Oracion's POV

My eyes find themselves jolting open as I throw myself to a standing position, wiping away blood from my torn skin where leftover teeth stick into me. I begin pulling them out one by one, using the light of the rising sun as my torch but quickly looking around for Ira in order to cover his exposed body.

"Looking for something?" A fluently speaking voice emanates from behind me.

I turn back, noticing nothing but a wall of shadow extending far above me. A Sene, a very very big one at that. His eyes slowly beginning to show themselves as they examine my body up and down, gradually releasing Ira from the depths of himself but only partially.

"Could you let him go?" I ask.

"The child eater? No." He responds. "I'm taking back what he stole." He answers.

"And what was that?"

"Feelings, I will not grant this man the blessing of being able to feel the euphoria of what we went through, for that is something you must sacrifice yourself." He sticks some sort of tube into Ira's back, pumping out a violet liquid from him.

"It won't kill him, will it?" I ask.

"Vampire? No. Human, yes." He answers.

"Do you know where the woman we were with is?"

"Father moved, I came along with you in order to take back from this man. You should all be here." One by one more eyes begin to emerge as they stare at me diligently.

"I'm assuming the Apparatus was your father?"

"He protected, fed, sheltered and educated. Is that not a father's description to you?" He argues.

He's right, but I don't answer. Instead looking around further for Mousai. Wherever I checked, the Sene followed, peacefully he moved behind me albeit distracting as his body makes an eerie sound similar to a gas leak with each subtle movement.

"Do you know where your Father would be now?" I ask.

"Yes." He easily answers.

"Not much of a talker when you don't need to be, huh?"

"Not very good at direction, are you." He slyly responds, pausing us both as his wall of eyes all turn to face one direction in particular.

I ignore the jab at me as he tries to help, "You telling me to go over there instead?" His eyes roll as he goes ahead of me. Sass.

"Do you have a name?" My curiosity gets the better of me as I desperately try to fill the emptiness of his gas sound with our voices.

"Argus." He simply puts.

"I-"

"Oracion, I'm aware." He sounds almost disappointed.

His body suddenly stops as all his eyes invert towards me, following me as they try to make me go forward and ahead of him. Mousai's dress coming into view as she sits high upon a broken pillar of what seem to be ruins.

She wipes her face as shimmering water drops from the pillar and just beside me. "The Apparatus took a liking to us, if you ever find it again you should say your praises for bringing us here." She sniffles a little bit for some reason.

My heart hurts hearing her sad for the first time, "What for? I something wrong?"

She jumps down but doesn't face me yet, "We gods have something called a Grace, typically a power involving domination over something else. Whether it be water, nature, fire, space or even the literal embodiment of a spirit." She turns to me, one of her eyes now dull in colour whilst the over continues to spiral gold. "But there's strict rules that follow the powerful ones...I just broke that rule over my own."

I try to speak but I lack the words to offer her any sort of support. Even so, she continues. "Because of my restriction, I'm basically powerless against the gods directly as I cannot command anything without a spirit, something they've all long abandoned."

Stolen story; please report.

"So what happened to your eye?"

She covers it briefly as she very clearly feels incomplete without it, "The price of forcing a spirit into something that was never there to begin with. This world is all about equilibrium, if something wasn't meant to be there, then it won't be there. So I paid the price in order to force my will upon both the Moon Goddess and the Apparatus."

I look back at Argus as if he's got answers for me, but just as expected he continues to stand there. "So...if you did it again?"

"I would surely fall from Grace, becoming a Hollow. Remnants of a god lingering within me but overall I wouldn't be who I am." She smiles a bit oddly enough, "Whatever happens, however it happens, I won't regret it. As I was born with this for a reason, so I'll be the one to decide when my time is up. Much like how you are."

"Wai-" I go speak but she cuts me off.

"That Sene has Ira right? I can feel something inside of him, faintly breathing." She walks up to Argus, holding a hand out through the shadows and gently waving her skin through.

"He said his name's Argus, he's just removing something from Ira that he supposedly took from the other Sene." I respond.

"Argus? Quite the familiar name" She laughs to herself, "The Sene are rich in meat that can essentially get any organism high, so it's only natural Argus wouldn't want to share that. And if we're being honest, what your friend did..."

I look away, not really wanting to hear it again. "I'm aware."

She understands without finishing the sentence, looking elsewhere as she practically begins to bounce between the ruins where the rocks are engraved. Some raw materials sticking from the ground as they show off a black greenish hue to them, similar to the ones that enthralled light.

I lean in closer to examine it, pulling out my sword and noticing the similarities between them. "So I was right?" Mousai randomly announces.

"About what?" I respond.

She walks over to me, carelessly grabbing my sword by the blade as she smiles at it. "You got this from a place under the Veil, correct?"

"Yeah, I did. How'd you know though?"

"This metal is called Revenant, it absorbs practically anything that surrounds it. It can only form from the after effects of what the gods call, the Boundless. An infinity corridor if you will, connecting space where it shouldn't be connected and making travel possible where it shouldn't be." She drops the sword, eagerly looking around for some sort of entrance or hint.

Beginning to whispering to herself, "There was once a little girl, one so lost and one so keen. Nobody knew where she came from, and nobody knew where she was going. They say she danced between the twilight, affected by time but on the corridor to any period she wanted. "Are you alone?" a voice spoke to her." She rehearses as if hearing it somewhere before.

I can feel her excitement as she digs out the dirt from surrounding pillars, circling them with her hand upon her chin as she thinks to the depths of her mind, dirtying her once clean appearance.

Argus hums a little bit, causing us to look back at him as his wall of eyes suddenly emerges one of particular colour, a pink that glimmered as it took in the landscape.

Mousai gasps for some reason as she begins to follow wherever Argus is leading us to, "I hadn't considered it before, but the Apparatus back there intentionally didn't keep you within it just like us. You weren't human even before giving yourself over, were you?" She asks him.

He releases Ira from him, flopping him like a piece of meat along with the cloak to cover him while his clothes drip out liquids. "Believe what you need to in order to continue within this life." He responds, tapping on a specific slab of stone that rests upon the ground, alerting us to pick it up for him.

Ira stands up, fully conscious of the Sene behind him as he stares daggers back at Argus. But this only causes Argus to lean closer to him, "I could of taken a lot more from you, what I took was far less than what you deserve. Be thankful."

I can feel my blood heat up a little bit as if in response to Ira, a bond that's tied through Eragon that doesn't seem to be dissipating anytime soon. "Help me with this." Mousai breaks the tension partially as she requests help with the heavy slab.

We throw it up, kicking it down the other way to reveal the entrance. A freshly lit passage giving the impression someone just passed through here. The thought leads me to look back at the stone slab as I notice the moss on it, making that impossible for someone to of came through so recently.

Argus steps forward as he briefly leads us down, "Time, space...the rules you once knew, no longer apply here. Enter with your mind set on one place and that one place only." The corridor's pink engravings gradually light up as his body passes them, brighter and brighter until we reach what appears to be a dead end.

As the slab behind us slams back shut for some reason, we can't help but acknowledge the enclosed space we're now trapped inside of. Mousai leads her hand down the light as she stares at it in awe, "I've heard stories but I myself have never entered the Boundless" She laughs almost uncontrollably to herself for some reason.

"What's so funny?" I can't help but question.

"I-was scared to enter here on my own in all honesty but I've found some sort of solace in our luck." She looks towards Argus.

Ira releases a hum of clear uncertainty as he clearly judges her sanity.

"The Boundless is feral, a power far beyond and far before us gods. However there's a species that made their home out of it, ones that were able to influence it to benefit them in ways we'd never understand." She explains.

I remove the cloak from Eragon's head as I feel him tugging on it with his teeth as if wanting to say something, "I had heard they went extinct, wiped out by a force greater than themselves?"

Mousai shakes her head in disagreement, "Someone who 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯'𝘵 be there, someone who 𝘤𝘢𝘯'𝘵 be there, and someone who you've 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 met." Those were the means to identify them, so by that logic...everyone? "Our true eyes reveal who we are but nobody even knows what theirs are, some say gold, some say white, purple, red...but none can confirm."

Ira sits down, audibly slumping his body as he comes agitated. "Enough with the edging, so who are they?"

Argus' pink eye comes out once again, leaning in closer to the dead end as iridescent light begins to literally leak through the bricks. "They're the Fae."