In this world, becoming a Lost did not mean wandering through a forest or stumbling into some scarred wasteland. It meant being driven out of an aspect of existence, cut off from something fundamental, or dead in a way that had nothing to do with flesh. One could be lost from light, untouched by illumination no matter how desperately they sought it. One could be lost from sound, lost from warmth, lost from memory.
Leon was Lost. He simply did not yet know what he had been severed from.
He drifted through the vast, dark expanse unmoored from time, unanchored from space, turning over every detail of the ritual in his mind. He had followed every instruction Elias had given him. He had written down every note, checked every symbol, every gesture, every breath. He had made no mistakes. He was certain of it.
As his eyes wandered across the endless dark, a sudden glow erupted in the void. It was blinding, violent. Leon flinched, raising his hands to shield his eyes as he instinctively drifted backward, trying to escape the radiance. After several agonizing moments, the light dimmed, collapsing back into nothingness.
Leon lowered his hands.
A figure now stood before him.
The figure was contrast itself, White as snow against the dark expanse, as light as a feather against the heavy atmosphere.
The figure had no mortal-like face; no eyes, yet for some reason, Leon felt a gravity-like gaze looking down at him. No mouth yet, as the being arrived, even though no words had been spoken, his very silence was noise itself.
The figure had no mortal or alien features one could use to discern or describe him. His form was totally non-existent.
Leon did not have words to speak, not even a letter came out his mouth. He just silently watched and observed the figure before him.
"So, you've made friends with him," the figure spoke in a deep and low tone. It was not a question; it was a confirmation. Like he had been watching in boredom, waiting for something interesting to happen.
His voice was like the roar of the heavens itself. Like thunder striking the ground, like the uproar of the forsaken!
Leon paused awkwardly.
"What are you talking about?" he asked in a confused yet trembling manner. The aura the Figure excluded was so crushing that if not for the expanse or the fact that it was just his soul, it would have been his end.
The being released a sigh.
"El, Apostle of the Gods. Righteous ritualist. Mother of doom. The Great One. I do believe you became his servant just the other day. Did you not?"
"Yes," Leon replied, trembling.
'What does El have to do with this, though?' he thought.
"Make sure you serve him rightfully and at all costs. But there will also be the end of it. Because of this, I will give you my powers, and you will awaken. You will become my heir, Leon, my son, my only son."
"I don't understand what you're saying," Leon muttered, trying to comprehend the words of the being. "What do you mean, 'there will also be the end of it?" he asked, confusedly. "You will become my Father, I will become your heir, what does that mean? Are you my long-lost father that left me?"
"And lastly, who exactly are you?"
The figure paused upon listening to Leon's words, letting the silence stretch between them. Then, after a few moments, he said:
"You are also as inquisitive as 'him'"
"To be frank," he began as he flicked his wrist, the expanse suddenly vomited two bronze-like chairs. And gesturing his hands towards Leon's seat while he sat down.
As Leon sat on the bronze-like chair, The Figure continued speaking.
"There is always an end to everything. Nothing ever stays the same way, walks the same path, or remains the same. Time moves relentlessly, change is unpredictable, so yes. There will be an end, arriving at the appointed moment set by the One Above Me.
As for what I truly mean by the end… prepare for it. Whatever choice you make in that moment, I will be satisfied, but do not overthink it. Act. Even the strongest convictions are not immune to change. In time, they bend. And when they cannot… they choose another shape. Treachery, at times, becomes the only path for a faith too strong to bend. Taking it may ease the weight of sin upon your shoulders.
I have always been your father; I did not need to impregnate her to make you into existence. You have always been my son, my only son. That is why, I cherish you above all else. No, I did not leave you, I left you to grow."
Answering Leon's last question, he spoke in a gentle tone:
"You…"
….
Leon woke up violently, his eyes opened aggressively as if longing to see the world. His body jerked up forcefully, his nerves, his touch and everything that seemed dead became awake.
Leon finally understood what he had been lost from:
He was lost from loyalty.
…..
The Void was brighter than light, darker than darkness, wider than infinity, and yet more enclosed than solitude itself.
Beneath that impossible sky, black grass stretched in every direction. Each blade was long and thin, touched with the glimmer of distant stars, as though a ruined night had fallen to the earth and taken root. It spread across the land like a silent plague, vast and unending, until it vanished beyond the furthest reach of thought. No boundary could be seen. No end could be imagined. The human mind, so proud of its measurements and certainties, became small there.
Above, the heavens opened into a starry abyss. The sky was drenched in a darkness so profound that ordinary night would have seemed pale beside it. Countless stars burned within that depth, scattered like divine wounds across the body of creation, cold and remote and beautiful beyond reason. Yet even with their brilliance, the firmament remained oppressive, as though it were not a sky at all, but the interior of some vast and sacred mystery.
And suspended in that unreachable expanse hung the sun.
It was turned upside down.
The sight of it carried a quiet wrongness that words could not fully capture. It did not blaze with warmth, nor did it command the heavens with the golden authority of a true star. Instead, it poured down a white radiance so pure and severe that it seemed brighter than light itself, an illumination without comfort, a brilliance without mercy. It washed over the Void in endless streams, making every shadow sharper, every silence deeper, every strange thing stranger.
At the centre of that boundless world stood two trees.
They rose from the sea of black grass with solemn grace, ancient and still, like monuments left behind by a forgotten age. Their branches stretched wide beneath the inverted sun, and from one of those heavy limbs hung a pair of ropes, dark and slender, descending toward the swing cradled between them.
Upon the swing sat Ben El.
Behind him stood El, one hand loosely resting against the rope as he pushed him forward with slow, measured motions. The swing moved gently through the strange white light, drifting back and forth with a rhythm so calm it seemed to quiet the whole world around it. In that endless and unnatural expanse, where the sky itself felt like a riddle and the grass resembled the spread of a celestial disease, that simple motion carried the softness of an old memory.
Silence watched them with a faint smile.
There was joy upon the creature's face, light and delicate, touched by the innocent happiness of youth. It was the kind of expression one might have expected beneath a summer sky, amid warm winds and sunlit fields, not here, not in this impossible realm where light shone too brightly and darkness ran too deep. That smile did not belong to the Void, and because of that, it became all the more beautiful.
For a moment, the scene possessed an almost sacred gentleness.
The black grass whispered beneath the pale brilliance. The ropes creaked softly with each passing motion. Ben El swayed in quiet ease, and El stood behind him like the keeper of a fragile, vanishing peace. The two trees held their place like silent witnesses, while Silence looked on as though guarding the last surviving remnant of something tender in a world that had long since outgrown tenderness.
It was beautiful.
And because it was beautiful, it felt unbearably distant.
As though this was not happiness itself, but the memory of happiness. Not peace, but the shape peace had once left behind. A perfect, quiet image preserved in the heart of a world too vast, too strange, and too empty to understand it.
….
Twenty-eight days passed.
Not gently, nor quietly, but like silence stretched until it tore like a mortal entangled in the unseen hands of Time. Time, ever relentless, surged forward without pause, leaving all things behind without regret or memory.
Twenty-eight days passed in the blink of an eye.
One moment was filled with plans, questions, fragile belief, and fleeting joy. The next was drenched in red, the stain of blood upon grass, the clash of steel, the cries of anguish. Doom was written plainly upon their foreheads, etched not by fate alone, but by Change itself as it descended, slow, silent, and absolute. When it was over, the battlefield lay still, strewn with ruined flesh and the remnants of what once lived.
Twenty-eight days did not pass idly.
Under El's guidance, they were shaped. Their bodies hardened. Their minds were forced open, exposed to the distortions of reality, the distant echoes of something that screamed without sound, something that watched without form. They learned. They endured. And with each passing moment, they advanced further along a path that did not lead to victory, but to annihilation.
Twenty-eight days ago, was the future.
Now, it was the present.
Soon, it would be nothing more than history.
The end approached as all ends do, quietly, like the first light of dawn. Gentle. Unassuming. Inevitable. It cast its final glow upon them, a last mercy before everything was taken.
"The war begins today."
A smile spread across his face.
Not one of hope, nor excitement.
But something far more unsettling.