Lucius could feel the hair on his arms stand on end while he moved, a primal response to an atmosphere saturated with the electricity of potentiality. It was as if the very fabric of reality here was thinner, frayed by the concentration of aether that had been channeled and bound into the stones.
He came upon a junction where the corridor split into a labyrinthine network, a maze that promised only madness to those who would traverse it without knowledge or guide. It was here that the dance of shadows grew more frantic, as if agitated by the convergence of paths. Lucius paused, the weight of decision heavy upon him. His mind puzzled at the problem, and the urgency and feeling of being watched from every direction made his normally methodical mind confused and uncertain.
Choosing a path at random—or perhaps guided by fate—he pressed on, his senses heightened to the point of pain. Each whisper of sound seemed to be a voice, each creak of the ancient structure a step, and with every breath, he felt as though he was drawing in more than just air, but the dark essence of the prison itself.
The maze of corridors seemed to close in on Lucius as he progressed, its walls pressing upon his psyche as much as they did upon the space. He felt the ghostly presence of the prison's long-dead occupants brushing past him, and sending a shiver down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. Every new turn and every new choice added a new layer to his growing confusion—and despite even magical effort, he could not remember the turns he had already taken.
He could only press on, and hope to find the exit before he succumbed to the psychic pressure demanding he break, shatter, and become another spirit haunting the endless dark.
With each choice he made the air grew thicker.
It was a toxic miasma of the arcane that clung to him like a second skin. The darkness deepened the further he went, becoming a palpable entity that sought to smother the radiance of his lightsphere, and in turn wither the resolve in his spirit. On he went, and finally a path sent him out of the abyssal labyrinth, into an open chamber with a single stairwell.
That wound deeper, spiraling downwards into the bowels of the planet and toward a forgotten revelation which he knew, to the depths of his soul, man had never been meant to find.
And yet, he could no more turn away than he could suppress the fear.
He was committed.
Whispers skittered across the stones as he walked and started down the ornate steps into alien darkness, slipping into Lucius's ears like a litany of voices that were at once alien and achingly, terrifyingly familiar. The murmurs were wordless but full of intent, and sought a communication beyond the grasp of his conscious mind. They tugged at the edges of primal understanding, and stirred some primate instinct within him that went mad with terror.
He was an intruder here, a speck of mortality trespassing in the dominion of the undying.
The weight of countless ages bore down upon him as he descended, and the very air seemed to bear testament to the timelessness of the prison. Each breath he drew was heavy with the dust of eons, and every mote seemed intent on suffocating his ability to continue—as if the very detritus itself were given a will and intent.
In all of his years, all of his travels, and all of his battles; he had never felt what he did then. He had never felt a force that so easily suffused him with instinctive dread. He wanted to turn back. He wanted to turn, and flee, and never stop until he was clear of the wretched place—and yet he didn’t. He couldn’t. More than fear, more than terror, more than primal instinct to survive, something else beckoned to him.
Something he could only describe as the inexorable tether of fate.
That compulsion grew magnitudes more potent while he continued his descent.
Lucius could feel himself approaching something. He could feel a shift in the air.
Something lived at the end of his path, waiting, listening, biding its time.
Waiting for him.
The path became a singular tunnel and leveled out smoothly as the walls closed in, almost suffocating him with their proximity. The air was a pressure against his temples, a grip upon his throat, and a veil over his eyes. The sensation of being watched intensified as if there were a thousand unseen gazes upon him dissecting his every move—a congregation of ghosts assembled to witness the culmination of a great scheme stretching across eons.
A pair of immense doors easily twenty feet tall awaited him, each marked with eldritch runes and thrown ajar as if to welcome him home.
Lucius emerged into the grand chamber beyond with the feeling of crossing a threshold not just in space, but in time. The stark transition from the claustrophobic confines of the corridors to the cathedral-like expanse of the sanctum was disorienting, and he took a moment to steady his mind. The chamber into which he stepped was a mausoleum of power, a sepulcher for the presence that dwelled in its center. The columns that lined the walls seemed to stretch endlessly upwards, their tops lost to the shadow that clung to the ceiling like a shroud.
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At the center of this solemn cathedral of stone, upon a dais of onyx, the creature awaited him—though Lucius had not anticipated such an encounter. He advanced with caution, his fingers twitching and the radiance of his lightsphere dimmed as if terrified of offending their unexpected host. The creature's form was stretched out, an effigy of what once must have been a regal and formidable being. Its body, though withered by the passage of time, was a tapestry of both grandeur and decay.
The skin that clung to its elongated frame was pallid, a ghostly canvas stretched over protruding bones and made almost translucent in its delicacy. A network of veins, dark and prominent, branched out beneath the surface like the roots of a gnarled and ancient tree, pulsing with the ebbing life of a creature that refused to accept death.
Lucius' approach was cautious, each step measured and reverent in the face of the sole living creature in the prison’s entirety. He knew, somehow, that it was the only creature—and perhaps always had been. It was not the sanctum that had been built for it, but instead the entire facility; one that had, over tens of thousands of millennia, been eroded by the force of the unknown creature’s will.
That was why he had made it so far. That was why he had even found the sanctum. His host had destroyed the barriers trapping it within, and done so over a time scale greater than all of human history combined.
Lucius rested his right hand upon the hilt of his aetherblade—a small comfort, and a whisper of protection against the unknown. The dim glow from his lightsphere cast an aureate sheen over the creature, highlighting the contours of its alien elegance and the ethereal quality of its slumber.
It was in this moment of hushed anticipation that the creature's eyes snapped open, orbs of an incandescent red that blazed like celestial bodies in the stark chamber. They fixed upon Lucius with an intensity that spoke of ancient wisdom and untold power, piercing through the gloom and rooting him to the spot.
He had never before in his life been frozen by a mere glance.
"You bear the stench of the hunted," the creature declared. Its voice was a paradox, at once a whisper that seemed to echo through the infinite corridors of the prison and a sonorous declaration that resonated through the very marrow of Lucius' bones.
Lucius' heart hammered against his chest, a primal drumbeat at odds with the spectral quietude of the chamber. Fear coiled within him, primal and terrified and begging him to flee; but shackled by an equally potent force—curiosity, and the insatiable self-destructive human need to know and understand.
"What are you?" he found himself asking, his voice a hoarse croak in the vastness of the chamber, weak from disuse and exposure to both the biting cold of the deathworld and the oppressive suffocation that pervaded the prison..
The creature seemed to regard him with a gaze that stretched back across millennia, its sanguine eyes a mirror to a time beyond Lucius’ conception of time itself. "A remnant," it responded, the masculine timbre of its voice tinged with the melancholy of eons spent in isolation. "A memory of Empire," it continued, a declaration that reverberated with the echo of fallen grandeur and the specter of dominion lost.
The creature lifted its hand slowly, and the air around it seemed to quiver, as if reality itself was reacting to the movement. The gesture was languid but deliberate, and each motion wove an unseen tapestry of ancient energies that curled through the chamber like the tendrils of an awakening storm. "And you, Lucius Argent, are my deliverance." it intoned, the words hanging in the air with the weight of a sacred edict.
Lucius felt the air in his lungs turn to ice, his body rigid as if caught in the gaze of some primordial predator. The creature before him was not merely a prisoner of this forgotten tomb; it was a relic of an age when such beings shaped the cosmos to their will. He was in the presence of history incarnate, of power that humbled the might of his own technologically-advanced civilization and turned them into a comparative cacophony of mewling babes.
The creature’s eyes, so like twinned crimson stars of otherworldly force, did not waver. They held him captive, not by chains, but by the sheer magnitude of their presence. In their depths, he saw the reflection of empires rising and falling, of the timeless dance of creation and entropy. The very air seemed to thrum with the creature's vitality, in a beat that was out of sync with the heart of a mortal man.
Lucius' grip on the hilt of his inert aetherblade tightened, a response born of his training and the instinctual, primate need for defense. Yet he knew, he knew that the weapon was as insignificant as a scalpel in the face of a supernova. The creature before him was a testament to an era when beings wielded powers that bent the fabric of reality, a time that Lucius could scarcely even begin to comprehend.
The tension in the chamber was a living thing, a serpent coiled tightly around the moment.
Finally, Lucius found the power to speak once more.
“What…” he licked his lips. “What is your name? What do you want from me?”
To this the creature smiled, and when it spoke, it did so with a laugh that echoed across the vastness of the chamber and filled Lucius’ Aether Core with the overwhelming force of its existence.
“I am called Arkaenan, Lucius Argent. I am the Sovereign of the Crimson Star.”
The name and title seemed to set the very planet to trembling, and Lucius found himself short of breath, felt his mouth turn dry, and his armpits lathered in sweat in the same instant as a terrible chill filled his blood. Reality itself seemed to warp under the force of the declaration, the Aether Core within his sternum quailed at the force of Arkaenan’s presence.
“As for what I want, my boy, that is the wrong question.” Arkaenan said with that same paradoxical blend of sibilant whisper and thunderous proclamation. “The true question, the real question; is what do you want from me?”
It was then, in that critical moment of revelation in which Lucius opened his mouth to answer that the hunters made themselves known—and the first kinetic strike slammed into the prison from orbit.