Elias returned to the shadow realm, not by stepping but by remembering.
The Echoing Hollow obeyed his thoughts, and one thought summoned the path to the place where light was born afraid. He followed it willingly, letting his form dissolve into meaning, then reform where darkness shaped dreams.
The realm of Nyx was not like the rest of Aetherion. It had no horizon. No sky. No sound. Yet it was never still. It breathed with a slow, eternal rhythm—the inhalation of inevitability.
He emerged beneath a ceiling of shifting mist that shimmered with muted starlight, each swirl a forgotten night. The ground was not stone, but something softer, like memory long buried. Elias walked without footsteps, for this was not a place for mortals. Even gods came here with caution.
Nyx waited for him.
She stood barefoot upon the river Lethe, which flowed in reverse through the dark. Her cloak moved as though alive, sewn from veils of ancient silence. Her face bore no emotion, but her eyes, deep and dark, carried stories that even Elias dared not name.
"You return," she said, her voice not echoing but nesting in the hollow space between thoughts.
Elias bowed his head slightly. "I still seek what sleeps beneath the world."
"Then you will stay a while longer."
From the mist, Erebus emerged. He was not a figure but a feeling—pressure without form, presence without outline. He did not speak, but with him came the weight of all things hidden: shame, secrets, stillness.
Together, they led Elias deeper into their domain. As he followed, the air grew denser—not heavier, but more meaningful, as if every step passed through moments no one else remembered.
They passed through archways of carved forgetting, through corridors wrapped in dusk. And then they reached it:
A gathering of beings.
Not gods, yet more than ideas. These were children born of Night and Shadow, and they drifted between existence and metaphor.
Hypnos, sleep incarnate, hovered near a pool of stilled water. He whispered stories to the surface, and with each word, mortals in the distant world above fell into dreams. His eyelids drooped eternally, yet his mind flickered like flame.
Thanatos, quiet as bone, sat beside a tree whose leaves never fell. His eyes were twin voids, but his gaze was not cruel. It was inevitable. When he looked at Elias, he offered a nod—not of respect, but of recognition.
Moros, twisted and muttering, paced in slow circles. He carried scrolls that wrote themselves, inscribed in languages that predicted endings. Elias could not read them—but he understood them, painfully.
Nemesis stood apart from the others. She watched Elias with careful, calculating eyes. In her presence, Elias felt the weight of all the words he had spoken—every whisper of influence, every echo left in the weave of myth.
"You seek to shape the world," she said.
"I only observe," Elias replied.
"Observation changes outcomes," she countered.
It was not an accusation. It was truth.
Nyx moved among her children without speaking, but each one bowed subtly as she passed. She returned to the river and turned to Elias.
"Do you understand now why we do not speak loudly?" she asked.
"Because your voices carry more than sound," Elias said.
"Because our voices endthings," she whispered. "Death is a silence. Sleep is a forgetting. Doom is a sentence. Justice is a weight. We are the conclusion to stories before they're told."
Elias stepped to the river's edge. He watched the current of Lethe swirl around his reflection. It did not show his face, but flashes of what he might have been—had he stayed human, had he stayed silent.
"What am I becoming?" he asked aloud.
Erebus moved closer. This time he spoke, his voice dry and deep as windless earth.
"You are a myth not yet believed. That is the most dangerous kind."
Elias turned his eyes back to Nyx.
"Why show me this?" he asked.
"Because you walk above fate, yet brush against it," she answered. "And because soon you will name things that ought not be named."
The warning was clear. His voice had power, but not all power was meant to be used.
He stayed among them for a long time. It might have been years. It might have been a breath.
He spoke with Thanatos about what it meant to bring an end—not in cruelty, but in mercy.
He listened to Hypnos sing to the stars, and learned that rest was not surrender, but trust.
He watched Moros unravel the fates of beings not yet born, and understood why dread came before wisdom.
And Nemesis? She showed him his reflection once more—not the face he wore, but the trail he left. Every ripple. Every choice. Every silence.
When Elias returned to the Hollow, something followed him.
Not a being. Not even a presence.
A knowledge.
He took up a branch from the first tree he had grown and dipped it into the lake of unspoken words. From it, he painted a new symbol on the wall of the Hollow.
It looked like nothing.
It looked like end.
It shimmered, faintly, then sank into the stone.
He sat beneath the tree for a long time.
And as the stars moved above Aetherion—slowly, solemnly, without name—Elias closed his eyes.
Not to rest.
But to listen.