Sera's sky-blue eyes widened at him in that cute, curious way only she could manage. Then a mischievous smile curled across her red lips, like she'd just figured out some interesting secret.
"I never knew you were this sensitive about your hair," she said, shoving her fingers through it with a playful grin. "Makes me wonder how many ways you'll curse if I decide to get serious," she added, tightening her grip with a giggle.
"You little devil!" Elias shouted, prying her fists away from his hair and rubbing his scalp. "And what the hell do you mean by curse? I am a man of culture, if you don't know," he added, adjusting the frame of his glasses. "Speaking curses is far beneath a prodigy like me!"
Sera looked at him strangely, one eyebrow raised, as if he had just said something unbelievable. "But you just called me a little devil seconds ago, idiot!"
Elias snorted. "It isn't a curse if it's true."
Sera sat up straight, her expression deadpan as she glared at him. Recognizing that look, Elias made to run before he got beaten up.
But the little girl was quick. She grabbed his hand, knelt on his chest, and narrowed her eyes, ready for what promised to be one of her brutal lessons.
"Bastard!" she shouted, squeezing his nose and punching him lightly in the chest with her tiny fists. "Jerk-ass! Ass wipe! Son of a—ugh!"
"Kick his butt, Sera!" Lizzy shouted from a few meters away, one hand raised, her eyes sparkling with glee.
Elias turned to his parents for help, but they simply looked away, as if nothing was happening. His dad turned to watch the sun, pretending to discover something fascinating.
"You've learned some really bad words, Sera," Elias said, his face full of genuine concern as he tried not to wince under her assault. "Someone out there must be influencing you badly!"
"It's all you, darn it!" she shouted, punching harder.
"Fuck it! Fine, you win, okay. This is starting to hurt like hell."
She stopped, blowing a strand of her white, glossy hair out of her face before lying beside him with an annoyed pout.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. They silently savored the moment. The silence was comfortable, almost soothing, as they lay side by side.
Then Elias turned to her, hesitant.
"Sera," he said. Her sky-blue eyes met his in curiosity. "If I am to tell you that I like you, how exactly would you react?"
Sera's eyes widened for a moment, her cheeks turning scarlet before she turned her face away shyly. "Aren't we too young to think about grown-up stuff like that?"
"Right," Elias replied, his face still on her. "Say when we get older, and I date someone else—"
"You are mine!" the little girl replied instantly, her fierceness and possessiveness leaving him speechless.
"But what if we are in separate worlds? What if you get somewhere I can't reach? That I don't deserve to—"
Sera placed her forefinger on his lips, hushing him. "Elias, I don't know why you're suddenly asking questions like this. It's a little irritating, you know!" She huffed, rolling her eyes sideways. Then she lifted her hand toward the sky, as if to catch the clouds. "When Daddy was still alive," she began, eyes glassy, "he said separate worlds or hierarchies don't exist. They're just terms people made up to define their inferiority, to give it a name."
Then she turned to Elias, smiling, touching his face and squeezing his cheeks playfully. "Human is human, Elias," she continued. "People are still people no matter how powerful or different they become. Besides, you're far too hot-headed and crazy to end up ordinary anyway."
Elias' face contorted into a frown. "Hey, take that back. I am a cool boy with a noble temperament!"
Sera snorted. "Yeah, right. It's far easier to say the sun rises from the west."
Elias coughed, his face reddening at her snort. He gently tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear with surprising tenderness. "Sera… thank you."
Her cheeks flamed instantly. "Whatever you say, idiot," she muttered, quickly turning away to study a particularly interesting blade of grass.
Elias stood, stretching his arms out slowly. His gaze wandered to Lizzy and their parents, all laughing and talking like nothing had happened, before settling back on Sera.
Beautiful. Angelic. Cute-faced Sera.
Fearing his resolve might crumble if he looked for even a second longer, he clenched his jaw and started walking toward the distant horizon.
"Where are you going?" Sera called after him, worry in her voice. He didn't stop.
"To find you, Sera," he said, refusing to look back. "To cure my parents… to protect Lizzy." His tears began to fall, unheeded, as he pressed forward. "Fuck! Why does this hurt like hell!"
"Big brother!" Lizzy's voice grew louder behind him, her footsteps running to catch up.
"Elias!" her voice rang out, trembling with emotion.
"Son!" his parents shouted in unison.
Elias broke into a run, tears streaming down his face in torrents.
Then the illusion dissolved.
He found himself suddenly in front of the seventh staircase. The golden glow of the sixth staircase was already fading as its song stopped completely.
He clenched his fists, fighting the heartache assaulting his chest.
The dark throne loomed closer, massive, domineering, capable of instilling a primal fear in any soul. It felt like a void where sound and light simply ceased to exist.
Then Elias turned his gaze to the seventh staircase.
The last one.
The final test that would determine the direction of his miserable life.
He took a deep breath and stepped onto the stairs.
This time… there was no thunderstorm, no trembling of the realm, no monumental occurrence to mark the moment.
There was only silence.
Stone-cold. Terrifying.
The golden stairs shifted into something entirely colorless, transparent, as if even color itself didn't deserve meaning.
And it didn't sing. Instead, its very presence seemed to erase the very concept of sound.
Elias squinted. "Hey… is this thing broken—"
Before he could finish, a spiraling dark void erupted right in front of him, sucking him into its depths before he could blink.
***
The moment Elias appeared, he took a quick glance around him and nearly peed himself in fright.
All around him were thousands of galaxies and burning stars, worlds numbering in the millions like tiny dots in the distance.
Elias had never felt so small. So humbled. So insignificant.
"You are finally here," a voice from a few meters away made Elias jerk with terror.
He turned to find a man sitting leisurely on a dark throne, lips curling faintly in amusement. The man was dressed like a scholar, his face so ordinary that you could forget him at a glance—if not for his eyes, which were entirely black. The sight was unsettling; looking too long felt like being pulled into a void.
"Who the fuck are you?" Elias asked, his voice nervous as he looked at the being in front of him.
"Who am I," the man replied faintly, his eyebrows furrowed as if the question deserved a lot of thought. "To put it plainly, I am an avatar of the Silent God. To put it metaphorically, understanding who I am is too much for a mortal brain like yours to comprehend."
"That's not too hard to understand, you know," Elias replied, folding his arms. "An avatar is some kind of clone, right?"
The man laughed, the darkness in his eyes deepening. "Close, but not close enough. See, Elias, a god like me is not a singular being. I am a concept. I am made to encompass all things, worlds, realms, and universes. Something as puny as a body cannot bind me."
Elias coughed, turning his face away. "Right, my mortal brain definitely cannot comprehend that."
"Come closer, boy," the being called.
Before Elias could react, he found himself right in front of the man, those pair of dark, obsidian-like eyes studying him with interest.
"Ambitious enough," the being said, his voice delightful, as if he had tasted something delectable.
"Has the right touch of madness," he continued, a grin stretching across his face.
"A sadistic, narcissistic, selfish, and petty child with a long vocabulary of curse words," he said, rubbing his hands in excitement.
"Elias, throughout the multiverse, although many may come close to you, there are none I find just as appealing," the being added, his face widening in a large smile as his gaze turned predatory.
Elias felt goosebumps when the being looked at him, and suddenly he seemed to realize that he had been standing naked the whole time. "Hey, I am not gay!" he shouted, covering himself with his hands and resisting the shudder that ran down his spine.
"Foolish," the being scoffed, then he turned his face away from Elias and looked toward the distant galaxies with a sigh, his face filled with melancholy. "It's only a matter of time before I get shattered into fragments, but I have lived long enough and have very few regrets. One of which is the loneliness that has always accompanied me," he said, turning his dark, beady eyes back to Elias. "That even in my destruction, there is simply nobody to stay by my side."
Looking at the being, Elias was unsure about what he was supposed to do. Was he supposed to comfort him, play him a song, or—
"Your sympathy is meaningless to me, boy. I haven't lived for billions of years just to enjoy comfort from children," the being said, his voice filled with derision.
'Dammit!' Elias growled internally. He couldn't even have some privacy to himself in his own damn mind.
"What is strong enough to destroy a being as powerful as you anyway?" Elias asked, this time genuinely curious.
"Nothing is that capable, actually," the being admitted, pride in his voice. "Those primordial sons of bitches had to gang up on me because they couldn't take me one-on-one, so much on their talks about honor and fairness. Damn hypocrites."
Elias raised his eyebrows, a little impressed. "Is there any reason for the animosity between you two?"
The being looked at his fingers, flicking them intermittently. "Oh, I stole the greatest treasure of their tribe and while I was caught up in the process I… mistakenly killed their ancestor. But hey, who knew he was so weak that he couldn't withstand a single blow from me? That guy was all bark and no bite. So you see, my annoyance is pretty validated. That bastard's death sent his entire tribe after me, when it's his fault for not being sturdy enough to remain alive from a single slap!"
Elias stared slack-jawed at the being, and suddenly he was filled with a sense of crisis at the power of the god in front of him. He definitely didn't want to get "play slapped 'mistakenly.'" Taking a few steps backward, he looked at the amused face of the god in front of him and tried not to grit his teeth when he remembered that he could read his mind.
"What do you want from me?" Elias asked.
"Isn't it obvious?" the being replied, one eyebrow raised. "I am going to make you the inheritor of all of my power in return for one single wish." He gritted his teeth. "Destroy those primordial bastards and utterly annihilate their tribe. Leave nothing behind—not a single atom or particle of matter from their destruction. And let them know it's you, the inheritor of my legacy, that reduced their history to rubble and erased their name from the multiverse."
Elias stayed silent, gulping down a mouthful of air. Then he remembered something. Space shouldn't even have oxygen, right? Shrugging off the thought, he asked the question that had been bothering him the entire time:
"Why me?"
The man didn't reply immediately, his face distant as if staring far beyond the present.
"Silence, Elias, is the end to all songs. A void that devours all sound. It dispels all voices. However, it is a power that pushes one to loneliness. Only someone like you, with a touch of craziness and a little bit of mental instability, might naturally overcome that weakness."
"Hey, my mental health is perfectly okay!" Elias protested.
"That's enough," the being said, standing up from the throne and placing one of his hands firmly over Elias' shoulder. "I could give you all of my power here and now, but what would be the fun in that?" His grin cut across his face. "To make things interesting, I will scatter my fragments across the multiverse, and maybe a few in your home world. But I will give you enough to enable you to ascend to the peak of your home world—enough to make no one there capable of standing against you."
Elias gulped, heart thudding painfully in his chest.
"The power I give to you is unlike any other. It's older than the primordial songs, even older than time itself. Silence is a void that devours songs. Beings like us don't create songs; we steal them. We make it our own."
The being smiled, his body dissolving into a blue mist that sparkled like glowing moths.
"Elias, show the multiverse that silence is still alive, that it can never truly die," he whispered, his voice falling to a final, almost playful whisper. "And of course, kick butts and have a lot of fun while you're at it, okay?"
Then, in a flash, the blue sparkles condensed into a ball right in front of Elias and shot straight into his chest. At the same moment, he was teleported back to the realm.
But Elias was too caught up with the pain raking through his body in waves to even notice. Large veins appeared on his forehead as he screamed.
His bones cracked and shattered beneath his skin, flesh tearing and healing back simultaneously—a dizzying loop of repeating agony. His blood poured out like a river, while his heart pumped new, vibrant blood as fast as he was losing it.
A cocoon of light enveloped him, encircling him in a sphere and separating him from the outside world.
In there, he was being reborn.
He was being reforged.
And the realm itself was silent, as if it was waiting with bated breath for its king to be born.