A/N: This story will likely be extraneously confusing for people who don't know what Deepwoken is or its lore, because this fic will be incorporating a lot of its gameplay mechanics (especially the stat sheets) and ludonarrative.
This was supposed to be a one and done story (a One-shot basically), but I decided it would just be free writing without much effort or thought put into it. I'm not confident in this thing at all, and as a result, it won't have as much care or revisions put into it as, say, Cometh the Hour (Bleach x Arknights) or Heavens Away (ULTRAKILL x Arknights).
***
"So weep for ash, and weep for ruin -
For embers fade, and swells the sea.
Hold on to hope, and in so doing
Beware - the Tide comes too for thee."
― 'To Sleep, Dreaming' (Contour 4)
***
To seek the unknowable was to seek nothing.
The Depths were unknowable. What benefit would one pitiful soul achieve at scrutinizing nothing? To gauge at their own perusal, verses impenetrable by the human mettle? It was Song which tuned life in ways to flourish, so too was it Song that would sing mankind's elegy at the coming ends.
All stemmed from the Depths. Once again, that selfsame blight in discernment, void of voids arranged in some array resembled sea, for eyes to see yet not to see. Mankind would challenge this, only to know ever less.
Beings of untraceable heritage and inscrutable denomination were the ones who slumbered at the nethermost regions of this realm, the Depths. They, with their full-foul might, are the ones who pulled the cosmic levers and turned the celestial knobs rested upon the fulcrum of the world.
Humans were ants. Nay, perhaps less, a lesser particle than even an atom would suffice to describe their place in the world. Or perhaps even a passing thought, an imaginary detail of grass upon a world filled with shifting continental plates and wide mountain ranges.
Insignificance was humanity. Conceived in a world too large, forever betrothed to the plights that unmake them and fester an adversarial hate to the brethren called their own. Even in their own microcosm of history, all figures belonging to 'man' would eventually decay from memories, further proving transience.
Then, at the crux of all human wrong, the original sin, rested the mortal ego.
They came to the world with a gift. They had abused the gift, and neither could they recognize the greater meanings—greater purposes—of their gift. Thus begot their own folly as time repeated itself, as if history were one big carousel of new horses replaced once again by another horse forever to gallop the same posture their forefathers were to have done.
They, in doing so, plunge themselves e'er deeper into the boundless dark Depths known to be the machinations of the Drowned Gods, and find those cosmic cogs running those God's machines. Great in harrowing size those cogs were, to spur into such a motion that would leave souls riven into naught but oblivion. Only oblivion.
The Depths, O the Depths...
An endless journey forsworn from any hope or joy.
***
Solan Malkavian listlessly glanced down the Old Diver's Watch in his hands, fingers gently caressing the gold-lined, blood-stained ivory it comprised. The tickings he remembered crawling to his doom had been halted in ways Time would never deign to do.
That was good, excellent e'en.
His twitching hands, his heart-spoiling palpitations, had all ceased in the same manner time had. That brought greater calm to his deluged self, ever since he became last of his cohorts to venture deeper into the fathoms of New Kyrsa, the Sleeping City.
Breathing in, he prayed to once again be able to walk upon steady lands of the Surface. Treading the malignant waters of the Depths unto the Second Layer had done himself no good. Too many times has death walked upon his very own path like the grim reapers he saw depicted in paintings.
Breathing out, he journeyed deeper and deeper. The purple grass was as alien as the structures of this city, 'specially those subterranean transportations, and those great spires outstretched to a skyless above as if the city's ribcage themselves.
Glancing down at his watch once again, he thinned his lips. The hands were still unmoving in their place.
He knew folklore of that Great God of the Gale scrawled across walls of scriptures by those native Kyrsans, its name Ethiron. He notioned that it was the doing of this Drowned God that his reality had been shattered time and time again like with this pocket watch's glass.
The hands only pointed in one direction. It drew him like moths to a flame. Dangerous, surely, but Solan Malkavian worked with Flamecharm since he began his lifelong voyage. A flame would not deter him, he would walk into them without hesitation.
So, he continued on and on and on.
The customs of this land were wildly divergent, and he was not welcome upon its premises by the denizens. He snuck, therefore, admiring vistas scattered abound the path on that call beckoning him to the center of the city.
None other Pathfinder nor Journeyman has come to traverse these lands before. Not even the esteemed Black Divers bred by the Markor's Citadel.
An opportunity in way of a mouth jutted with razor teeth.
Be that as it may, Solan wasn't one who sought such dangerous endeavors. But at his current moment in time, he couldn't do anything else other than to force this 'opportunity' unto himself. To walk in that maw ready to snap shut at any moment.
...
...
...
Solan stared at the Old Diver's Watch once more after passing a bridge. The hour hands were still stuck upon the eleventh hour, in contrast to the minute hand stagnated at the fifty-ninth minute. Away from it, he turned to the entrance bare in front, awaiting his entrance in twisted imaginings fabricated by his mind.
His heart began thumping. The structure looked to be a shrine, but he knew it to be Ethiron's bedchamber.
The first step taken, and then the second. There was a gale blowing wistfully 'round, a royal purple in color. At first, it was calm, before it grew in substantial intensity each step he made in passage to the shrine.
He saw it.
The swirling vortex of eternity loomed. Its gravity tugged on his very soul, threatening to pull him under its current and cast him against the jagged edges that lurk within. To undo him, the wind howled.
He resisted.
Solan forced himself away from the vortex. Deep inside he knew that if he so much as made contact with this force, he would no longer exist in this world.
He resisted further.
The howling broke, giving way to a cacophony of alien screams that drowned out all of his senses and left him crushed beneath their weight. This close to the source, he realized what lurked within the tempest. A vestige of a force greater than any, a thousand Kyrsan souls wailing in an agony sublime.
He resisted with all that he was.
Without even a whimper, the only sound left was his ragged breathing. Despite the gale, he remained. For but a few fleeting moments, it seemed as if the storm had passed.
He breathed out, seeing what was in front in this serenity.
A circular gap. Laid inside was an ebony non-existence Solan couldn't begin to discern. All it brought was a great sense of primordial fear within him, as if he were at the epicenter of something far beyond knowing.
That... void...
It was void where Ethiron slumbered.
Solan knew his last waking moments began at this instance, for a great crescendo broke the silence surrounding him utterly.
That crescendo was a formless, primeval voice.
.
.
.
.
.
Which.
.
.
.
.
.
Beckoned.
.
.
.
.
.
"—WAKE."
'Neath the void arose it, the Scion! As the Gods Below invoked by name!
A colossus wrought of ivory bones, hands spanning wall to wall, its head a tetrahedron crowned jutting dendrite horns.
The scourge of New Kyrsa hollered to him, the ant of this universe, in all its power and might! Its maddening sound echoed betwixt walls and filled his ears in likeness to a rising flood to drown him forevermore!
Solan raised his hands and clamped his ears, feeling his eyes bulge as if to burst from his vessel. He panicked, then he calmed, then he panicked again and again 'til he calmed; still shaking, before unbuckling his weapon and brandishing it toward Ethiron's vile Scion made manifest.
Without further thought, he challenged it, a mortal against immortal.
He stared it dead in the eye, flaming azure to the eyes of infinite cosmos. The Scion forewent its bellow and he met it in full form.
Guardian eternal of Ethiron's bedchambers, it stretched its appendage of prodigious size back, and bore it forward thunderously abrupt.
As Solan raised his greatsword, he felt great pounds acting upon his body when contact was made. Blown off his feet, and sent careening to the walls, his spine pulverized when he felt the kinetic agony shatter him.
His vision lost shapes and colors, and his knees began to buckle and yield. Befallen to the ground, Solan slammed his working arm and pushed.
Rise, rise! He demanded himself to rise, not to fall!
Pushed to the brink of all annihilation, a Black Diver would claw like an animal to defend his basic right to existence. There, they became the object of admiration amongst others, the unbreakable pioneers of humanity.
Solan would not break.
A faint fickle flame guttering formed in his quivering hands. It raised, dancing blue, seen only by his own enamored eyes reflecting its radiance. The Flame of Denial, he knew it distantly to be the very nature of mankind.
Why, their nature? Because it was human nature to deny goodness, to deny morality, to deny faults, to deny logic, to deny impossibility; and it was by this Mantra the Flame of Denial was born, so he would deny death at the precipice, and let this flame smolder greater in his heart by a raise and stamp of his arm to his breast; letting that fire settle in.
It was human nature at his beckoning and call.
Flesh knit itself together by the weaving azure. His grip fastened anew 'round the handle of his great sword now raised to heave once more against godly Scion.
Fell it be, as all horrors of the Depths should be!
He charged again, again, and again, 'til the ground ran knee-deep carmine rivers turned confluence of his lifeblood sloshing each step. His arms grew weary like a hermit would at midnight, but he would never slumber 'til the Scion lay gored.
Solan would fight to see its yellow marrows exposed. E'en if his eyes blind by bloodshot, he would not sleep!
The Scion responded, Bonestaves of Eld.
Sharp bones slipped from portals formed gaps in dimension, slinging his way. He contested, again, again, and again, parrying those blows, 'til the mechanisms of his armor, that technological wonder, failed between each swing of his blade. His blade... Grown to chip each blow.
Solan would revolt to forbid defeat. E'en if his mind lost sanity in repeated action proved unchanging, he would not sleep!
The Scion responded, Vehmens Ventus.
A spherical tempest formed in its hand of purple gale so pressurized it bent space. It shot forward. Stratagems tested, advances alternated, Solan switched from blade to Flamecharm in order to cast unto the Scion Mantras aplenty, just barely staving off Vehmens Ventus enough to veer out its vector.
Crashing on the ground, grumbling, Solan stood back up. He would burn the last embers in his body 'til naught remained but a flame on its vestigial end. To the farthest yon, he would push!
He.
Would.
Not.
Sleep!
Forward, a charge—
The Scion responded—
Again, again, again, again, again, again...
Again...
Again...
...He began to mourn in insomnia.
Those other Divers, who came before him, too mourned before their deaths at the unfairness of the morbid world. Had that meant he was soon to die? Now so soon at such a ripe and tender age?
...Solan didn't know, he was uncertain. Fate played its hand without warning precedence. After all, that was how Lumen spun 'neath the Moonseye and Suncross on their axes, and...
...
...
...
...Did he triumph?
Solan's Darksteel Greatsword laid a heap of battered darksteel connected only by a splintered handle. His gaze turned upward slowly from the scarred ground, up to the creature 'fore him.
The Scion of Ethiron laid dead, its bones cleansed and hollowed out.
He fared no better than standing like a rigid statue with some parts of limb hanging by cartilage and sinew. His muscles ached in unison with his screaming flesh, blood pooling one last stream in front of him as his Ether was fully exhausted.
His gaze drifted downward, into his free hand feebly contorted around his Old Diver's Watch. He turned it, and looked at its pane.
The pocket watch lay fractured in his hands, dusting away by the incessant squalls pressured upon this fading Layer, the clock hands stubborn in place, 11:59, 'til...
Tick.
The twelfth hour.
It broke unreservedly into scattered motes.
Solan's eyes hadn't mustered to widen, and neither could he be surprised any longer. It told him enough a story, that time—and by proxy, so did space—at this exact moment had begun to terminate themselves.
The Drowned Gods sang melodies which resonated with the end of all things. A 'death' of one of their Scions would bring an inevitable 'death' to where they too resided, and Solan would be witness to its explicit details.
His body began its bending in ways unadvised, and then soon in ways unachievable; sick crunching sounds and twists resounding in his destroyed ears.
With it all came the chorus of those thousand Kyrsans entrapped in the baleful Gale like a menagerie.
Kyrie, Eleison (Lord, have mercy)!
Kyrie, Eleison (Lord, have mercy)!
Impermanence became clear to the breaking Solan, and he could only close his eyes to the prayers of the Kyrsans beggared to Ethiron to delay their ruination.
Kyrie, Eleison (Lord, have mercy)!
Kyrie, Eleison (Lord, have mercy)!
Echo, echo, did those pleas ring, greater than any church bell tolled high atop derelict churches, incessantly as if lengthened in eternity.
The eternity of the Gale.
The Eternal Gale.
Solan could no longer feel, hear, nor see.
To seek the unknowable was to seek nothing.
Seek nothing he did, and it was nothing he would become. Still, in nothingness was he bestowed one single image.
Ethiron, stirring, time and space drawn into their horizon, a single scream stretched out into an eon.
...
...
...
The Depths subsumed him.
He came to sleep, e'er dreaming.
***
"The Fourth Gift.
At last, the long-forgotten Song rings on and spreads
Its wings, its wondrous nature now in full revealed!
'Tis a lament, with sadness ripe! and yet within,
A sea-soaked ember - hope! - is still concealed!
Unebbing. unabating. ceaseless. such are the tenebrous waves that claim us on the highest seas - in storms, in gales, in tempests wild.
When toll the bells, awash in brine we sink, once drowned to never rise again.
...But float to land perhaps once more, upon the crashing of the tide."
― 'To Sleep, Dreaming' (Contour 4)
***
A/N: Originally wanted to use Maestro Evengarde Rest (The best Deepwoken lore character no competition) as the crossover character, but then I wouldn't be able to do the whole stats thing that Deepwoken players have. So I settled with my first ever OC... not too proud, considering how much I prefer writing crossover characters.
Solan is a name I derived from Rogue Lineage, where the God of Order of that game's lore was named Solan. Malkavian comes from House Malkavian that also came from Rogue Lineage. Rogue Lineage imo was a trash game with an even trashier community, and only the lore was cool. Never found enjoyment playing it, and glad I never did because other games I played during its time were far superior (I.e., actual games like Final Fantasy and Soulsborne games).
Deepwoken is the only Roblox game that has lore and literal written books that read well, along with the only combat (for its time) which was reminiscent of Sekiro (best combat of any game imo). Game felt like an actual fantasy world, with realistic dialogue pertaining to the characters born during its time—that being during a more archaic history compared to modern world.
Which makes sense, since the developers of Deepwoken have read actual fantasy books such as Stormlight Archive. They knew what they were doing.
Thought of Bloodborne and realized ignorant I am of Bloodborne's lore, but with the 1000+ hours I have in Deepwoken and my fixation on its own lore, I think I could do a fun little drabble of a crossover pertaining it because of how fitting its whole environment and feel is to the eldritch sea of Arknights.
Sadly, Deepwoken as a game has been more fixated on PVP rather than the lore which had me so invested in the whole premise in the first place, which is wild for a goddamn Roblox game fixed with a rather toxic community (especially its competitive side).
It's just that the story and lore potential of Deepwoken has only been scraped by the surface of a massive iceberg, with the developers not having done much and what I can only consider the barebones of developing it.
Reading Deepwoken lore books in the game provides a good perspective and story, but I'd much prefer if there was gameplay or progression based on an actual story that the player can be involved in. Such as the whole storyline with the Duke of Erisia and the Lord Regent—that was quite literally the peak of Deepwoken barring the Maestro boss-fight release.
Deepwoken is nowhere near the level of other actual good games I've played, such as Sekiro, Elden Ring, yadda yadda yadda, but gosh... it could be so captivating in its lore, and I really wish I could be enamored as I was back then being able to expend hundreds of hours into it, but it just doesn't bring the same joy anymore.
My bad for the yap sesh, it's more of a vent of what I'm feeling about the current state of Deepwoken. So much potential wasted.