It was quiet.
Quiet, Rylafein had found, was not generally a relief. The strange Chaos-creatures he'd fought moved silently, favoring darkness and shadow and leaping from it to attack in an instant. So quiet did not mean safety.
It did not per se mean fear, either--not the way it once had, when the cave-creatures going silent meant that a monster was most certainly on the hunt. That descending silence had always been a signal that something unnatural was coming, and that Rylafein had best become Pyrrhus and prepare to fight.
Now, it was....more or less the state of things. The sounds of animals had dwindled over the years--long enough that Ryla was sure he should not still be young, preserved as he had been the day the sun rose and his world fell--until there was nothing. Until most of what he heard was the dripping of water and his own footfalls and breathing.
It was impossible to know, truly, how long it had been. In the caves that stretched under the entirety of Pyrrhus, there was no day or night--not like the shifting colors of the sky his world had once known, where although the sun never truly rose, there were still lighter and darker skies that made for a way to chart the passing of time. No, down here, there was nothing--and even on the surface, if Ryla dared return there to face the scorching heat of the endless day that had replaced his planet's natural night, the sun seemed frozen in the sky, not even managing the daily course the sky ought to have. Nothing but a forever-midday, making the surface utterly uninhabitable for life used to the darkness.
So, in truth, Ryla did not know how long he had been running for. How long since he'd cut his sister's throat and fled, living as hunter and hunted of his own scattered people. The ones he had once been sworn to lead. The ones who had once held him up as the son of their god, the finest warrior their world had produce din a generation, an unmatched killer.
But then, it was his own fault, wasn't it. He was the fool who had talked Bernard into seeking out that crown. An artifact of Chaos--an artifact of power.
Heibing had warned them. Stringently. And they hadn't listened. Hadn't paused. Had charged forward, reckless and certain, and now Bernard was dead and Ryla's world was shattered and he was.
Alone.
Except for the very Chaos he had unleashed.
Sometimes, he wondered why he had been allowed to go on for so long. His people aged slowly, but they did age--if they lived long enough to, if they were canny and strong enough, there were tales of great warriors who lived to be centuries old. The Senshi before him had been closing in on four centuries when a knife in his back had taken him down.
(People said his own brother--the man Ryla had grown up calling "Uncle"--was responsible. No one could prove it, of course, and even if they could, Elkaste never would have suffered any consequences. If Ryla's predecessor couldn't hold his own, that was his own fault, the general thinking went.)
But it had been much longer than that, Ryla knew in his bones. He might not have an objective way of telling how many days, how many years, how many centuries he had been scrabbling in the dark, surviving on scrounged cave moss and underground lakewater, but he knew it had been far, far longer than any Pyrrhan had been known to live.
It was an irony, he thought. The planet of nihility, of nothingness and endings, keeping its Senshi alive for so long to fight a poison he had introduced to it. It was, perhaps, also a punishment, that he endured in the dark and the depths, like some sort of creature out of his people's old folktales about what you might find if you went too far into the caves.
If there had been monsters there once, they were gone now, certainly. Hunted to extinction by the Chaos creatures Rylafein had brought, just like everything else on this world except for Ryla himself.
But it was quiet in the dark, and Ryla sat by the edge of a vast underground lake, and contemplated diving in.
The water was cold. Clear and fresh and drinkable, somehow, but so cold he knew swimming in it would be dangerous.
He wondered if he would fall asleep.
Once upon a time, he would never have considered such things. Once upon a time, he had never imagined that he might tire of fighting, of running, of surviving. He'd thought he wanted to live forever, to fight and ******** and see every bit of the galaxy with his husband and his cousin and his dearest friend, to never grow old and never die, to have all the time in the world.
What an idiot he'd been.
All the time in the world wasn't a blessing. It was a curse. An endless purgatory of struggling, of never being able to stay in the same place for long, of hoping that when Chaos caught him he was still able to fight it off.
Perhaps it would have been different, under different circumstances. But all he had was the darkness, and the loneliness.
He contemplated, staring out at the black lake before him. Part of him was afraid of what he was thinking of--part of him raged against even the idea of giving up. He had lived this long, fought for this long--surely he wasn't really considering giving up now, after all of that--
And as he contemplated, he felt something.
A pull.
For the first time in centuries, he felt something like--like a calling, like the world outside these damp, dark caves was reaching out for him and reminding him it was there.
And in desperation, he focused on that pull and let it carry him away.
Wherever he landed, it was bright. And loud.
He winced, at first, at the lights all around him--but it wasn't the agonizing, scorching sun on the surface of his world. After a few blinks, his eyes started to adjust--and he took in the lights of a city.
Centuries of darkness and silence, shattered all in a moment.
Pyrrhus took a deep breath.
And felt as if, perhaps, he might be able to go on.
[wc: 1069 words]
