Chapter 197: You Cannot Leave Yet

Elias hesitated, and then he reached out and touched the glass.

He did not put much pressure, but the mirror shattered inward, the pieces flying into the void, before reforming in his palm as a shard of absolute darkness.

It drank the light around it, swallowing the entire chambers until he was surrounded by darkness, and Elias was floating in the void, the Veil Fragment cold in his hand.

The goddess spoke to him with the voice of the void. The cadence of her speech was strange; she spoke and stopped, almost as if her voice was coming from a distance that was so far away that it took a lot of time for it to cross over to him.

“You have carried them all, little vessel. The noise. The pain. The sorrow. And now you carry the emptiness itself.”

He did not answer. There was nothing to say.

“You know now. What you are. What you have always been. A container. A vessel. A thing that was made to hold what should not be held.”

Elias looked at the Veil Fragment. It pulsed with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat, the same rhythm as the Echo Stone, the Heartwood, the Tear. They were all the same. They were all part of something larger.

“The Hollow Monarch,” he said.

The void was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, it began to laugh.

“Yes. The Hollow Monarch. The contradiction that holds infinity in finitude. The vessel that contains the uncontainable. You carry its emptiness. You carry its hunger that fell from the stars. I held that hunger in the past for the safety of all, yet it tore me apart.”

A pause.

“You are not the first to hold this hunger; before you, there was me. You will not be the last. But you are the one who has come this far. You are the one who has carried the weight. You are the one who has refused to break.”

The void began to fade, and as the darkness receded, Elias found himself standing at the center of a small chamber, the Veil Fragment cold in his hand, his heart pounding in his chest.

Elias closed his eyes and digested everything he had just learned.

First, he understood that he had the void attribute, which came from the fusion between the two archetypes of Lumina, Miracle, and Damnation.

The moment he had touched his Lumina, Elias had been brought to a white void where he heard the voice of this goddess, who had given him a very cryptic message,

“Eat your wings and fly.”

From that moment forward, everything that had happened to him had pushed him deeper into the void, and he may have just learned his connection to this mysterious goddess and his past.

The Commander could not tell him the truth, and he had to figure it out with the clues that were being given to him. As much as Elias wanted to piece together everything he had learned, he needed to move ahead with this trial.

He was nearing its end and did not have time to wonder how everything came together.

Bringing out all of the four objects, they fit perfectly in both of his cupped palms, and they began to grow warm, then hot, then burning, and he gasped as light poured from his chest through the nine marks on his chest.

The light covered the four objects, and they began to fuse. Elias’ eyes were fixed on this process even as the flesh of his palm began to blacken and smoke.

He could sense that the process of this combination was important, but could not fully understand it; Elias tried as much as he could to memorise what he was looking at.

He was beginning to see the rotating bones of his palms when the fusion ended, and what appeared on his palm after the purple light vanished was a small cube that was no larger than his palm.

Elias blinked. He certainly was not expecting a cube to appear after all of the objects fused together.

His curiosity triggered, Elias began to observe it more closely. Running his finger across its surface, he saw that it was smooth and its edges sharp.

It was made from an unknown metal, and it was warm, pulsing as if it contained a heart.

Elias was extremely curious about what all of this was about, and suddenly noticed that the cube was not truly smooth.

His skin had regrown over his palm, and due to how sensitive they were, he could sense extremely minute bumps over the surface of the cube.

Elias focused and began to slowly run his fingers over the cube. The impressions on them seemed random, and suddenly the cube glowed once, twice, three times, and then it vanished.

“Damn, I was only able to memorize a small part of those impressions. How am I supposed to leave this place?”

Elias stared at his empty hand for a moment, and the ground began to shake as a loud cracking sound suddenly erupted around him. The cavern was collapsing.

He turned and ran.

The tunnel that had led him here was gone. In its place was a passage he had not seen before, lit by a faint blue light that pulsed in time with the groaning of the stone. He ran toward it.

Even as he was moving, Elias knew he would not make it. The walls were closing, the ceiling was falling, and he was too slow.

He did not have any broken bones, but he was lacking Stamina, but it was almost as if the collapsing space froze for a brief moment, and Elias was able to squeeze through, but he nearly lost a foot.

Bursting into a cavern, Elias stumbled, rolled, and came to his feet. He looked around him, and the cavern was smaller, with smooth walls and a high ceiling.

“Good, nothing is collapsing,” Elias groaned and went on one knee, wishing he could just fall asleep in this position, but he could not stay here; this place was too dangerous, and he needed to go back to safety.

He rested for two minutes, and this brought up his Stamina to the halfway point and his health to about seventy percent. This would have to do.

Elias began moving towards the end of the cavern, approaching a corner. When he reached the corner, he looked ahead, and waiting for him were two figures he knew better than almost anyone in the world.

Two members of the Order, Rhys and Lyssa.

They were not wearing their usual clothes. Rhys was in black, his axes at his waist, his white hair loose, his pale blue eyes fixed on Elias with an expression he had never seen before.

Lyssa was in grey, her hands bare, her fingers twitching as they always did when she was about to work.

“Elias,” Rhys said. His voice was cold. “We need you to stop.”

Elias slowed, but did not stop. “Do you have any instructions for me? I don’t know how long this place will last, but there is a chance for it to collapse.”

“We know.” Lyssa stepped forward, her hands raised, her fingers weaving patterns in the air. “We’re here to make sure you don’t leave.”

He stopped and looked at them before looking behind him; there was no road left or any alternate pathway. Elias frowned before he settled his mind, and he calmly asked,

“Why can I not leave?”

“The Commander’s orders.” Rhys said, “Apparently, you’ve done well, Elias. Better than expected. But you’re not leaving until we’ve tested you.”

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