Alatar hovered before the strange orb, his red-black form dimly reflecting its shifting surface. Its sheen reminded him faintly of oil burning, liquid darkness with streaks of color that refused to hold. Every instinct urged him to consume, but another instinct—a memory of the agony the blue light had once brought him—made him hesitate.
Last time nearly broke me. Last time nearly killed me.
So, for the first time in his strange existence, he studied instead of devouring outright.
He circled the orb, watching the ripple of its surface, waiting for a lash, a trick, any hint of malice. But unlike the blue light, it carried no weight, no gravitational pull that threatened to swallow him whole. And unlike the golden orbs(souls), it did not whisper lives, loves, or wasted years into his head. It was simply other.
Harmless. At least, as harmless as anything here could be.
"Then let's see…" Alatar murmured, stretching out his obsidian-gray hand.
The instant his palm brushed it, the soul unraveled into him. Not memories. Not lives. Not overwhelming collapse. Yet there was a pull—a tug that did not come from within the Void, but from elsewhere.
His vision blackened.
For a moment he thought himself destroyed, cast into nothingness at last.
But then—light.
Cold, pale, and vast.
When his sight returned, Alatar stood not in endless emptiness but on the stone steps of something massive, ancient, and impossible. The structure before him climbed endlessly upward, towering higher than even Earth's tallest towers, its form sharp and solemn as though carved from eternity itself. He craned his neck back, and still the peak vanished into the dim horizon of this strange place.
A temple.
An ancient temple.
The air here was not the Void, nor Polaris Prime, nor anything he had known. It was thicker, older. As if every breath carried echoes of a forgotten tongue.
Alatar swallowed hard, his chest tightening. His skin crawled again at the slit on his forehead, a faint burning itch, as though the eye beneath it stirred at the sight of this place.
He stood frozen at the threshold, caught between terror and curiosity.
And before him, the sealed doors of the temple waited.
The temple loomed before Alatar like a monument to a forgotten age. Gray and black stone, each block the size of houses, had been stacked and bound with impossible precision. The sheer breadth of it spanned nearly four hundred meters, its height soaring into the dim horizon like the spine of a dead god. From afar, it had the silhouette of a castle, but up close it revealed itself as something altogether different—an edifice of worship, dominion, and warning.
Its walls were not plain but alive with history. Carved into the obsidian-dark stone were statues and reliefs that stretched upward in endless procession. Massive beasts writhed in frozen motion, claws extended, jaws unhinged in roars that time could not silence. Interwoven with them were towering humanlike giants, each sculpted with four arms, their expressions caught between agony and triumph. Some raised weapons of unfamiliar shape, others clasped spheres that resembled suns, moons, or perhaps worlds themselves. The artistry was meticulous, a kind of reverence preserved in stone, and Alatar felt as though the builders had poured every secret of their race into these walls.
The air itself carried weight. A solemn heaviness pressed down from all directions, like standing in a tomb the size of a mountain. It was dark here, yet not blind-dark—more the darkness of abandonment, of halls once filled with life and now left to gather dust across millennia. Loneliness clung to every moss-covered seam, to every weathered statue face. And yet, there was reverence, too. Whoever raised this temple had not built it as mere shelter or fortress. No, this was a shrine to something greater, and even in ruin its presence demanded awe.
Alatar's eyes caught again and again on the carvings. He found himself tracing the lines of those four-armed giants with something like unease, for their forms felt too deliberate, too alive, as though they might at any moment step free of the stone. Their gaze seemed to follow him no matter where he stood.
Finally, his eyes rose to the doors.
They were vast, gray slabs set with veins of green and black moss, towering higher than any cathedral gate he had ever known. Their surface, too, bore carvings—the same beasts, the same giants, locked in battles or ceremonies whose meanings had been lost to time. The scale of it all dwarfed him. Only something titanic, a behemoth of unimaginable strength, could ever hope to push them open wide.
Alatar stood in their shadow, a lone figure before a structure meant for gods.
Alatar's steps echoed faintly against the frozen ground as he drew closer to the colossal doors. He forced himself to turn away from the statues, though every fiber of his being whispered that their eyes followed him. There was something in their stony gaze—a warning, or perhaps judgment—that gnawed at the back of his mind. Yet the doors ahead called stronger, pulling him forward like inevitability.
When he reached them, he froze.
The surface was no mere slab of carved stone. Etched into its vast gray expanse were words—massive, jagged, and utterly alien. They wound across the gates in symmetrical patterns, as though each letter was a rune, each rune a fragment of law. The language itself was strange, not like any script Alatar had ever glimpsed even in the memories of the souls he had devoured. No, this was something older, something mortals should never have been permitted to see.
He stared, and the words stared back.
They pressed into him—not his body, but his soul. The symbols radiated a gravity that threatened to tear him apart, a weight of superiority, eternity, and a primal authority that mocked his existence. Each line seemed to grind into his very being, shaving away fragments of thought and essence. It was not just writing. It was law carved into stone.
Alatar staggered, clutching his head as the pressure mounted. His chest felt hollow, his veins aflame, and for the first time since stepping into this endless path of void and worlds, he felt genuine fear.
And then—
It happened.
The pressure forced something within him open. With a sharp flare of pain and clarity, Alatar's third eye split wide across his brow. He gasped, stumbling back, shocked beyond words as sudden light flooded his vision—not light in the ordinary sense, but perception.
Instantly, the weight vanished. The suffocating pressure of the words dissolved as though they had never been there. The unbearable grinding against his soul ceased. He could breathe. He could think.
And more than that—he understood.
The runes before him shifted, not in shape, but in meaning. They no longer stood as incomprehensible etchings but as words, sentences, concepts laid bare. Their meaning was not simply translated into his mind—he knew them, as though the language had always been etched into the marrow of his bones.
Yet what froze him in place was not the message.
It was the recognition.
The language was older than stars, older than the first breath of time. It was not mortal, not divine in the way gods of myth were spoken of. No. This was the first tongue, the foundation on which all other languages crawled like shadows.
The Axiom of the Primordial.
Alatar's body locked, every thought in him gone still. He trembled, not from fear, but from the immensity of the revelation. He had seen the language of gods—the script by which existence itself had once been written.
And now it was written across the door before him, daring him to step closer.