Before El rose a vast grey castle, its expanse so immense it resembled a city rather than a single structure. Countless spires pierced the golden sky, their pale stone softened by climbing flowers that bloomed along balconies, arches, and high-reaching towers. The air carried a quiet stillness, untouched and sacred.
One could mistake it for heaven.
Beneath their feet stretched a sea of golden clouds, dense enough to bear their weight yet soft enough to ripple with each step. Light gathered in every direction, reflecting faintly against the smooth stone of the castle ahead.
The man stepped forward without pause, his figure steady as he walked toward the towering doors in the distance. With a small motion of his hand, he signalled them to follow.
El moved after him, the others close behind, their footsteps muted against the clouded ground.
A guard stood at the entrance, his spear lowering the moment they approached. His armour gleamed with interwoven silver and gold, each plate engraved with fine, deliberate patterns that caught the surrounding light.
"Stop there."
The command rang out, firm and unwavering.
The man did not slow.
He passed the guard as though the voice had never been spoken, his pace unchanged, his presence undisturbed.
Recognition dawned instantly.
The guard straightened, the tension leaving his body as he stepped aside. The spear lifted, the great doors opened without resistance, and his head lowered in silent reverence, not only to the man, but to those who walked behind him.
Inside the castle lay an endless expanse of stars.
Not painted upon a ceiling, not reflected in glass, but stretching outward in impossible depth, as though the room had been hollowed into the night itself. Constellations drifted where walls should have been. Light bent without reason. Distance refused to remain constant.
Near the centre of that void stood a throne forged from condensed starlight. Its edges bled faint radiance, as if the act of existing cost it something immeasurable.
Seated upon it was a being with three heads.
Each head was veiled in a slow, breathing fog the colour of old ash. No features could be discerned beneath it. No eyes, no mouths. Only the suggestion of attention. Only the certainty of being observed. The darkness around them did not conceal them. It seemed to grow from them.
To the right of the throne stood a shadow.
Its body existed in fragments, like shattered glass suspended mid-collapse. Pieces orbited one another in restless, silent rotation. Limbs formed, dissolved, and reassembled without pattern. At times it possessed too many arms, too many legs, too many faces. At times it possessed none at all. Every surface reflected something that was not present. Every motion lagged slightly behind itself, as if time struggled to keep hold of it.
To the left stood a phantom.
It had no body. No outline. No anchor within reality.
At a distance, it resembled a ghost, swaying gently, limbs implied rather than seen. But the longer one looked, the more the illusion failed. It was not an absence. It was an intrusion. A fracture where existence had been forced apart and never properly sealed.
It danced.
Not with grace, not with purpose, but with a slow, vacant rhythm. Its movements echoed something remembered but no longer understood. A song that had lost its sound yet continued to dictate motion.
Its hands held a glass.
The glass was thin, nearly transparent, and dimmed as though it resisted being seen. Within it sloshed water, dark and restless. There was no reflection upon its surface. No sky. No light. Only depth.
Inside that depth, a world struggled.
An unformed blackness had collapsed into a sphere at its centre. Around it, oceans churned in endless violence. No land broke the surface. No clouds softened the void above. Only water, circling, devouring itself, bound to something it could not escape.
The phantom lifted the glass.
The motion was sudden. Final.
It tilted the rim toward where its mouth should have been and drank.
The water surged upward in a violent flood, as if pulled by a force deeper than gravity. The black sphere followed, dragged into that unseen throat.
For a moment, everything stilled.
Then something went wrong.
The world did not pass.
It lodged.
The phantom convulsed. Its form flickered, collapsing inward and expanding outward in uneven pulses. It clawed at its own absence, tearing open distortions that bled shapes into being. Tendrils of slick, unfinished flesh pushed outward, writhing, grasping, trying to force the obstruction down.
They failed.
The black sphere began to spin.
Slow at first. Then faster. Then violently, dragging the surrounding water into a spiralling frenzy that should not have fit within the phantom's throat.
The tendrils stopped.
They turned.
Without command, without hesitation, they began to tear at the phantom itself.
Flesh split where no flesh should exist. Blood seeped from geometry that could not contain it. Coiled strands, wet and glistening, spilled outward, unravelling into the star-filled void.
The phantom's dance did not stop.
It only grew more erratic.
More desperate.
As though something inside it was trying to escape, and something else was trying to keep it there.
And in the next instant, El forced his eyes open.
The man placed his hand on his shoulder, bringing him back into reality.
El let out a sigh of fear and whispered to himself:
"It's those strange dreams again."
Half of what El had seen in his dream was true. The other half was madness. It was the soft, convincing deceit of a mind already beginning to split at its unseen seams, a failing perception slowly corroded by the mark taking deeper root within him.
He had always dreamt like this.
Since the day he was born into this world, sleep had never been a place of rest for him. It had always been a threshold, a blurred and treacherous country where truth and falsehood wore each other's faces. Some nights showed him things that later proved real. Others fed him visions so distorted, so quietly monstrous, that even remembering them left a bitter taste in his mouth, as though his soul itself had been made to swallow poison.
They were not nightmares, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. Nightmares belonged to frightened children, to startled awakenings and trembling breaths in the dark. Neither were they dreams, if dreams were meant to visit a sound and orderly mind.
No, what came to El was something far stranger.
It was the hidden world behind his eyes. A second realm built in silence by a sanity that had long ago learned it could not survive reality without first reshaping it. It was an inner landscape, an alternate existence his mind had fashioned for itself in secret, like a condemned prisoner digging tunnels beneath the floorboards of his cell. At times it resembled a sandbox for the soul. At times a playground. At times a mausoleum.
And there, within that inward world, his mind was free to unleash its private catastrophes upon him.
Once, those visions had struck with the force of revelation. Reality would descend on him cold and merciless, clothed in vivid illusions so terrible they felt more authentic than waking life itself. His thoughts would splinter. His reason would crack apart into jagged, lightless fragments, each one drifting deeper into a darkness that had no bottom. There had been a time when he feared that one night he would fall asleep and never fully return, that he would wake with his body intact and his mind left wandering somewhere behind those invisible doors.
But he had grown used to it.
Or so he liked to believe.
Now, his sanity no longer shattered so easily. It bent. It endured. It wrestled in silence against the sacred curse that had marked his existence from the very beginning. He had once thought that was enough. He had once thought endurance was victory.
He was wrong.
For even the heavens had judged those dreams too profound, too dangerous, too blasphemous to be entrusted to someone like El. Or perhaps someone like Amon. At times, even he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. The confusion lingered at the edges of his thoughts like mist over black water, thin and almost harmless until one stared long enough to notice shapes moving beneath it.
Some parts of the dream had been true.
The Throne was real.
The being with three heads was real.
The shadow standing at its side was real.
The endless starry expanse was real.
But the phantom was not.
The glass was not.
The world within it was not.
Those were the lies.
Or perhaps they were truths his mind lacked the mercy to accept.
That uncertainty was the cruellest part. El no longer knew whether madness took the form of falsehood, or whether it was simply the mind's final defence against truths too immense, too inhuman, to be borne whole. Sometimes he suspected insanity was not the breaking of reason, but its awakening. Sometimes he feared that what he called delusion was merely sight stripped of its gentleness.
Before him, the being upon the Throne inclined its three veiled heads ever so slightly, as though its interest in El had deepened. The gesture was small, almost elegant, yet it carried a dreadful weight, like the shifting of something ancient beneath the foundations of the world.
Beside him, Leon and Elias stood frozen, their presence strangely distant, as though El were seeing them through layers of water or memory. For one fleeting moment, he was seized by a terrible thought: that neither of them was truly there, that he had come alone, and that his mind had merely placed familiar shapes at his side so he would not have to face the vastness by himself.
Then the man stepped past them.
Calmly, naturally, as though walking into the presence of such a being required neither courage nor reverence, he moved forward to greet the one seated upon the Throne.
"My Lord, I hail the Mysterious One of the Grey Castle, the King of Space, the Holy Grail, the Black Sun, the Red Sky that dances with doom. I hail the Sleeper who dreams in the Graveyard of Fools, the one who walks upon the Astral Sea."
"I greet you."
The being upon the throne, the Mysterious One with three veiled heads, moved ever so slightly. It was nothing more than a faint inclination, a nod so small it was almost imperceptible, yet the entire hall seemed to tighten around it, as though even the air understood that something had acknowledged their presence.
The man continued.
"A war recently took place between the White Castle and the Black Castle. The Black Castle claimed victory. The White Castle was consumed, and from their union, the Void Castle was born."
His voice remained calm, measured, neither hurried nor hesitant.
"With me today are our younger brothers of the Void Castle. They have come to propose an alliance."
At those words, the Mysterious One turned its gaze.
It did not move quickly. It did not need to.
Its attention fell upon El with such oppressive stillness that even Leon felt his breathing falter. Elias, too, stiffened beside him. Neither spoke. Neither dared. In the face of that gaze, silence did not feel like caution. It felt like instinct.
Then the Mysterious One spoke a single word.
"Speak."
The voice was not loud, yet it descended upon the hall with crushing clarity, as though the command had been uttered from every corner of existence at once.
El stepped forward.
"I am El, the Righteous Ritualist, the Great One, the greatest ritualist of this age, Apostle of the Gods, Son of the Most High."
His tone was steady, almost arrogant in its certainty. Each title fell from his lips without the slightest tremor, as though he were not introducing himself, but merely stating truths too obvious to deny.
Leon's fingers twitched faintly at his side.
Even now, even here, El sounded exactly the same. There was no reverence in him. No hesitation. No sign that he understood just how narrow the line beneath his feet truly was.
El continued.
"I have come to propose an alliance between you, the Grey Castle, and us, the Void Castle. If the proposal suits your will, then accept it."
A smile, faint and sharp, touched his lips.
"If not, then we cannot guarantee your safety."
The atmosphere changed.
It was subtle at first. A shift so slight it could have been mistaken for imagination. Yet the temperature of the room seemed to drop, and the silence that followed no longer felt empty. It felt watchful.
El did not stop.
"Our elder brother was erased in the war. I would rather not see our elderly brother share the same fate."
The words had barely settled when the shadow moved.
There was no warning.
One moment it stood beside the throne, still as a stain in the dark. The next, it was in front of El, surging forward with terrifying speed. Multiple constructs formed in an instant, sharp and lethal, their edges gleaming as they shot straight for his throat.
Leon's heart lurched.
Elias took half a step forward before instinct crushed the impulse where it was born.
The attack should have reached him.
It did not.
The man stepped between them.
The motion was effortless, almost lazy, yet impossibly precise. His hand rose and intercepted the killing force before it could touch El. The constructs stopped just short of flesh, suspended in the air with a violent hum, their points trembling a hair's breadth from his neck.
For one breathless second, nobody moved.
Then the man turned his head slightly and looked at El.
"Be careful of what you say."
His tone was mild.
That only made it worse.
It was not anger that lived in those words, but warning, and warning spoken so softly carried a far greater weight than rage.
El smiled.
Not nervously. Not in relief. He smiled as though the threat had entertained him.
Then, before anyone could stop him, he began to walk forward again.
Leon's eyes widened.
Each step El took seemed to drag the entire hall deeper into unease. His pace was unhurried. His posture remained loose, almost casual. It was the walk of a man who either possessed absolute confidence or had gone too far to recognize fear.
Perhaps both.
He stopped before the throne, close enough now that the weight of the Mysterious One's presence seemed almost physical, like an invisible sea pressing against skin and bone.
El lifted his chin slightly.
"So?" he asked.
The smile on his face deepened by a fraction.
"Have you made your choice?"
No one breathed.
The silence that followed was long enough to become unbearable. Leon could hear the pounding of his own heart. Elias stood rigid, his jaw clenched so tightly it looked painful. Even the man said nothing now.
Then the Mysterious One answered.
"No."
The word fell softly.
Yet it struck with the force of judgment.
A pause followed, brief and absolute, as though the world itself had been made to wait for what came next.
Then the being spoke again, its voice low, cold, and final.
"It does not matter anyway."
The three veiled heads remained still, but the hall seemed to darken beneath its words.
"You will die before you know it."