---
> He bled.
And the universe held its breath.
Crimson poured from a cut across his palm—just a thin line—but it was the first wound in an eternity. Aetherion, the one who shaped existence with thought alone, stared at his own blood as if it were a foreign thing.
It sparkled like molten stars, sizzling as it fell through the void and evaporated into golden steam. Each drop screamed of broken laws. The very concept of injury writhed in confusion, unsure how it had touched the untouchable.
And yet, Aetherion smiled.
Because pain meant limits.
And limits meant he was here—truly here.
Not dreaming. Not projecting. Not omnipresent in disguise.
> "You made me bleed," he said to the Watcher. "How?"
The Watcher did not answer with words this time. Instead, it opened.
Its form split down the center like a curtain of night, and from its chest poured visions—millions of them. Memories of lives never lived, possibilities never born, universes that bent under rules older than existence.
Among the chaos, Aetherion saw… a throne.
But it wasn't his.
It was higher.
Older.
Not built by his will.
> "You were not the first," the Watcher whispered through the storm.
"You were made."
The words struck him like comets.
"No," Aetherion murmured. "I was. I came before time. Before cause. I shaped the beginning."
> "You shaped a beginning," the Watcher corrected.
"Not the beginning."
Aetherion staggered.
He had never staggered before.
His memories, perfect and infinite, began to crack. Fractures appeared in the narrative of his own birth. Gaps. Missing time. Blank spaces where something else had been—then was not.
He fell to one knee.
And then he laughed.
> "So I'm not a god," he whispered. "I'm someone's creation."
> "Am I your tool?" he asked. "Your weapon? Your… son?"
The Watcher offered no answers.
Only silence.
---
Aetherion stood again.
"Then I renounce my past. I reject the perfection that caged me. If I was created, then I choose what I become next."
He turned from the Watcher and walked back into the physical world—the alien universe where he had once felt small. The Watcher did not follow.
But its warning echoed:
> "To defy your origin is to unravel yourself."
---
Time passed.
Aetherion no longer lived like a god.
He lived like a man.
He no longer reshaped planets with a flick. Instead, he built a small home at the edge of a drifting world called Velthra. A place of quiet storms and crimson skies. There, under violet moons, he grew food from dirt he did not create. He built furniture from wood that scraped his perfect skin.
He watched Nyra.
She came often. She never asked what he was.
They sat together in silence, sometimes for hours, watching clouds bloom across the atmosphere like ocean waves. She spoke of her people, of war and peace and forgotten languages. He listened. He asked questions.
And sometimes… he smiled.
---
But something in him remained broken.
Each night, when Nyra returned to her city and he lay in a bed too small for his presence, Aetherion dreamed.
He dreamed of a time before time, where voices whispered behind walls he couldn't see. Where hands pulled something from the void and whispered it into being.
He saw his own face—white hair, silver eyes—trapped in a prism of light.
A blue flame—a spark—passed through him.
He was made from something ancient.
He was not alone in the beginning.
He was not the beginning at all.
---
The next morning, Nyra found him at the edge of a crater.
He was silent, staring at the sky.
"Something's coming," he said softly.
Nyra's brow furrowed. "What?"
"I don't know," Aetherion replied. "But it knows my name."
---
Three Days Later
They arrived.
Not ships. Not armies. Not machines.
Concepts.
Ideas made flesh.
Beings of raw design—Order, Entropy, Balance, and Hunger.
They floated above Velthra like celestial judges.
Each bore a mark across their chests—the sigil of Origin.
They looked upon Aetherion with recognition.
> "You were not meant to cross over."
> "The defect seeks identity."
> "You are destabilizing the framework."
> "You must return to sleep."
He stood between them and the planet, arms spread.
"I refuse."
They moved to erase him.
But Nyra stepped beside him.
"You won't touch him."
She raised a hand, and from her palm bloomed a spear of compressed anti-light, something not even Aetherion could explain. It tore toward the being named Order—
—and shattered.
Aetherion caught her as she collapsed.
> "Why?" he asked her.
Her voice was faint. "Because you never belonged alone."
He turned to face the Concepts.
> "She bleeds for me."
"She chooses me."
"And I choose this world over yours."
He lifted his hand—and this time, the air bent.
The wound on his palm reopened, and with it, something poured out.
Not blood.
Not power.
His name.
The true one.
The one buried beneath layers of existence.
It echoed across the stars, and the Concepts faltered.
Even they had never heard it.
> "I am Aetherion," he roared. "I was made, yes. But I am mine now."
He struck.
---
The battle scarred galaxies.
Order was the first to fall—ripped into paradox, her design shattered by a strike of will. Entropy twisted him in return, decaying his form to primordial ash—but he refused to die. Balance fractured under the weight of choice. Hunger fled.
Aetherion collapsed to one knee, smoke rising from wounds that rewrote themselves.
The Watcher appeared again, silent, watching from the edge of the rift between universes.
> "You chose pain," it said.
> "Yes," Aetherion replied.
> "And now what?"
Aetherion looked toward Nyra, still breathing, still clutching her chest where light seeped like blood.
"I build.
I love.
I remember."
---
End of Chapter Two.