Arius stood on the edge of the abyss, where the earth meets nothingness, and where the boundaries of the world as he knew it came to an end. The wind howled from the depths with a strange force, lashing his face with a cruel chill, like the final farewell slaps from a world that had offered him nothing but the bitterness of pain and betrayal. The smell of ancient rocks mixed with the dampness of the void filled his lungs, as if the earth itself were breathing its last. His ragged clothes, which barely covered his slender body, fluttered violently under the deafening blows of the wind, and his hair, dirtied by days of displacement and flight, blew in front of his eyes like black curtains obscuring the sight of life; yet, he did not blink, nor did he attempt to push those bothersome locks away. At that moment, the towering black void beneath his feet did not represent death in his lost imagination, but rather the only "salvation"; that absolute "end" he had longed for like a thirsty man craving a drop of water in a barren desert; an end to every whip, every insult, and every night he spent shivering in a cold cell.
Behind him, steady and rhythmic footsteps broke the silence of the place; steps his ears could never mistake, for they were etched into his memory with every lash mark he had received in the training camps, steps always preceded by a suffocating aura of authority. It was Nahira. She stopped at a distance from him; he could feel her coldness that preceded her presence. Her royal cloak, adorned with gold threads and appearing as if woven from dead sunlight, rippled behind her in the wind, while she stood with her accustomed pride, as if she owned the very rocks upon which she stood. Despite this, there was a strange glint in her sharp eyes, a suppressed anxiety behind a wall of tyranny, as if she feared losing her favorite toy at the last moment—not out of love for his survival, but out of fear of losing the tool she had polished with an iron hand.
"Arius... stop. Come back at once," she said in a conspiratorial, cold tone, lacking any shred of emotion, as if she were commanding a submissive slave rather than a boy on the verge of suicide. Her tone continued to beat the drums of veiled threats: "Do not dare to defy my command; you have not yet escaped my control. Do you think your life belongs to you to decide when to end it?"
Arius did not move, nor did he even turn around; he fixed his gaze into the eternal blackness before him, as if addressing the abyss itself. Nahira's features tensed, and her voice rose with a sharp intensity that shook the rocky cliff; the echo of her voice reverberated among the mountains like the cry of a woman who had lost control over her possessions: "Have you lost your mind completely? This pit is not a path to escape, it is the void! Whoever falls into it has their trace erased from existence, from time, and from the annals of history. You will disappear as if you were never born! Is this the shame you want for yourself?"
Arius turned to her very slowly; his movements were calculated and calm in a way that stirred suspicion, as if his body had been freed from the constraints of both gravity and fear. In his eyes, there was no longer the look of fear and brokenness she had been accustomed to seeing for years, but rather a terrifying comfort and a quiet madness resembling the stillness before a storm that uproots trees from their foundations. He smiled suddenly—it was a pale smile, barely visible on his wan face—and then he laughed quietly. The sound of his laughter was pure, devoid of hesitation, as if his soul had been freed from its burdens; a laugh that pierced the coldness of the wind to reach Nahira's ears like whips: "At least... I will finally be rid of you, you cursed woman."
Nahira froze in her place, her eyes widening for a moment at the horror of what she heard. Arius's words fell upon her ears like rusted daggers that pierced the shield of her pride, which no one had ever dared to scratch before. Shock froze the blood in her veins, and before she could comprehend the impact of his words or reach out to stop him, Arius threw his body backward toward the abyss, as if casting off a heavy burden from his shoulders. His slender body fell, gradually fading into the absolute darkness, and in the final moment, while in the dark wind, he directed a look of triumph and gloating at her, a cold smile that burned what remained of her false authority, leaving her to experience a moment of her own fall—morally—into the depths of that abyss.
Nahira stood on the edge, silent as a marble statue erected in a deserted graveyard. The wind toyed with her heavy cloak and folded it, and her eyes stared into the void that had swallowed her "failed project." Her breathing was rapid, but her face remained a mask of ice. A soldier approached her with heavy, dragging steps; the sound of his feet on the rock was audible, his limbs trembling from the gravity of the situation and fear of the consequences of this failure: "My Lady... are you alright? Shall we send search parties?"
She did not answer immediately. She continued to contemplate the endless blackness for a long time, as if trying to read the future in that void, or perhaps searching for a trace of the soul of the boy who was once in her grasp, before she turned with a glacial coldness that made the soldier recoil, as if her gaze were a sword held to his neck: "Let everyone return to their work. It is over... in any case. I do not want to hear his name again."
Nahira left the place; her steps were heavy, and with every step she took, she buried behind her the memory of a boy who once dreamed of a normal life, but ended up as a grain of dust in an unforgiving universe, leaving behind a silence broken only by the howling of the wind.
### The Confrontation in the Absolute White
Boom! Suddenly, the void tore open. It was not a sound audible to the ear, but a tremor in the essence of existence. Arius opened his eyes to find himself lying in an infinite white space, with neither sky nor earth, just whiteness enveloping the soul and burning the sight with its purity. He tried to move, but his body was paralyzed as if bound by invisible chains of light, while his soul boiled with the fires of anger and questions that had accumulated like ash in his heart.
"Welcome... I see you died sooner than I expected," the mocking voice echoed throughout the void, an echo coming from everywhere and nowhere, a voice that seemed to emerge from within Arius's own skull.
Arius burst out screaming, a cry mixed with the pain of years, a cry with which he wanted to shatter the walls of this cursed whiteness: "You cursed voice! You deceived me! Sixteen years of hell and humiliation because of you! I received nothing but pain, you were watching me while I was being crushed! Why?! What is the purpose of all this suffering?"
The voice laughed with a terrifying coldness, a resonant laugh that shook the white space: "Did you not ask for power, Arius? In this world, power is not given without a price... and you paid for your ascent with pain. Every drop of blood that fell from you was ink in the record of your new creation."
Arius roared, trying to resist the paralysis, his muscles tensing under the influence of a mysterious energy: "The price for what?! You were just amusing yourself with me while I was being lashed and tortured every day! Was my pain just entertainment for you in this void?"
Silence reigned for a few seconds, a silence as heavy as an entire eon, then the response came in a malicious and deceptive tone, a tone carrying within it a surprise not fitting for an omnipotent entity: "Perhaps you are right... In reality, my feeling of boredom was increasing as you were beaten without any real resistance. But... all of that was just a test of the solidity of your essence, to see if you would break under the weight of fate or hold out to create it."
The voice drew closer, and its tone became heavier, with a resonance suggesting cosmic awe that makes stars dim: "I will send you to a completely different place, a world where the rules are written in blood, but the price this time is more expensive; your entity. I will erase your memory; you will not remember Nahira, nor your family, nor even this hell. I will grant you a power created for you alone... the power of Celestin. Are you ready to abandon everything you are to become something new?"
Arius closed his eyes; a bitter internal struggle tore him apart; does he choose to forget the pain that shaped his identity in exchange for a mysterious unknown? Does he erase the memory of his torment to be born a creature without a past? "I agree," he whispered finally, his voice trembling—not from fear, but from the magnitude of the decision he had made.
At that moment, an intertwined purple symbol appeared in the air before his eyes, resembling a vortex of cosmic energy that did not belong to this dimension, and it imprinted onto his back with heat that seared the bones, penetrating into his flesh and bones to become part of his composition. "This symbol? You will understand it later when your need for it becomes dire," the voice said mysteriously before everything began to fade, before the white world dissolved into a new darkness: "Remember my only piece of advice: If we meet there... follow me. Trust me more than anyone else... and this is your last chance. If you die this time... I will not bring you back to existence, I will leave you to the eternal void."
### Birth: A Scream Against the Storm
On the planet Celestin, where the sky is torn by purple lightning as if it were wounds in the fabric of the universe, the storm was announcing the birth of something the universe had never witnessed before. "Alberto" stood on his high balcony, watching the lightning split the peaks of the sacred mountains like celestial whips; his hands were trembling on the wooden railing of the balcony, and tension coursed through his veins with every thunderclap that shook the palace.
The maid broke the silence of his anticipation, panting, her face expressing panic mixed with awe: "Master Alberto! He is born! The newborn is fine!"
Alberto rushed like a hurricane toward the vast hallways, his heart beating violently in his chest, as if it were beating the drums of war. He opened the door to see his wife, "Hiles," exhausted, her face as pale as the moon, cradling a suspiciously calm child. He was not an ordinary child; his features carried a mysterious dignity that did not belong to the age of infants, his eyes were shining with a fleeting silver glitter, as if they contained stars trapped since the dawn of history.
Alberto held the child and pressed him to his chest. At that moment, absolute silence reigned in the room; he did not hear the sound of the rain or the thunder of the storm outside, but he heard a strange voice echoing inside his skull, a voice no one else had heard, deep as if it were a call from the bowels of the earth, a voice that shook his being: "Name him... Arius."
Alberto's body shivered, as if the name had been engraved and branded into his soul with heated iron. He whispered in amazement, his eyes brimming with an emotion he had never experienced before, as if an ancient name had returned to life on his tongue: "Arius..."
Hiles smiled wearily, unaware that she had just released a name that was a mix of curse and blessing at the same time, a name that would reshape the destiny of their world. Arius was born again, without memory, without constraints, and without fear. He was born in the heart of the Celestin nation, while the storm outside was playing the first symphonies of his new fate... a fate no one, not even Nahira in her distant world, would be able to imagine or realize its depth. The story began, and fate was writing its first words with ink of lightning and blood.