Jormund's awakening was neither a rupture nor a return to pain.
It was an acceptance.
A slow surfacing of consciousness, like a mountain suddenly realizing it had always existed. There was no gasp for air, no violent jolt. Just a single, primitive thought:
I am still here.
He opened his eyes.
Or rather… he understood that they were open.
Above him stretched an impossible ceiling.
A sky—but inverted, unfolding not like a promise, but like a suspended abyss. Thousands—no… millions of stars were scattered across the darkness. They were not fixed like those of mortal heavens. Some pulsed softly, others flickered like wounds that had never fully healed.
There were blue stars, deep as forgotten oceans.
Red ones, heavy, almost violent.
Dying yellow lights, wavering like flames on the edge of extinction.
And others still—violet, greenish, unreal—whose glow seemed to defy all known logic.
Jormund remained motionless, unable to look away.
— …This is not Tartarus.
His voice barely resonated, swallowed by the surrounding space. No echo answered him. The silence here was not empty. It was present. Dense. Almost observant.
He tried to move.
His body responded without resistance. There were no chains, no restraints, no pain. The obsidian that formed his flesh faintly reflected the celestial lights, revealing the fissures carved into him—those mineral scars left by the Styx, by Chronos, by the fall itself.
He slowly sat up.
Beneath him, there was no true ground. The surface absorbed light, a black expanse, neither rock nor liquid, yet solid enough to support him. With every movement, he felt the strange sensation that the world acknowledged his presence, without truly welcoming it.
— Where… am I?
He placed one knee down, then stood fully. His silhouette cut through the darkness like living stone. Instinctively, he searched for landmarks.
Nothing.
No walls.
No visible horizon.
No colossal pillar.
No divine chains.
Fenrir was not there.
The realization tightened something within him. The wolf had been neither ally nor friend, but his presence embodied a constant, a raw truth of Tartarus. His absence made this place even more unsettling.
Siegfried was gone as well.
The name crossed his mind like a warm ember. Siegfried… the man who had defied eternity through sheer will. Jormund felt an unfamiliar weight in his chest—an emotion he did not name.
And Zeus…
At that thought, his body reacted despite itself. Tension ran through his limbs, an ancient instinct forged from fear and defiance. But here, no thunder roared. No sky tore itself apart.
Only the stars.
Jormund drew a deep breath—an unnecessary gesture, as he no longer truly needed air, but a reflex inherited from what he once was.
— Beelzebub…
The name escaped his lips without anger, without hatred. Like a conclusion.
He understood now.
This was neither punishment nor whim.
It was a calculated displacement.
The lord of Tartarus had not scattered them at random. Each had been sent where their nature would be tested. Where their certainties would become useless.
— A world without chains… Jormund murmured.
— Without visible laws.
He lifted his gaze again toward the sky.
As he kept watching, he noticed a disturbing detail.
Some stars were… going out.
Not violently. Slowly. Their light dimmed, contracted, then vanished, leaving behind a deeper darkness. And almost immediately, elsewhere in the sky, a new glow appeared—timid, fragile, like a newborn consciousness.
— Worlds dying… and others being born.
A shiver ran through his obsidian spine.
— Or minds.
The idea settled within him with oppressive weight. This sky was not decorative. It was functional. Each star seemed to be an anchor point, an existence frozen between life and oblivion.
Chronos.
The thought did not come as memory, but as internal pressure. A force lurking behind his ideas, behind his instincts. Since he had devoured the fragment of the Titan, time was no longer a line—it was a mass, compact and crushing.
— You see this place… don't you?
He did not expect an answer.
Yet something inside him vibrated faintly. A silent acknowledgment—or perhaps an ancient mockery.
— This world is not yours, Jormund continued.
— No more than it is mine.
He took a few steps.
Each movement felt measured, weighed, evaluated. As if the world itself were calculating the probability of his existence within it. He advanced slowly, ready for any reaction.
Nothing happened.
Then, in the distance…
A light.
Faint. Unstable. Different from the stars. It did not come from the celestial ceiling, but from the unseen horizon, at eye level. It flickered once, like a flame threatened by wind. Then again.
And finally, it stabilized.
Jormund's obsidian heart began to beat faster.
— …I am not alone.
He stopped.
Instinctively, he placed a hand at his side, where a weapon should have been. But there was nothing. No hammer. No chains. Nothing but his body—and what he had become.
— Very well, he murmured.
— Show yourself.
The light did not answer.
But it grew slightly brighter.
At that precise moment, Jormund understood something fundamental.
This place was not a kingdom in the traditional sense. It was neither hell, nor heaven, nor battlefield. It was an in-between. A liminal space, suspended between realities, a forgotten crossroads where the laws of the gods lost their authority.
A place where even Zeus would have had to tread carefully.
— If Beelzebub sent me here…
— Then this world is a trial.
He raised his head, standing straight and unmoving, facing the distant light like an undefined fate.
— And I will not retreat.
The stars above pulsed once, all at the same time.
As if the shattered sky had just acknowledged his existence.
And somewhere, far away, in another realm, something had awakened in response.