Whispers in the Dark

Power was a sickness, and the obsidian throne was its cold, black heart. For five days, Sasaki Ren had sat there, a king only in title, a prisoner in every way that mattered. The power they had crowned him with was not a gift of strength, but a fever that burned cold in his veins, a constant, chaotic whisper in the back of his mind. It was the voice of the Absolute Void, a chorus of nihilistic truths, empty promises of peace through oblivion, and the echoing, amplified sound of his own deepest insecurities. The abyss of Sheol was now inextricably connected to the abyss in his own soul, and the sheer, untamed magnitude of that connection threatened to drown him, to erode the last remnants of the boy he had been and leave only the hollow, echoing shell of the Vessel.

He was a prisoner of the throne, just as he knew, with a dreadful, soul-deep certainty, that Akari was a prisoner of her holy, white-walled citadel. Abyssal Guards, towering Fallen clad in jagged, primordial armor, stood a silent, eternal vigil at the edges of the vast throne room, their glowing crimson eyes a constant, unsettling reminder of his new reality. He was their Vessel, their King, the prophesied savior of their damned race. And he was more alone than he had ever been in his life, isolated not by walls, but by a power he could not control and a grief he could not share.

His waking hours were a hazy, disconnected fugue state. He would sit for hours on the cold, light-drinking throne, trying to parse the tactical reports from the various chieftains. They spoke of battles and skirmishes along a border he had never seen, in a war that had raged for millennia, a conflict that felt like a distant, abstract horror. He would nod, make the appropriate sounds of command, but his mind was elsewhere, lost in the echoing void within.

His nights, however, were the true torment. Sleep offered no escape, only a different, more intimate kind of hell. The moment his consciousness slipped, the nightmares would come for him. He would see Akari’s face, not as he remembered it from their last, perfect morning, soft with sleep and affection, but as he had seen it in the final, terrible moment of the Sundering—a mask of pure, unadulterated terror as she was consumed by a merciless, searing light. The dream would shift, and he would see her again, this time clad in radiant, white-gold armor, wielding a sword of pure sunlight. Her face in this vision was serene, beautiful, and utterly devoid of recognition as she unmade his new, desperate people, her divine light erasing them from existence with a gentle, pitiless grace. 

He would wake with his heart pounding, a silent scream trapped in his throat, the cold sweat on his brow a familiar, unwelcome human feeling in a world that was rapidly stripping his humanity away. He was haunted by the ghost of the girl he loved, and terrorized by the specter of the saint she was being forced to become.

On the fifth day, Azazel came for him. The ancient demon lord approached the throne not with the fearful deference of a subject, but with the measured, patient steps of a tutor addressing a difficult, self-destructive student. “The power is untamed,” Azazel rumbled, his ancient, crimson eyes studying Ren’s tense, exhausted posture, the way his hands gripped the arms of the throne as if to keep from being swept away. “It feels your grief, your unfocused rage. It churns inside you like a storm trapped in a bottle. A king cannot rule his kingdom if he cannot first rule himself.”

Ren’s gaze, which had been fixed on the cavern’s distant, oppressive, and lightless ceiling, slowly lowered to meet the demon’s. There was no anger in his eyes, only a profound, hollow exhaustion. “Teach me, then.” The words were quiet, a near-whisper, but they held a core of cold, hard steel, the sound of a man who had reached the absolute end of his own resources.

Azazel led him from the oppressive grandeur of the throne room, through winding, torch-lit corridors, to a vast, empty cavern at the edge of their subterranean city. The only feature in the immense, silent space was a perfectly smooth, circular floor of polished obsidian a hundred meters across, which reflected the dim, purple light of the distant crystals like a dark, still lake.

“The Void is not a sword to be swung wildly in the dark,” the old demon explained, his gravelly voice echoing in the vast, empty space. “It is the canvas upon which reality is painted. It is the silence between the notes of creation’s song. It responds not to incantations or rituals, but to will. To emotion.” Azazel’s gaze was sharp, analytical, and surprisingly compassionate. “Your despair is a deep and powerful well, boy. I have not seen its equal in ten thousand years. But it is a chaotic, desperate thing, the thrashing of a drowning man. To command the Void, your despair must be given purpose. It must be focused into a single, sharp point.”

“My purpose is to get her back,” Ren stated flatly, the words an unshakeable, absolute truth.

“A noble goal,” Azazel conceded with a slight nod. “But you seek to fell the sun by throwing stones. Your approach is born of panic. You must first understand what you are truly fighting for, beyond the memory of a girl. You must understand what you are fighting against.” He gestured to the center of the obsidian floor. “Reach out. Feel the emptiness inside you. That familiar, cold ache. Do not command it. Do not fight it. Simply… guide it.”

Ren closed his eyes. He took a deep breath of the stale, sulfurous air and focused inward, on the cold hum within him, the sickness of power that had become his constant companion. He thought of Akari. He pictured her in a cold, white room, surrounded by serene, smiling fanatics who called her a savior while they were systematically forging her into a weapon. He imagined her fear, her confusion, her profound loneliness. A surge of raw, black rage, born of his utter, pathetic helplessness, erupted from him.

A torrent of shadow, tangible as rock, burst from his outstretched hand. It was not a controlled beam, but a violent, messy, and uncontrolled explosion of raw, undiluted despair. It slammed into the cavern’s far wall with a deafening, grinding crash, shattering ancient rock and sending a tremor through the floor that nearly knocked him off his feet. The psychic backlash threw him to his knees, gasping, the whispers in his head screaming in a triumphant, chaotic chorus.

Azazel watched, unmoved, as the dust settled. He looked at the massive, newly carved crater in the cavern wall, then at the trembling, kneeling boy. “As I said. A storm. You cannot wield a hurricane. You must become its eye.” He turned, his great, leathery wings shifting slightly. “Your lesson in power is over for today. Your grief is too wild, too untamed. For you to gain control, you must first be given a reason to hate something more than you hate yourself. It is time for your lesson in truth.”

Ren did not expect to be taken back to the fortress, but to a deeper, more ancient part of it, a section sealed behind a massive stone door that bore no markings. It was guarded by two of the largest demons he had ever seen, silent sentinels whose very presence seemed to warp the air around them. The guards bowed and heaved the great door open, revealing a dark, silent sanctum that felt colder than the rest of the fortress.

“This is a place of sorrow,” Azazel said, his voice a low, reverent murmur. “It holds the memories of our greatest tragedies. I had not intended to show you this so soon, but your power is too volatile, too self-destructive. You need focus. You need to understand the true, monstrous nature of our enemy.”

He led Ren to a single pedestal at the center of the dark, circular room. On it rested a single, pulsating crystal, the size of a human heart. It swirled with trapped, purple shadows, a galaxy of captured pain. “What is this?” Ren asked, staring at the unsettling, seemingly living object.

“It holds the truth,” Azazazel replied, his voice grim. “The truth of the attack on the human village of Bethany. Our chieftains speak of it with rage and a thirst for vengeance. Zion speaks of it as proof of our innate savagery. Both are wrong. It was not an act of war. It was a tragedy.” He placed a heavy, scarred hand on the crystal. “This holds the final memories of a warrior who died there. He was not a raider. He was a father. And this… this was supposed to be a rescue mission.”

The crystal flared with a sudden, violet light, and an image, hazy and distorted, bloomed in the air above it. Ren was no longer in the sanctum. He was seeing the world through the eyes of a Fallen warrior, running through a burning village, the scent of smoke and cooked meat thick in the air. He heard the screams of humans, but also the roars of his own kind—roars that were not of battle-lust, but of pure, unadulterated, soul-shattering agony.

The memory’s viewpoint rounded the corner of a burning building. And then Ren saw it.

In the center of the village square, tied to crude wooden posts, were the small bodies of the Fallen children. They were not just dead. They had been systematically, methodically used for target practice. Their small, winged forms were riddled with arrows, pierced with spear thrusts, and hacked with clumsy, brutal sword swings. It was not the clean work of soldiers in the heat of battle. It was the cold, systematic butchery of a training exercise, a monstrous act of desecration.

A wave of pure, unadulterated horror washed over Ren, so powerful and so visceral that he fell to his knees in the real world, his own breath catching in his throat. He watched through the memory as the rescuer who held the crystal, the father of one of the dead children, let out a sound that was not a word, not a roar, but the sound of a soul breaking in two. And then he watched, in horrified fascination, as the warrior's humanoid form began to twist and contort in on itself. Bones snapped and reformed with wet, cracking sounds. Flesh tore and reshaped. 

The being’s despair was so absolute, its grief so pure, that it triggered the involuntary, horrific transformation known as the Harrowing. The warrior, the father, became a towering, multi-limbed, mindless beast of pure, instinctual fury. The memory dissolved into a red, chaotic haze of carnage as the transformed demons unleashed their grief upon the village and the soldiers who had murdered their young.

The image in the crystal died. Ren was back in the sanctum, on his hands and knees, retching onto the cold stone floor, his body trembling uncontrollably.

“Now you see,” Azazel whispered, his voice thick with an ancient, weary sadness. “This is what we face. An enemy that sees our children as sport. This is the ‘righteousness’ of The Most High. And your Akari… she is now their holy champion. Their sword of ‘purification’.”

Ren stared at the floor, his mind a silent, screaming void. The horror of the vision. The calculated, monstrous cruelty of Zion. He no longer saw them as devout followers of a different, stricter god. He saw them for what they were: a sickening, genocidal cult that practiced and perfected the torture and murder of children, hiding their depravity behind a mask of holiness and light. And Akari, his Akari, was their prisoner. His unfocused, self-pitying grief for her merged with a cold, focused, and absolute rage for the suffering of The Fallen. His despair had finally been given purpose.

He slowly, shakily, got to his feet. Azazel watched him, a wary expression on his face, perhaps expecting another uncontrolled, explosive release of power. But there was no explosion. There was only a terrifying, absolute calm.

The shadows in the room stopped moving. A profound silence fell, so deep and so absolute it felt like the world had gone deaf. The Absolute Void, feeling the diamond-hard clarity of his will, answered his call. It flowed from the corners of the room, not as a chaotic torrent, but as a silent, reverent tide. It crawled over his simple clothes like liquid night, hardening and shaping itself into an intricate, terrifying suit of spiked, black plate armor. It covered his legs, his chest, his arms. A horned helmet, its faceplate a blank, emotionless, and utterly terrifying mask, was the last piece to form, sealing his human face away from the world forever.

When it was done, he was no longer Sasaki Ren. He was a figure of cold, silent, and absolute dread. He clenched his newly armored fist. A single, silent, black crack shot through the solid stone floor beneath his feet, branching out like a bolt of dark lightning.

Azazel took an involuntary step back, his ancient, blood-red eyes wide with a terror that transcended respect. He fell to one knee, bowing his head. He had wanted a king. The prophecy, it seemed, had given him an apocalypse.

Inside the helmet, the world was muffled and distant. Ren could no longer hear the chaotic whispers of the Void. There was only a single, pure, and diamond-hard thought in his mind. He was no longer just a boy trying to save a memory. He was a King, and he would rescue the girl he loved from the hands of the evil, sickening, child-murdering cult that held her captive, even if he had to burn their entire holy mountain to the ground to do it.