate illustrations engraved into the smooth white surface. Not painted or inlaid, but carved with such precision and detail that they seemed almost alive, telling a story that flowed continuously across the stone like a frozen river of narrative.
His breath caught as understanding bloomed.
This wasn't a collection of separate images. It was a story, meant to be read as one continuous tale.
…
In the beginning, there was only darkness.
A formless void stretched endlessly, empty and pregnant with terrible potential. Then, from that primordial nothing, a figure emerged—colossal beyond comprehension, a truly giant human form depicted with flowing brown hair and wearing resplendent golden and white robes that seemed to emanate light even in carved stone. He held a staff of power, and around his head, bright white halos multiplied in concentric rings, each one pulsing with divine authority.
The giant slept.
And in that divine slumber, something miraculous occurred. His body began to glow, radiance building until it became unbearable, and then—separation. Like a cell dividing, his form split, and from his singular essence emerged two beings. Twin angels, winged and radiant, each bearing similar appearance to their progenitor. They were perfect mirrors of one another, identical in power and beauty, hovering in the void as the giant's form faded like morning mist, his purpose fulfilled in their creation.
The two angels floated in the formless dark, alone together.
Then one of them noticed something—a stone slab, suspended in the void as if waiting. Upon its surface, writing blazed in glowing red script. The angel approached, drawn by curiosity or fate, and began to read. The script was simultaneously clear and utterly incomprehensible, as if the knowledge it contained was too vast, too dangerous for any mind to fully grasp.
But the angel tried anyway.
He stared at the forbidden text with consuming intensity, and as he did, something began to change. His form darkened at the edges, shadows creeping across his radiant skin. Black armor materialized around his body, encasing him in plates of darkness, though his face remained recognizably angelic—not yet fully transformed, caught in that terrible threshold between light and shadow.
He couldn't look away.
Again and again he returned to the slab, obsessively studying the forbidden knowledge. Each time he read, the corruption deepened. His face twisted, features elongating and distorting. His wings, once pristine white, began to tatter and darken. His body bent under the weight of the armor, which grew more elaborate and menacing with each reading. The transformation was gradual but inexorable, and by the time he finally stepped back from the slab, he had become something truly monstrous—a demonic figure of absolute malevolence, great horns crowning his head, nothing of the original angel visible except perhaps the basic structure of his wings, now ragged and grotesque.
Asgrodiphus, the Fallen.
The other angel—the one who had resisted temptation, who had not read the forbidden text—finally discovered what had become of his twin. Horror and desperate concern radiated from his luminous form as he confronted the dark lord his brother had become. They spoke, though what words passed between them was lost to time and stone.
The white angel departed, flying through the void with purpose, and returned carrying a large vessel—a gourd from which bright golden liquid brimmed and overflowed, each drop containing concentrated divine essence. He offered it to the dark lord in a gesture of supplication, of healing, of desperate hope that corruption could be reversed.
Asgrodiphus refused.
His rejection was absolute, final. Whatever he had become, whatever knowledge he had consumed from the forbidden slab, it had changed him in ways that could not be undone by any cure, no matter how divine.
The white angel—Alphina—returned to a place he had created: a realm of his own, where two magnificent thrones stood side by side in a grand hall. He sat upon one, alone. The other remained empty, waiting for a twin who would never occupy it. The posture of the seated angel radiated loneliness, incompleteness, the terrible weight of solitary divinity.
Time passed in the depiction, suggested by subtle changes in the carved lines.
Then Asgrodiphus arrived.
He appeared before the empty throne, and for a moment—just a moment—it seemed he might sit, might accept his place beside his brother despite everything that had changed. But instead, he attacked. The two figures clashed in combat rendered with such dynamic energy that Zane could almost hear the thunder of their battle, see the lightning of their powers colliding, feel the very fabric of reality trembling under the force of their conflict.
Brother against brother. Light against darkness. Creation against corruption.
Alphina fought not with hatred but with sorrow, and in the end, his power proved greater. He destroyed Asgrodiphus's body utterly, tearing it apart until nothing remained but a single dark orb—a sphere of concentrated corruption that pulsed with malevolent energy, all that remained of his fallen twin.
But Alphina did not destroy the orb.
Instead, he lifted it carefully, cradling it as one might hold something precious despite its poison. And in his hands, radiance bloomed. The darkness began to dispel like smoke in sunlight, purified by divine light that refused to give up on what his brother had become. The cleansing was not complete—some shadow always remained—but enough was purged that the orb transformed, becoming something that could be used rather than merely destroyed.
And Alphina, in his infinite wisdom or infinite loneliness, decided to create.
Using the purified orb as foundation—using the transformed essence of his fallen brother—he forged an entire world. A landscape emerged from nothing: a grand city built upon a mountain's peak, its architecture both beautiful and haunting. Forests surrounded the city in protective embrace, trees rising tall and green. At one end, between the ancient trees, he carved a passage—a well that led out, a doorway to other realms, because this newborn world was revealed to be a prison of sorts, a sealed realm from which escape should be possible, even if difficult.
But the darkness Alphina had dispelled from Asgrodiphus's core did not vanish entirely. It could not be destroyed, only relocated. It loomed at the boundaries of the newly created world, circling the forests like a living thing, kept at bay but never truly banished—a perpetual reminder of what had been sacrificed to make this place possible.
The world of Milgardia was born from the body of the fallen, sustained by the prison of divine will.
Alphina stood in his creation, alone among the trees and stone, and then made his choice. He approached the well—the passage out that he himself had created—and left. Departed his own creation, leaving it empty and unattended, perhaps to seek something in the greater realms beyond, or perhaps simply unable to bear remaining in a world built from his brother's corrupted essence.
And with the creator gone, entropy began its work.
The darkness at the boundaries, patient and hungry, began its slow encroachment. The green trees at the forest's edge withered and turned black, their wood becoming twisted and wrong. The corruption crept toward the mountain, darkening the stone. Even the city walls began to change, white stone shifting to obsidian, purity surrendering to shadow inch by inevitable inch.
But Alphina had not abandoned his creation entirely.
The perspective of the story shifted, expanding outward to reveal something vast and incomprehensible—the prison-world of Milgardia was merely one small realm within a cosmic architecture of staggering scale. Countless colored spheres floated in endless streams through a void, all circling around a coin-like, multicolored platform that served as some kind of nexus or hub. These spheres moved with purpose, flowing in rivers of light and memory, an eternal circulation of... something. Dreams, perhaps. Or souls. Or moments of consciousness crystallized into form.
Alphina appeared in this greater realm, no longer bound by the prison that held his creation. He moved among the flowing spheres with divine authority, and as he passed, he used his power to draw them toward himself—not all of them, but many. They came at his call, and under his touch, they compressed and transformed, becoming crystalline shards that glittered with concentrated potential, each one containing the compressed essence of whatever the sphere had been.
But even as he collected them—dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands—more spheres continued flowing in from the edges of this vast realm, maintaining an eternal cycle. The supply was infinite, or near enough to make no difference. They circled the multicolored platform in endless procession, a cosmic river that could never be fully dammed.
Alphina gathered all the shards he had created and pulled them into himself, absorbing their essence until his form blazed with accumulated power. Then, with purpose renewed, he approached a swirling aperture—a hole that twisted with multiple colors, identical in nature to the passage inside the well he had created in Milgardia.
Without hesitation, he entered, plunging back into the prison-world he had abandoned.
The corruption had spread in his absence. The dark world seethed with it, shadows having claimed vast territories. Alphina flew toward the center of the city—the mountain's peak—and then suddenly plummeted downward like a meteor, diving into the heart of the corruption itself.
Inside the city, monsters now resided.
Twisted things born from the encroaching darkness, they shambled through streets that had been built empty, their forms grotesque parodies of life. They turned toward the descending angel as one, sensing the divine intrusion, and began to converge with predatory hunger.
Alphina did not fight them.
Instead, he gathered all the accumulated energy he had absorbed—all those crystalline shards, all that concentrated potential—and released it in a single overwhelming surge. White, ethereal power flooded outward from his form in waves, washing over the corrupted city like a tide of purification. The monsters shrieked and writhed as the light touched them, but Alphina's intent was not destruction.
As his radiance enveloped each monster, he reached into them with divine precision and placed something—one of the crystalline shards he had collected, pressed into the core of each twisted being. One by one, the monsters collapsed, their thrashing stilling as the shards took hold. They fell into deep sleep, their bodies convulsing and changing.
When they finally lay still, their forms had transformed utterly. No longer monstrous, they had become gentlets—the first of their kind, with smooth clear skin—even their heads was clear— and calm expressions upon their newly formed faces, each one containing a crystalline core formed from the shard Alphina had gifted them.
The city filled with sleeping children of two creators—shaped from the corruption of the fallen, animated by the sacrifice of the divine.
But Alphina's work was not finished.
He flew to the empty center of the city, to the exact spot where the Cathedral now stood in Eryndor's present, and there he made his final choice. His form began to glow with impossible radiance, light building until his very outline became uncertain, and then—transformation.
His body did not die. It became.
Stone rose from his flesh. Pillars formed from his bones. His wings spread and hardened into the arched ceiling of a grand cathedral, each feather becoming a carved detail of impossible beauty. His essence flowed outward, shaping itself into walls and foundations, creating a structure of worship and power. At the entrance, two statues emerged from his transforming substance—eternal guardians embodying his dual nature, the light he championed and the darkness he had defeated and transformed.
Standing stones rose in a circle around the cathedral, protective and reverential—a henge marking sacred ground.
His core—the essential divine spark that had animated his existence—descended deep beneath the cathedral, forming an underground chamber divided into four distinct sections, each one serving a purpose known only to the architect of his own dissolution.
And finally, his blood—golden and luminous, containing the last of his mobile divine essence—began to flow. It moved through hidden channels carved into the cathedral's foundations, spreading outward through Eryndor itself, following pathways that led to each sleeping gentlet scattered throughout the city.
The golden blood reached them and flowed into their bodies, filling their cores with divine animation.
They woke.
The first gentlets opened their eyes and rose, no longer monsters, no longer empty vessels, but living beings with purpose and will. They looked around at the city that would be their home, at each other, at the cathedral that had been their creator in his final act, and they understood—however dimly—that they existed because of sacrifice beyond measure.
But even this was not the end of the story.
The darkness that had corrupted the world was not wholly destroyed—could not be, perhaps, for it was born from Asgrodiphus's essence, and his essence formed the very foundation of this realm. Portions of shadow remained, separated now by a barrier of light that Alphina's sacrifice had erected. The corruption persisted at the boundaries, having engulfed half the forest and surrounding all of Milgardia in perpetual siege, a reminder that paradise was always provisional, that darkness was always waiting.
Time passed.
The gentlets were no longer weak or hollow. They grew in power and purpose, their crystalline soul cores glowing with different colors and intensities as they refined themselves. Some cores blazed with vibrant hues—red, blue, green, gold—while others remained hollow, empty vessels that nonetheless served their purpose. The gentlets' forms became simplified in the depiction, their heads no longer detailed but rendered as smooth blue shapes, their bodies marked with colored strands that indicated memories absorbed by the human-like beings.
They discovered the well that Alphina had created and learned to pass through it, entering the outer realm where the colored spheres floated in endless streams. These were dream bubbles, they learned—each one containing memories and experiences of brown-headed humans who resided within them. The gentlets entered these bubbles and received gifts: knowledge, skills, memories that could be stored and traded. They brought these treasures back to Milgardia, enriching their civilization with echoes of worlds beyond their prison.
But not all gentlets remained pure.
Some approached the white barrier of light that held back the corruption, and they crossed into the shadow beyond. When they returned—if they returned—their crystalline cores had turned black, corrupted by the same darkness that had transformed Asgrodiphus so long ago. These black-core gentlets became threats, dangers to be monitored and, if necessary, destroyed.
The cycles of gentlet existence established themselves, repeating with clockwork precision.
Their soul cores bore numerical markings—streaks that ranged from one to six, indicating stages of refinement or power. Zane watched the visual narrative unfold across the walls: gentlets with glowing cores sometimes simply dissolved, their bodies breaking down into pure shards that clattered to the ground, their purpose fulfilled or their essence exhausted. Others ventured into dream bubbles and died there, killed by dangers that lurked within human memories—monsters born from nightmares, perhaps, or simply the hostile architecture of alien consciousness.
Some gentlets conquered the bubbles successfully, the dream bubbles, having fulfilled their purposes, transformed into white dust falling on the coin-like platform, collected carefully by others who understood its value.
With each cycle, the numbers decreased—a slow attrition that might have doomed the entire species, except for one crucial mechanism.
The shards that formed when gentlets dissolved in Milgardia were gathered with reverence and carried to the underground chambers beneath the cathedral—the space that had once been Alphina's core. There, they were placed upon a stone slab, and from them, new gentlets were formed. Resurrection or reincarnation, the distinction unclear but the result undeniable: gentlet civilization could sustain itself through transformation and rebirth. Nonetheless, their numbers still decreased, but the deaths decreased more and more as the civilization strengthened.
The white powder collected from gentlets who died outside Milgardia was taken to a familiar fortress-like structure—the very factory Zane had just visited—and transformed into glassy spheres. Memory orbs. Even death could be made useful, made productive, made part of the eternal economy.
The cycles continued: gentlets entering dreams, receiving gifts from the brown-headed humans within the colored spheres, returning changed or not returning at all. Some accumulated streaks on their cores—one, two, three, progressing toward the maximum of six—before finally dissolving into shards somewhere between beginning and apex. Others turned to dust in the outer realms, their essence scattered across dimensions.
Each time a gentlet was born in the underground chamber, their core was revealed as either hollow or colored. When hollow, a new individual emerged, a fresh consciousness born from recycled essence. When colored—in various intensities and hues—the same gentlet persisted, the same consciousness returned, reborn into a familiar form to continue accumulating experience and power.
Knights appeared in the later depictions—armored warriors who patrolled the white barrier with vigilant purpose, hunting and destroying black-core gentlets that attempted to cross from the corrupted zones into Eryndor proper. They were protectors, maintaining the boundary between civilization and chaos.
The hollow-core gentlets—the rank zeros—were revealed to have unique properties. Only they could manipulate memory orbs directly, converting memories to dream essence and back again, though paradoxically they could not access the stored memories for their own use. The memories themselves became valuable trade goods, circulating among all gentlets regardless of rank. And notably, crucially, the hollow gentlets never dissolved into shards—they alone were exempt from that transformation, permanent in a way their more powerful kin could never be.
The story flowed across the walls like a living thing, and it all appeared to be ancient history, sacred mythology carved in stone to preserve the foundational truths of gentlet existence—
Until Zane saw himself.
His heart stopped.
There, in the most recent section of the engravings, seamlessly integrated into the eternal narrative: a figure wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Brown-headed. Unmistakably him.
The depiction showed him appearing suddenly, materializing out of nowhere on a brown dusty path just beside the well—the same path he'd actually walked. He was shown sleeping there for a time, and then four gentlets emerged from the well and discovered him. Zane traced their life cycles backward through earlier sections of the engraving and recognized them: the hunters from Milgardia who had found him, who had brought him to Eryndor.
The story continued: they followed the path together to the city. Met the council in formal gathering. Participated in an exchange where a silvery memory orb containing a dagger disappeared, replaced by a revolver—and the revolver was depicted not in the silvery dream-essence form that memories took, but in its true physical appearance, midnight-blue and solid, exactly as it looked in reality.
Every moment of his time here was recorded.
The engravings showed him at the guild registrations, walking with Lady Sylvia through Eryndor's streets, visiting the Avenue of Artificers. They showed him summoning Nyx, who appeared as a translucent blue figure emerging from his being. The Inventory Grimoire materialized in his carved hands. His absorption of golden energy from a skill orb was rendered in precise detail, the moment of cosmic knowledge transfer captured in stone.
His entire life since entry was being documented, somehow transmitted to these walls in real-time or near enough to make no difference. The depictions were telegraphing everything that occurred in Eryndor, creating a living history that updated itself with each passing moment.
He had revealed the Grimoire to their surveillance. He had revealed Nyx. He had shown himself absorbing cosmic power that no gentlet could comprehend.
Zane let out a heavy sigh, tension releasing through his chest in a long exhale. At least the Bazaar itself hadn't manifested in the engravings—the artifact that bound him remained hidden, its existence perhaps too fundamental or too foreign for whatever mechanism created these depictions to capture.
Then he noticed something that made his breath catch for an entirely different reason.
His own figure in the engravings was different from the gentlets in a way that went beyond species. Where gentlets possessed a single crystalline core in their chests, his depicted form contained three white cores arranged in a triangular pattern. And from his brown head—the feature that marked him as human, as "ancestor"—a multicolored aura radiated outward in prismatic glory. Not the single-hued emanations of even the most powerful gentlets, but a corona of shifting colors that suggested complexity, multiplicity, infinite potential.
The imagery made him look like a prophesied savior, a chosen one, the answer to prayers offered in desperate faith.
And perhaps that's exactly how the gentlets had interpreted his arrival, because in the final sections of the engraving—the most recent additions—every gentlet depicted was shown turned toward him. Facing his direction in attitudes of reverence, expectation, hope. Even a hunched, robed figure—a hollow gentlet who appeared to have resided in one of the underground chambers since the very beginning of gentlet civilization, since the moment Alphina had first animated them—had turned from eternal vigil to face toward where the ancestor had appeared.
In the depiction showing his summoning of Nyx, one of his three cores visibly separated, moving from his chest to become the translucent aide—a fragment of himself given independent form. When he absorbed the skill orb's golden energy, a different core drew the power inward, containing and processing it like a vessel filling with light. The third core simply existed, glowing but inactive, waiting for some purpose not yet revealed.
Zane stared at his own image carved in eternal stone, at the three-core configuration that marked him as fundamentally other, and felt the weight of realization settling over him like a physical thing.
He had walked into something far larger than a trading opportunity.
He was part of their theology now, woven into the sacred narrative that gave meaning to their entire existence. The depictions had cast him as a figure of cosmic significance—perhaps the heir to Alphina's purpose, perhaps the one who would finally break the cycles of corruption and rebirth, perhaps something else entirely that he couldn't yet comprehend.
And mythologies, he knew from countless web novels absorbed in his old life, had a way of demanding their protagonists fulfill certain roles—whether those protagonists had agreed to the script or not.
The story carved in stone was still being written, and he was no longer merely its reader.
He was the story, whether he wanted to be or not.