Alatar was no longer the man he once had been.
The last two centuries had passed as a blur, a smear of time that left no trace on his hollowed mind. The final fragment of consciousness he had clung to, the last raw thread that reminded him of who he was, had been locked away. He had not fallen into sleep, nor death—he had simply stepped out of reality, leaving only an empty vessel behind.
And through those years, the black soot had finished its work.
It had infiltrated every cell, every organ, every thought, until there was no piece of Alatar left untouched. His flesh was no longer flesh as mortals knew it. His soul was no longer purely his own. The assimilation was complete.
But Alatar, in his blank state, remained oblivious.
Ash fell from the skies beyond the temple's open doors, a slow, eternal snowfall of gray that drifted in on invisible winds and settled upon him layer by layer. It matted into his hair, coated his skin, filled the cracks in the floor around him. Centuries passed this way, until he no longer looked like a man but like a shrine—an unmoving statue seated against the pillar, an eternal decoration for an enigmatic, watching temple.
His skin, once a warm, deep brown, now bore the gleam of obsidian, a hard and polished sheen that reflected no light. His body which had once glimmered in vitality and regality had become more sculpture than flesh. If before he thought his body was crafted by gods, now he looked like gods themselves would be jealous.
His eyes had changed too. Where once they had been black with irises of red, gold, and blue, they now swirled like ink poured into water, shifting with impossible depth. The colors no longer sat in rings—they bled and flowed together, infinite and unknowable.
And his third eye—oh, it had not been spared.
The slit had retained its scarlet hue, but within it three distinct irises had formed, conjoined like a triad of worlds intersecting in a cosmic alignment. One glowed the pale gray of ash. One shone the absolute black of the void. And the third gleamed gold—but a gold marred by threads of black, as though tainted by some primordial corruption. Together, they spun slowly, an eternal Venn diagram of impossible geometry, the three centers overlapping into a singular, unknowable point.
If before the eye carried a sense of death—of endings, of something irredeemably wrong—now it radiated supremity. To gaze upon it felt like committing a cosmic sin. It was as though the eye had been forged from the first darkness itself, a thing no mortal should dare to behold.
It had evolved.
Along his spine, something wondrous—and terrible—had been written.
Words carved themselves into his flesh in Etymon-script, glowing faintly like starlight.
> "THE KEEPER OF THE ABSOLUTE VOID,
IN WHOM ALL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS DIE."
The language that had once shattered his throat and almost unmade him was now etched into him, made part of him, his very bones singing with its resonance.
And at the nape of his neck, where the spine ended, a mark bloomed like ink spilled into skin: a tattoo of an open book, its pages jagged, its center occupied by three open maws lined with teeth. It was so black it seemed to drink light, a darkness that could never be covered or erased.
But these were only the outward signs.
The true change lay deeper, in places no eye could see. His thoughts had been hollowed, reforged, tempered into something alien. His mind no longer worked as a human mind should—it was something colder, sharper, layered like an infinite labyrinth. Emotions were distant echoes. Pain, though constant, was little more than background noise.
And still, Alatar sat unmoving, caked in centuries of ash.
The trauma had not left him, and perhaps never would. The pain was too deep, too fundamental to forget.
So he remained as he was: a silent monument, a vessel of something that would one day awaken.
A keeper.
A husk.
A man who had crossed the threshold of mortality, and become something far stranger.
_____________
The ash fell continuously from the sky like winter snow, soft and ceaseless, blanketing the world in muted silence.
There was no sun here—had there ever been one?—yet the sky was not entirely dark. It glowed faintly, a sickly gray luminescence, as though some dying star beyond the veil still shed its last light upon this dead land. The horizon stretched forever, featureless and empty, mountains rising like the teeth of a colossal beast, their peaks drowned in pale ash.
There were no sounds.
No wind.
No birds, no beasts, no voices.
Only the fall of ash, and the stillness of the world.
At the center of it all stood the Sanctum of the Malakors—the only monument that broke the monotony of this endless desert of white. It rose from the earth like the spine of a buried titan, its towers blackened with age yet untouched by ruin. Even half-buried in centuries of ash-fall, it remained imposing, eternal, as though it had been here before the first mountain had risen and would endure long after the last had crumbled.
And at its heart, in the hollow of its shadowed halls, Alatar remained.
He was as unmoving as the pillars themselves, seated against the stone, a statue of obsidian-flesh layered with centuries of gray. The temple had claimed him, and the world beyond had forgotten him.
But something had begun to change.
Unlike the stillness of centuries past, there was now an anticipation in the air—an almost imperceptible vibration, as though the earth itself was listening. The ash seemed to fall slower, thicker, swirling faintly as if caught in a breathless pause.
The inevitable awakening was near.
It was not just the temple that knew it—the world knew. The mountains stood like silent witnesses. The ash fell like ritual incense. The gray sky hung like a watchful eye.
Somewhere deep within Alatar's reshaped body, the soot that had saturated his cells stirred, as though it too had been waiting for this moment. Words glowed faintly along his spine, the Etymon-script pulsing like a heartbeat.
And though Alatar remained still, hollow gaze fixed on nothing, some part of the universe was already bending in recognition, acknowledging the moment that was coming.
The world was ready.
And it was welcoming what was about to wake.
And inside Alatar, the blue light—the gateway to Polaris Prime—ignited like a star being born.
A deep suction tore through him, not of flesh but of soul, dragging his mind from the temple and hurling it across the void. His body remained seated at the heart of the Sanctum of the Malakors, motionless, covered in ash, but within him a new horizon opened.
--
Inside Polaris Prime
--
Cold.
The cold hit him like a blade, cleaving through the numb haze that had dominated him for centuries. For the first time in millennia, Alatar felt. His mind cleared, his heart thundered, his breath misted in the frozen air.
He stood once more in Polaris Prime, the world of frost and ice where he had been remade before.
A cave stretched out before him, familiar yet not—shadows deeper, walls marked with faint symbols that pulsed like living veins of ice. A bitter wind whistled through unseen cracks, whispering across the cavern floor.
"Ulfrimir," Alatar called, his voice hoarse but steady.
No answer.
His footsteps echoed as he walked deeper, the sound sharp against the silence. Confusion gnawed at him. Ulfrimir had been here before—ancient, slow, his words coiling like glaciers grinding together.
"Ulfrimir!" he called again, more insistent this time.
A voice answered.
But it was not Ulfrimir.
It was lighter, swifter, yet carrying with it a power so palpable it prickled against Alatar's skin.
> "Ulfrimir is not here, little enigma," the voice said. "You stand in the dwelling of another."
Alatar stiffened, his body instinctively tense.
"Who are you?" he asked, his tone firm but cautious, his hand brushing the spectral markings glowing faintly on his forearm as if to remind himself he still had a form, a presence here.
> "I am Auryaire," the voice answered, calm and cold as a glacier's heart.
"The Saintess of Forgotten Ice. One of the Thirteen Overlords, as Ulfrimir is. You have wandered into my sanctum, and I have chosen to speak."
The air grew colder, the frost on the cavern walls thickening into jagged crystal spires.
Alatar followed the voice, his breath misting before him. His footsteps crunched over ice as the cavern widened into a vast hollow. And there, coiled in the center like a living mountain, was the speaker.
A serpent.
No, not merely a serpent—a titan.
Auryaire's body was white as new-fallen snow, gleaming like polished marble beneath the pale glow of the cavern. Her scales shimmered with a faint opalescence, catching and refracting the light so that she seemed woven from frost itself. Thirteen wings sprouted along both sides of her colossal back, each feather thin as glass and rimed with frost, stretching outward like a cathedral of ice.
Her head was lowered, her massive golden eyes fixed on him. Her presence was crushing, divine, yet her voice when it came again was soft enough to frost his breath.
> "You carry the stain of the soot," Auryaire said, her words ringing like icicles breaking.
"And the language of the First Tongue burns within you still. I can smell the pain on you, Alatar. You have been remade. Tell me—did you endure willingly, or simply because you could not die?"
The question hung in the air like a blade of ice suspended above him.