The place breathing around them did not resemble any chamber meant for living things at all.
A colossal heart the size of a hill rose beneath Kalintill's knees, its surface flexing with each deep beat that pushed through the entire cavern of flesh, sending tremors through the red ridges spreading outward like roots.
Other organs hung in the distance like suspended continents, tethered by cords of living tissue that twitched now and then like something from somewhere tugged from far beyond.
Above it all drifted shadows that refused to stay still, long black streaks twisting through the air while whispered voices wailed from inside them, as if every scrap of darkness carried some tormented soul that never found rest; The air itself looked diseased, black rot spreading through it like mold across fruit.
But Kalintill did not appear disturbed by any of it.
He had messy black hair, brushing the scar that cut straight through his left eye and dragged down his cheek like a careless knife mark. And his dark red eyes studied the woman beneath him with the amusement of someone who had wandered into a temple only to find the god already lying on the altar. Faint black veins wandered beneath the skin along his cheekbone, branching in strange directions.
He was naked, crouched above her on the massive beating heart, and the goddess below him also.
Her name was Ifreiti, and Ifreiti's long red hair spilled across the living surface beneath her, tangled and scattered in wild strands. Her two fiery orange eyes stared up at Kalintill through the curtain of it, bright with a fascination that had nothing cautious inside it.
A white halo hovered above her head, glowing with a restrained brilliance that looked completely out of place in this cavern of rot and shadow, and strange red symbols and runes ran across her skin from face, to collarbone, and to hip, crawling like living hieroglyphs written in some divine language.
Kalintill leaned down and grabbed her by the jaw.
His mouth met hers in a rough kiss that carried none of the reverence mortals usually offered gods. His fingers slid into her hair, dragging her head back against the beating flesh beneath them while the distant organs around the chamber twitched again, another deep beat rolling through the entire nasty landscape.
Ifreiti smiled when he pulled back, satisfied with this. "Us bonded like this… let me have a taste of your blood."
Kalintill blinked once at her.
Then the corner of his mouth lifted in a grin.
"What for? You're a vampire or something? Thought you were the goddess of beauty and temptation and divine fascination with mortal life."
Ifreiti's orange eyes glowed with something thoughtful, though her hand still rested comfortably against his shoulder as if she expected him to stay exactly where he was.
"Yes… that's what I am."
She brushed a finger across the scar crossing his eye, studying the dark veins beneath his skin with obvious interest.
"The other divine see you as a gift. Or a curse. They argue endlessly about which one you might become. They want to inspect you, they want your blood, because your power does not belong to this world either. You smell like the aliens who sometimes fall into creation from outside the firmament… yet you were born here. It's strange.."
Her halo flickered as she continued, "I couldn't help myself. I told them I would observe you first….but quietly. The divine council does not like descending into the mortal sphere without judgment, but curiosity is part of my nature, and curiosity is difficult for them to deny when it belongs to the goddess of fascination itself." She smiled again, though something nervous crept into the edges now. "If I returned with proof that you truly carry power from outside the firmament, the other gods would tear the heavens apart trying to claim you. I came myself because they trust me to tempt rather than destroy. I could weaken my presence, slip past their watch, and reach you before any of the war gods arrived."
Her fingers brushed lightly across his chest, and she kept going.
"One drop of blood… that is all. If you give it to me willingly, I can anchor your existence to mine. The council would have to acknowledge you as divine property. No god could erase you after that. If they caused war just to grab you on their own, even if they weakened themselves to get here, billions will die. And for my nature, I can't allow that. As you know, us divine beings need to weaken ourselves to walk the mortal plane or choose champions in our steed, as our power is too great and would destroy half the world just by blinking. But I knew I could get to you this way, as none can resist a divine goddess' kiss, not even the divine themselves. And seeing how I have you here with me, you have easily fallen for me."
Her voice softened with the promise.
"I would raise you beside me. You would ascend with me. Eternity would belong to you. As you have become my favorite, I want to keep you for myself and keep humanity alive at the same time."
Kalintill stared down at her. "Ascension, huh?" He leaned closer as if the answer might arrive in the next kiss.
Ifreiti tilted her chin up slowly, clearly expecting it, thinking, 'I got him….'
Then, his lips hovered beside her ear, and Kalintill whispered, "Fuck your ascension. I want my immortality."
Ifreiti's eyes widened. "No…!"
Kalintill's arm moved behind him, dark red and black shadows gathered around his hand, rolling together in a rotating spiral until something solid forced its way into manifestation. Steel emerged from the storm of darkness, forming a long black blade decorated with carved red eyes on the blade itself that stared at its surroundings. Barbed wire was around the weapon from hilt to tip, biting into the steel like it had grown there like plants and roots.
Ifreiti's halo flared as divine power tried to gather, but she never finished, thinking, 'Impossible…! How could he resist divine temptation?! Not even a Demi-god can!'
She said, "You really are…an alien.."
The blade punched straight through her chest, and divine blood erupted from her in red glowing droplets that did not fall like ordinary blood. Each drop hovered for a moment in the air, glowing red and white before dissolving into sparks of golden dust that breezed across Kalintill's skin.
His grin widened as the blade dragged downward through her body, and the sound it produced resembled a blade tearing through a rough pillow.
Blood sprayed across his chest and face while the giant heart beneath them beat again, sending another tremor through the chamber.
Ifreiti coughed, and Ifreiti's orange eyes blinked with disbelief.
"You… you were supposed to…"
Kalintill pushed his hand into the opening he had made, his fingers disappeared inside her chest, then a moment later he pulled something free.
Her heart looked nothing like a mortal organ. The thing was crystal-like and crimson at the same time, shaped like a twisted star with veins of light running through its interior. Each beat caused sparks to leak from the cracks in its surface, soaring toward the halo that now flicked in and out above her head like a dying lantern.
Ifreiti's gaze dimmed and went dull while Kalintill rose to his feet atop the massive beating organ beneath them.
He turned the heart in his hand, studying it with open fascination while the shadows around the area continued their restless flight of whispers.
"Talking about ascension…" The grin never left his face. "I'll ascend myself, damn goddess. You shouldn't have weakened yourself to come see me. I'm not a nice person. I'm an alien, remember?"
Kalintill watched the strange heart beat in his palm.
Then his thoughts wandered somewhere far away, his next destination.
'Floating Isles. That was where the oldest things still lived. And if immortality existed anywhere in this miserable world...it would be there. I'd have to kill the Angel of Youth. But with this heart…I could negotiate…'
Kalintill stepped down from the colossal heart and began walking.
The area continued breathing behind him, each massive beat sending ripples through the gross landscape of organs and living tissue, though he no longer bothered looking back.
"Alien…"
The word rolled out his mouth with a crooked sort of amusement.
"So that's what those annoying gods see me as."
Kalintill knew one thing perfectly well: If Ifreiti had arrived with her full strength intact, he would not be walking anywhere. A goddess at her full divinity could crush kingdoms without bothering to stand up. What he had just done only worked because she weakened herself to sneak into the mortal world. She had believed charm and curiosity would be enough to tempt him and bind him.
His red eyes looked toward the heart again.
The gods had reason to fear certain things, and aliens were among the worst of them. Beings from outside the realm of divine creation, creatures that did not originate beneath the authority of the heavens. No god had shaped them and no god understood them, and when they slipped into the world it never happened quietly.
The war that proved it still lingered in every history book across the seas; Angels descending in blinding armies, alien things pouring from rips in the sky. That war ended long ago, there's no more of those dumbass portals, but the damage refused to disappear, It just left a plague behind.
Axil.
A sickness feared in every port, kingdom, and pirate stronghold across the world.
No one understood how it worked. A person would catch the disease, the body would deteriorate in strange ways, and somewhere during the sickness an alien presence would begin forcing its way through the victim. Sometimes the infected person twisted into a monstrous creature that barely resembled anything human. Sometimes they remained physically similar but their voice, thoughts, and behavior changed completely, replaced by the personality of the thing that had arrived from whatever distant realm waited beyond the sky.
It did not limit itself to humans either, animals caught Axil, mythic beasts caught Axil, Demi-gods could catch Axil; Entire villages had burned when infected creatures began turning into something else in the middle of the night, and they were insanely strong.
So the law across the world became simple, anyone who caught Axil died immediately; execution before transformation, no mercy at all for anyone no matter what age.
Kalintill knew all of that anyway. He passed beneath another arch of living tissue as the memory drifted across his mind.
"My power is crazy, I know."
His fingers closed slightly around the goddess heart.
"But I remember having parents. Normal looking parents when I was born. I'm not an alien…I can't be."
The memory of his childhood crept up behind that thought whether he wanted it or not.
A dusty street in a small town near the coast, children running through the square while wooden toy ships bounced across puddles left by the tide, all while Kalintill was sitting on the stone steps near the well, just watching like always, keeping his distance.
Because the moment he walked closer the other children stopped playing, his red eyes frightened them; No one wanted to stand near a boy whose eyes looked like that.
"Alien eyes."
Parents whispered, and teachers stared too long.
Some of them said the word alien under their breath like it might crawl into their mouths if they spoke it too much and too loudly, or that it might trigger Kalintill into transforming and clobbering everyone.
But his mother and father never accepted it, they dragged him from wizard to wizard for years, men who specialized in illusions, Alchemists who brewed potions that promised to rewrite the body, and Sorcerers who studied ancient curses.
None of them managed to change the color of his eyes: Red remained red. So eventually his parents stopped trying, and they left the town instead.
Packed their belongings and moved to a quiet place far away where fewer people would stare.
That was when the stories began, his father wrote them, and his mother wrote them.
Endless tales where Kalintill became the main character, an unstoppable warrior sailing across the seas with a crew of pirates who feared nothing. In those stories he stole treasure from arrogant nobles, broke the teeth of anyone foolish enough to challenge him, and returned home richer each time while the entire world whispered his name in disbelief.
The hero always had red eyes, his parents never changed that part. They read those stories to him every day, and worked many hours building another world in his vision where he was on top. They wrote him to be unstoppable.
Kalintill stepped through a tunnel of torn muscle and bone as the memory faded behind him.
"Floating Isles…"
The name settled into his thoughts like a challenge.
'Every parent across the world told their children the same thing….stay away from that place. Annoying Astrologers studied the skies and charted the drifting islands from a distance but refused to approach them. Scholars argued endlessly about what existed there, though none of them actually went to confirm their weird theories, because the few who tried never returned.'
Kalintill did not care about that.
His feet touched stone as he moved closer to the exit.
Another thought forced its way forward.
His parents lying in bed, pale and sick, Druids and mages whispering outside the room about time that was running out much quicker than anyone wanted to admit.
Kalintill pushed through the final wall of flesh and stepped into daylight.
The world outside opened into a ruined mountain range where jagged stone formations surrounded the enormous corpse of a fallen giant. The creature's body had collapsed across several valleys, its ribcage jutting upward like a shattered fortress while scavenger birds circled high above the scene, this was the creature Kalintill came out of, a Giant that Ifreiti herself killed just so her and Kalintill could have privacy.
Bright sky stretched across the horizon, and Kalintill stood on the giant's shoulder with the goddess heart still beating in his hand.
"I'll make them immortal," he muttered, thinking about his parents. "And myself as well…"
His eyes lifted toward the distant clouds where the Floating Isles hovered somewhere far beyond sight.
"Fate keeps trying to ruin my life….Every time something good appeared, it vanished. Now even time threatened to steal the two people who had stayed beside me through everything."
'I don't care how dangerous the Isles are.'
The grin crept back onto his face.
'I'll be reckless. I'll beat up everything there if I have to.'
His fingers raised the heart slightly while it continued beating in his grasp.
"I have to outrun fate itself. Before it tries taking anything else from me."
His parents had always begged him to be cautious and to stay safe, to live carefully for their sake. Even sometimes regretting writing those stories for him as it made him more reckless than ever, but it helped his confidence in himself when he really needed it when he was younger, now he's 20 and the effects of it are coming into play.
Kalintill never understood that kind of thinking, the "safe" kind of thinking, or trying to come up with a dumb "strategy".
'Reckless people reached the finish line first. I'll just go take what I want. And beat up everything in the way..'
Then he smiled wider.
"I'm unstoppable…"