Skill Used: Soul Projection (Contact With Unknown Entity)
Ruel attempted to project soul-essence into the null-zone to make contact with the sleeping darkness within the ancient dragon’s remains.
Result: Failure.
His soul-essence crossed the threshold—
And shattered.
Not destroyed.
Fragmented.
Like a beam of light hitting a prism—his singular projection split into a thousand threads, scattered in every direction by the null-zone’s suppression field.
Each fragment carried a piece of him—a memory, a feeling, a scrap of identity—dispersed into the dark like seeds on wind.
Pain.
Not physical.
Existential.
The sensation of being unmade—momentarily—into component parts.
Ruel gasped.
His body convulsed against the stone floor.
The violet cracks went dark—completely dark—for three heartbeats.
One.
Two.
Three.
Then—
Something gathered his fragments.
Not gently.
Not carefully.
With the casual precision of something so vast that collecting scattered motes of consciousness was barely an autonomous function.
Like breathing.
Like blinking.
His soul-essence was compressed—squeezed—back into a singular point and returned to him.
But not unchanged.
Something came back with it.
A voice.
Not sound.
Not language.
A pressure against the inside of his skull that became meaning:
< SMALL.
>
A pause.
An eternity compressed into a moment.
< BUT.
.
.
WRONG.
>
The darkness in the skull’s eye sockets shifted.
Not movement—attention.
Something that had been diffuse became focused.
A point of absolute blackness within the left orbit condensed—became a pupil of anti-light that fixed on Ruel’s prone form.
< YOU CARRY THE VOID IN YOUR FLESH.
>
A sensation—not words now—washed over him.
Curiosity.
Ancient, dusty, cobwebbed curiosity stirring after eons of stillness.
Like
Ruel tilted his head, allowing his own void-scarred flesh to pulse in sync with the darkness, testing if they are truly of the same kin.
Ruel tilted his head.
A slow, deliberate motion.
Reptilian.
The vertebrae in his neck clicked softly in the silence.
His violet cracks pulsed—dim at first, then with growing rhythm.
A heartbeat cadence.
Thum-thum.
Thum-thum.
He wasn’t speaking. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He was resonating.
The void-scarred tissue along his spine, his flanks, the fracture-lines that webbed across his skull—all of it synchronized into a single frequency.
An offering.
A question posed in the only language that mattered here:
Are they the same?
Skill Used: Void Resonance (Kinship Test)
Ruel attempted to synchronize the void-energy within his scarred flesh to the frequency of the ancient darkness, testing for shared origin.
Result: Failure.
His cracks pulsed.
The darkness did not pulse back.
Instead—something worse.
Something more intimate.
The anti-light pupil in the skull’s left orbit narrowed.
Focused tighter.
And the pressure against Ruel’s mind returned—heavier now.
Dissecting.
< NO.
>
The word landed like a hammer blow.
Ruel’s void-cracks stuttered—their rhythm broken.
< YOU ARE NOT VOID.
>
A sensation accompanied the denial—cold, clinical examination.
Like being held under a magnifying glass by something that could read the architecture of his soul the way he might read claw-marks in mud.
< YOU ARE.
.
.
SCARRED BY IT.
MARKED.
CONTAMINATED.
>
A pause.
The darkness shifted—coiled differently around the cathedral ribs.
The attention sharpened further.
< A MORTAL SOUL THAT TOUCHED THE SPACE BETWEEN.
AND SURVIVED.
>
Curiosity intensified.
But now threaded with something else.
Something that made Ruel’s Dragon Fragment flare with instinctive warning—
Hunger.
Not physical.
Intellectual.
The hunger of something that had existed alone in silence for so long that novelty had become the only sustenance that mattered.
< THE VOID IS NOT A THING.
IT IS AN ABSENCE.
I AM WHAT GREW IN THAT ABSENCE.
>
The skeleton’s jaw—massive, draconic, black as the space between stars—shifted.
Not physically.
Ruel forced his voice through the pressure, a jagged, guttural sound.
“Then if I am a stain, why keep me here?
What is it you want from me?”
The words tore from Ruel’s throat like broken glass.
Not elegant.
Not dignified.
A ragged, guttural sound that defied the crushing weight of the entity’s attention—each syllable forced through a pressure that wanted him silent.
His vocal cords—barely developed, meant for growls and roars—shaped human syntax through sheer spite.
The sound echoed in the chamber.
Small.
Finite.
Alive in a way that nothing else here was.
The anti-light pupil dilated.
Silence.
Long enough that he wondered if he’d been dismissed.
Long enough that the cold seeped through his belly-scales and into his bones.
Then—
< WANT.
>
The word arrived with a sensation of amusement.
Dusty.
Creaking.
Like a mechanism turning for the first time in millennia.
< AN INTERESTING ASSUMPTION.
THAT I KEEP YOU .
THAT I WANT.
>
The darkness coiled—tighter around the vertebrae.
The cathedral-ribcage seemed to contract slightly, though no bone moved.
< YOU WALKED HERE.
YOU FLARED YOUR LITTLE LIGHT.
YOU PROJECTED YOUR SOUL IN TO MY SPACE LIKE A CHILD THROWING STONES IN TO AN OCEAN.
>
A pause.
The hunger-curiosity sharpened.
< I DO NOT KEEP YOU.
YOU ARE FREE TO LEAVE.
>
Another pause.
Heavier.
< BUT YOU WILL NOT.
>
It wasn’t a command.
It was an observation.
Delivered with the certainty of something that had watched countless mortal creatures behave in predictable patterns across epochs.
< BECAUSE YOU ARE HUNGRY TOO.
>
The pressure shifted—became almost conversational.
Less crushing.
Still immense, but restrained.
A giant choosing to whisper.
< YOU WANT TO KILL GODS .
I TASTED IT IN YOUR FRAGMENTS.
THAT RAGE.
THAT ABSURD, BEAUTIFUL ARROGANCE.
>
The left orbit’s pupil shifted—drifted downward—fixing on the void-cracks along Ruel’s body.
< YOU ARE A STAIN, YES.
A SMEAR OF VOID—
Ruel struggled to his feet, his claws digging deep into the stone.
“If it’s arrogance you admire, then teach me how to sharpen that blade.”
Ruel rose.
It was not graceful.
His left shoulder screamed—strained from the fall.
His limbs trembled under the psychic weight that permeated the chamber like deep-sea pressure.
Stone cracked beneath his claws as he forced them down—anchoring himself upright through sheer refusal to remain prone.
He stood.
Small.
Broken in places.
Violet light guttering along his fracture-lines like a dying candle.
But standing.
The anti-light pupil tracked his movement.
Slow.
Deliberate.
The way a scholar might watch an insect do something unexpected.