Elias was sinking.
He was submerged in a heavy, void that felt less like nothingness and more like liquid shadow. Around his body, was a flickering tapestry of black flames—the spiritual manifestation of the Sapphire Salamanders Corrosion venom. The fire did not burn with heat; instead, it gnawed at him with a numbing, subtractive cold, as though it were erasing him rather than consuming him. Even though he could sense his surroundings, his as were closed and his mind was detached with clinical disinterest as the obsidian tongues tried to latch onto the architecture of his soul, probing, testing, searching for something to corrode but being consumed by the void around him instead.
A part of him-a remenant from a previous world- felt a surge of genuine relief. He had finally found a poison potent enough to challenge his existence. He hoped, with quiet desperation, that the ooze would be sufficient to overwhelm his body's relentless, automatic regeneration. Even if it could nit burn through the stubborn continuity of his soul, and allow him to sink into a permanent, unambiguous dark.
But another part of him—the boy who remembered the warmth of Elara's embrace, the rough, protective hand of Alaric on his shoulder—felt a sharp, unexpected pang of disappointment. He didn't want to be completely devoured. He didn't want to end.
This fracture—this irreconcilable duality—pulled at him from both sides, like opposing tides threatening to tear him in half.
The flames flared once more, burning into a brilliant, abyssal violet… and then they began to falter and fade.
They weren't winning. His soul was simply too much. The corruption seeped into him—and was absorbed, neutralized, dismantled, as if the venom were little more than a mild irritant. The black fire sputtered, thinned, and finally died, leaving him suspended in total darkness.
'I'm dead.' Elias thought.
A profound lightness washed over him. A punctured heart. A systemic infusion of corrupted matter. Even his monstrous biology shouldn't have survived that.
One side of him rejoiced. The long experiment was finally over. The other side felt a crushing, suffocating grief. He saw Elara's face in his mind—the devastation when she realized her miracle had finally broken. He thought of Aina and suprisingly though he saw her cry. Jamie...
He had a family now.
A friend.
Unlike Liv—who had been a ghost in his previous life—these people were loud, vivid, painfully real.
'Why does it matter?' the nihilist whispered. 'Complexity is just a delay of the realization of the inevitable. I am dead. The point is proven.'
He waited for the white light.He waited for judgment. Nothing
He opened his eyes.He was floating in a vast, impossible expanse that resembled a cosmic nebula. Iridescent dust swirled around him in slow, deliberate currents. Several colossal spirals of multi-colored light rotated in opposing directions—clockwise and anti-clockwise simultaneously—creating a dizzying sense of motion without displacement. Above, him hovered a massive symbol of infinity, glowing with a soft, lunar radiance, backed by a perfect circular halo of golden vapor which, from below, vaguely resemled several interlcking rings..
Elias reached out. His fingers didn't meet air. They broke through a thin, unseen surface, like skin over water. He pulled himself forward, his feet touching something impossibly flat and reflective, like a mirror stretched to infinity. Ripples spread from his steps, vibrating through the space like rings on a pond.
"I didn't die," he muttered.
His voice didn't echo. It simply existed—heavy, resonant, undeniable.
Relief and disappointment tangled tightly in his chest as he looked around his Spirit-Domain.
'What will it actually take to kill me?'
'I'm lucky I survived.'
He imagined his parents again… and then remembered the small bulge slowly expanding from his mothers abdomen.
'They'll be fine,' he told himself. 'They have my replacement.'
'Do you actually believe that?'
A familiar, utterly grating laugh tore through the silence.
Elias's eyes snapped open, angry at it.He was back in his room at the Keep.
Morning light filtered through the closed blinds—but it was wrong. The beams didn't glow; they stood rigid and crystalline, frozen like spears of gold piercing the air. Dust motes hung motionless within them, suspended like insects trapped in amber. The world looked dull, drained, as though he were viewing it through a thick translucent lens that leeched color and vitality. He tried to activate his Flow Perception—
—and recoiled.
The Flow of the world had slowed. No—not slowed. Frozen mid-motion. Not paused in the way chains or barriers arrested movement, but held in a state of absolute, shivering stillness, as if reality itself had been caught mid-breath and forgotten how to exhale.
A presence loomed in the corner of the room.
Elias looked at it but did not register it immediately.
"Hey, thats not very nice, don't ignore me."
Elias seemed not to hear the voice. Instead, his gaze drifted downward, drawn by something familiar—something unbearably human. His mother knelt beside the bed, her hand wrapped tightly around his own. She appeared asleep, yet her brow was deeply furrowed, her face drawn tight with strain. Even now, unconscious or not, her Flow pulsed faintly, steadily, as she poured what little she had left into healing him.
'What's the point…' Elias thought though his true emotions where the inverse of disappointment. he was...glad?
A voice answered him.
"You're smiling, happy you aren't dead yet huh?" The voice said softly.
Elias's brow furrowed. A shallow crease formed between his eyes. His jaw tightened.
"I bet you're in denial, telling yourself you didn't ask for this," the voice said. "That it's unfair. That the world won't release it's hold on you. But look."
Elias swallowed.
"Even now, watching her break herself to keep you breathing, part of you is thankful. Just as I had intended." The voice continued
A flicker of guilt crossed his expression—quick, sharp—then was smothered beneath something colder.
"Because you love her."
Elias' head throbbed as he tried to figure out what was going on but the more he did, the more his head hurt and the world around him seemed to distort. The room seemed to bend at the edges. The frozen light fractured, splintering into sharp, impossible angles.
"I would'nt think about whats going on around you right now if I were you, mortal minds aren't designed to handle the strain. " the voice went on
"Is this an illusion?" Elias muttered
"This isn't illusion."the voice responded.
"A hallucination?"
"This isn't madness."
" A vision?"
the voice laughed.
"No, you haven't magically become a prophet."
It was then that what Elias saw in the corner of his room finally registered in his mind. Slowly—reluctantly—Elias turned toward the corner of the room.
A white, high-backed velvet chair sat there, utterly out of place. Lounging within it was a man with one leg crossed over the other, a porcelain teacup balanced casually in his hand. He regarded Elias with open amusement, as though he had been watching this performance for a very long time.
"A presence that does not belong to the frozen world," the voice said, now unmistakably coming from the seated figure—
"—because it owns the pause."
The man smiled.
"The sleeping beauty finally notices me," he said cheerfully. Elias finally understood.
The voice.
The judgment.
The impossible stillness.
It wasn't a hallucination.
It wasn't a dream.
It was Deus.
"Man, I thought I'd have to Narrate your deepest secrets and do a whole recap episode before you would notice me."
Elias snapped. "You bastard!"
He tried to surge out of bed, fury overriding reason—but his body refused to respond. He was locked in place, a statue with a functioning mind.
"Oh—right you can't move here. Apologies." Deus snapped his fingers.
The invisible restraints vanished.
Elias exploded forward, throwing a raw, desperate punch at the god's face.
His fist passed straight through Deus's head.
Again. And again.
He swung wildly, tried to tackle him, clawed at empty air as his breath came in ragged gasps. Deus didn't move. Didn't flinch. He merely sipped his tea.
Finally, the god sighed—long and theatrical—rubbing his temple.
"Oh, the human spirit" Deus said tiredly. "Always trying to reach the unreachable. An admirable quality but of no consequence regardless."
He set the teacup aside.
Elias staggered back, chest heaving. His gaze darted to the nightstand—the Jade Dagger lay there, dull in the frozen light. He lunged for it.
His hand passed straight through the hilt.
He froze.
Looked down beside it.
His body still lay in the bed—pale, unmoving.
"Wait," Elias whispered. "Am I… am I actually dead this time?"
Deus laughed—bright, melodic, infuriating.
"No, Ethan, guess I should call you Elias now. Your heart is healed.I must say your life so far has been very entertaining to watch. Though, between you and me…"
He leaned closer.
"There's still room for improvement."
Elias opened his mouth and let out a steady string of profanity but no sound was heard and there was a comical beeping with each word as if the world itself was censoring him.
"What...?" Elias wondered puzzled.
"What have you done to me? And what have you done to my mother. Whys is my room so..." Elias demanded, gesturing at the frozen world, his translucent hands.
"Aw, so you do care, how cute." Deus said with a wink. There was another beeping sound as Elias opened his mouth.
"I find the idea of profanity quite distasteful so I removed that concept of Profanity from this....*^=+...."
"Huh?"
"Oh right, you brain can't hold such high knowledge. So let me use the word...um...dimension, yeah, thats the one. I could make it permanent throughout all existence but That would be me flexing too hard." Deus said with a wink.
"Huh, did you stop time?" Elias asked, confused.
"Please. Stopping time outright is a bureaucratic nightmare," Deus replied lazily.
"No—I simply shifted your consciousness. Gave your mind a temporary avatar while we talk."
He turned toward the window, gesturing around them.
"Welcome," Deus said softly, "to the Interstitial Dimension."