Alatar moved toward the blue light, his steps drawn forward as if the void itself were urging him on. Curiosity edged at his thoughts like a blade—sharp, insistent. He wanted to know. No—he needed to know.
What made her different?
Jason's soul had been nothing but fragile specks of gold, a scatter of memories and misery. But this one… this one radiated completeness. Was every soul cast in a different hue, each color marking its strength, its nature, its worth? Or was there some hidden order here, a classification of lights in this endless darkness that he had yet to grasp?
Questions gnawed at him, filling the silence with their restless weight. He needed to know. He hungered to know.
And so he moved ever closer, the glow of the blue soul-light swelling before him, its cold radiance brushing against his essence like the touch of frost.
And just like that, Alatar devoured the blue light in its entirety.
For a heartbeat, he waited. Anticipation coiled within him like a serpent ready to strike. He expected memories—fragments of lives, whispered truths, something to explain what made her different. He expected knowledge, power, or at the very least, a taste of her identity.
But nothing came.
The void around him remained silent. Empty. Unmoved. It was as if he had swallowed smoke—beautiful, radiant, and utterly insubstantial.
Confusion pricked at the edges of his mind, quickly souring into frustration. And then—
The chill came.
It did not seep from outside, but erupted from the deepest recesses of his being, spreading like ice through veins that no longer belonged to flesh. A cold so absolute it made the vast void around him seem warm by comparison. His form trembled, not with fear at first, but with the alien wrongness of it, a sensation that clawed through his very essence.
Only then did Alatar realize—he had made a mistake. A grave mistake.
He had not devoured her.
She had entered him.
And somewhere deep inside, the echo of Mikaela stirred.
Alatar stirred, unease rippling through his essence. If he had still possessed flesh, he might have been drenched in sweat, but in the soul-like form he currently wore, it was only the phantom sensation of perspiration—an imaginary sweat—that trickled down the contours of what he was.
Something had shifted. He could feel it.
He closed his eyes—or what passed for them now—and turned his awareness inward, probing into the fabric of his being. He sought answers, some faint semblance of what had changed, some thread of understanding to anchor himself to. What had happened? What was happening? And, perhaps more dangerously, what was yet to come?
The devouring of the soul seemed to had have unintended reaction. The more he searched, the less he recognized. His essence felt crowded, stretched, as though another presence lurked beneath the surface, hidden but undeniable.
Each attempt to peer deeper brought only distortion: flickers of blue light bleeding into his core, whispers that dissolved before he could grasp their meaning, and a gnawing pressure as though his own soul no longer entirely belonged to him.
For the first time, Alatar felt something unfamiliar stir within the void of himself.
Uncertainty.
After searching for some time, Alatar finally saw it—a glowing blue light pulsing faintly within him.
Peering inward was disorienting. It felt less like introspection and more like traversing the same void he had just left behind. His inner world stretched vast and unending, a hollow expanse of shadow and silence, as if his very being had become a reflection of the cosmos itself. Space within him unfolded endlessly, layer upon layer, spiraling outward until it seemed there would be no end.
And yet, there it was.
The blue light shimmered in defiance of that emptiness, steady and alive, a star adrift in the eternal dark of his own essence. Its glow pressed against him, unfamiliar and unwelcome, but undeniably present.
He wondered, then, if this was the cost—or perhaps the consequence—of devouring souls. Did each one stretch him further, expanding his essence until it became something no longer human? Was he destined to become an eternal void in miniature, filled with the fragments of what he consumed?
The thought unsettled him. But beneath that unease… was fascination.
ALATAR'S POV
Fascination aside, I drifted closer to the light.
It pulsed gently in the dark expanse of my inner world, a steady heartbeat of blue against the endless stretch of black. Unlike Jason's fragile sparks, this one was whole, contained—an orb, complete in itself. I didn't rush it this time. No, I had already learned the danger of diving headlong into the unknown.
Instead, I studied it.
I circled the glow slowly, like a predator stalking prey it had no need to kill. Every flicker, every ripple of its luminescence I observed with a kind of quiet hunger. It did not recoil. It simply… waited, as though it knew I would come to it regardless.
I seated myself within my own thoughts, letting the silence between us deepen. Strange, how calm I felt. No fear, no hesitation—only that curiosity gnawing softly at the edges of my mind. Infectious. Consuming.
What was it, truly? A remnant? A prisoner? A gift?
The questions filled me like a tide, and I found myself smiling in the darkness. There was no rush. Eternity was mine now.
And so, after savoring the tension of the moment, I reached out—not to devour, not to crush, but to interact. To press against the orb's surface, to see if it would stir, if it would whisper back.
I wanted to know.
NO!
I needed to know.