Jelick Youmun stood under the observation tower and stared anxiously upward. His skin was moist with sweat. For whatever reason, the rhythm of his day was off today. He had arrived early for his shift, with the sun still hanging low in the sky. It would probably take another hour for night to come. The guard crossed his arms and uncrossed them, over and over, wishing time to move forward.

Why had he come early?

The air in this deserted part of the Fifth Cohort was hot; uncomfortably so. Jelick began continuously wipe away sweat as he waited, exposed to the elements in his position below the observation tower. In order to placate his fluttering worries, he settled back on the familiar activity of counting his own heartbeat. His eyes practically glazed over as the sun fell toward the horizon.

Nothing was as important as restoring his rituals.

At the proper time, Jelick roused himself he raised his head and watched as the entrance to the observation tower swung open. The familiar form of his fellow guard that formed the other half of this watchtower tandem stood in the doorway.

It was the same guard with the same lined face. The familiarity was reassuring. Jelick licked his lips. “Anything to report?”

There were a few beats of silence. The other guard hesitated, his face twisting in indecision. Jelick felt like the bottom fell out of his stomach. His sweaty hands turned instantly clammy.

“...technically nothing…” The other guard shook his head. “But… I have a bad feeling. The monitoring equipment has been getting some strange readings. Keep an eye on it.”

Jelick Youmun’s feet were frozen to the ground as the other guard hurried away from the post. All of Jelick’s own stress was compounded by this additional news from his partner. His own horrible sense of impending disaster was triumphant in his chest. It clamored for Jelick’s attention, but he ignored it as best he could. The guard stiffly climbed up into the observational tower and looked at the monitoring equipment; as his fellow had suggested, the needles occasionally twitched for no discernible reason.

Jelick looked up at the wide-open sky in front of him. The last light of this planet’s sun was sinking below the horizon, allowing a complex network of stars to creep across the sky like deadly mold. A small, yellow moon hung close to the horizon straight ahead. As Jelick tried very much to calm himself, his eyes settled on that moon.

It was a slightly unfamiliar sight, which was one more shock to his already overloaded system, but the innocuous celestial body became a resting place. His heart could beat, he could stare at the moon, he could recover his equilibrium.

Perhaps the strange readings from the monitoring equipment were simply a malfunction. Those stuck up individual from the Engraving Guild might act superior, but they were just as prone to failure as the rest of them. If nothing occurred during this shift, Jelick resolved himself to complain to management that the equipment was faulty.

Now, he just needed-

Jelick paused. His eyes were still on the moon, but there was something… different about the whole of what he saw. He stared at the distant sphere with a frown on his face. Was it a change in the color…? But no, it’s pale yellow was still the same.

Jelick shook his head decisively. Perhaps the moon was just moving closer or farther away from the horizon, due to his planet’s rotation. It was strange that he had never noticed this moon in the past, but Jelick was already too frazzled to let something small like that faze him now. He settled into a comfortable position and began to count his heartbeats.

He was determined to move past this day.

One…

Two…

Three…

It only took ten heartbeats for the moon to once again seize Jelick’s attention. Suddenly, he understood the strange impression that the moon was giving him; the current moon was noticeably bigger. It was once a small coin in the sky, but now it was around double that size.

Jelick coughed lightly. Perhaps… perhaps this was also due to the rotation-

In a flash, the moon was as big as an apple, hanging above the observation tower with almost antagonistic realism. Jelick’s heartbeat counting tumbled to a stop.

Five seconds later, there was another shift and the yellow moon had doubled again in size. From yellow, it shifted toward a radiant golden as the quality of light that it was reflecting down on Jelick’s planet changed. The air seemed to glitter, despite the fact that it should be night.

Then it surged closer and took up a third of the horizon, making the light it released was almost blinding. Jelick was trembling in his seat. His body was slick with sweat.

The next jump quenched the light entirely. The observation tower was suddenly entirely in shadow. The entire sky was filled with the looming moon. With such a short distance between the two celestial bodies, the moon above was dark and ominous, hanging over Jelick Youmun like a guillotine.

From that dark landscape in the heavens, the seething hordes of Nether Beasts began to descend. It was only when the alarms from other observation towers began to ring that Jelick Youmun remembered to trigger his own.

*****

The shade worked tirelessly, first reinforcing the pillar with the memories that it had gathered, then by beginning the process of Engraving. Each motion contained within it the full weight of the shade’s Nether. This core room of the floating island began to hum with the surging energies of connection and memory.

For good measure, the shade grew several extra arms. Then it began to Engrave all three base patterns all at once.

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For the Yggdrasil carving, stability and growth to compensate for a childhood of loss and instability. From the Grim Chimera, a deep-seated craving to change in a manner that would make the complex social interactions of a modern world a little easier on a misunderstood young man. And the Stillborn Phoenix eternalized that sense of helplessness an individual experiences before the unrelenting might of reality. The shade’s third image was the accumulation of compromises, spread across an increasingly dangerous life.

Each Engraving took up about a third of the pillar. They glowed with obsidian energy, the ambient waves of significance that they released lapping up against one another in complex patterns. Then came the difficult part; the shade began to layer all three Engravings across into each other’s territory.

For this step, the shade needed to move up and down the length of the entire pillar. Layering in a small space was literally impossible, but even with the larger space, it was extremely difficult. The subtle permutations of depth and breadth of Nether flows were innumerable. A normal human brain simply couldn’t handle the sheer number of permutations.

Luckily, the shade was only barely human these days.

During the Engraving process, the shade swiftly grew annoyed with the pillar itself; it dearly wished it had found a less durable material for his Nether Core. Obviously, the physical power would prevent it from being damaged, but Engraving each line required significant amounts of Nether energy. Even the shade’s instincts wondered where such a pillar came from.

Had the shade not obtained that dense pooled significance from the tomb, it would have needed to take several breaks already to replenish its strength. As it was, it quickly devoured the ambient significance and converted it into its own. And then it looked at the grey-green pillar with reddening eyes. There was so much more to Engrave.

What the hell was this pillar, anyway?!?

As the layering continued, the requirement of specific depth for the lines the shade made grew increasingly harsh. The Nether Engraving pulsed, releasing a baleful light into the sealed room. The shade could sense the island around it slowly shifting, both because of the actions of the workers to activate this place and because of the ambient Nether flows stemming from the very actions it took.

The Nether Core was, as advertised, the ‘core’. The energies of this location naturally were steadily being integrated into the core. As a core, that was its prerogative.

But neither of those phenomena was what attracted the shade’s attention. No, when it took rare breaks from the exhausting process of Engraving, it looked up in the direction of the sky and frowned for an entirely different reason. It didn’t understand how it was possible, but that being of Nether had locked onto its position once more.

It rapidly approached Expira, its pursuit of the shade continuing across Cohorts.

The shade clicked its tongue silently, a motion that it didn’t truly understand, but one that was leftover in its instincts. Then it turned back to the Nether Core. Its many hands moved ceaselessly. The layers of the differing significances began to steadily overlap, deeper and deeper. As the shade proceeded, it could feel its spectral body steadily growing weaker; the process of Engraving was more exhausting than it had anticipated.

Occasionally, it would take breaks to recover its energy, but the looming threat of the approaching Nether Being made it tense. Yet despite its emotional turmoil, it did not hurry in its Engraving. The Nether Core was more important than anything else. The shade was a being streamlined for this purpose; even though it was nervous, those emotions didn’t manifest in its work. The Engraving continued smoothly.

The layering deepened. Waves of force rippled across the pillar, strengthening the material. There was only a thin layer of Nether allowed by the System in the surrounding space, but that Nether began to naturally swirl inward. The Core exerted its influence in the surrounding space, steadily changing the surroundings. The materials of the entire island gradually shifted toward something beyond the physical.

Waves of ethereal black energy lapped back and forth over the pillar.

Yet on the cusp of completing the humming Nether Core, the shade paused the process. It looked up toward the sky, at the Nether Being that approached. The shade could feel that Nether Being gathering power to strike against the reinforced Aether protections in the area around this world and the Seventh Cohort more broadly.

Slowly, the shade began to smile. Leaving the Nether Core a single step away from completion and its first energy rotation, the shade utilized the principles it had learned in the tomb it had visited to rapidly construct a more typical Engraving.

Except this Engraving flowed easily through the air, rapidly seeping out into the surrounding space. The longer the shade worked, the further its Engraving spread.

The shade’s instincts had felt a great deal of worry about the completion of its Nether Core. It had already attracted enough dubious attention with the creation of its Fateset. To create a Nether Core in the eyes of the System was something that it didn’t want. However, circumstances had conspired against the shade; to reach the ability to finish his Nether Core so quickly, the original version of itself had to be trimmed down. It didn’t understand the details, but there were other methods it could have used if it retained its full capabilities.

As it was, the shade could only muddle along as best as it could. With quick flicks, its hands accelerated forward, drawing heavily on its Mana. The Engraving expanded, crossing mountains and rivers and ocean sot reach the ends of this world. Then the shade released a long breath.

Suddenly, there was an opportunity. Or rather, its instincts told the shade that it now had plausible deniability. After a few more seconds, the entire world was wrapped in this new Engraving. The shade’s fingers buzzed with the energy friction it had generated with its rapid Engraving patterns.

The shade finished its ancillary Engraving and looked up at the sky with anticipation. The Nether Being gathered more and more power and then brought a swirling maelstrom of Nether crashing down on the Nexus’s defenses. For a second the Aether held, but then everything cracked and began to disintegrate.

Suddenly, the pursuit became the perfect distraction.

With a smile on its face, the shade activated the familiar Engraving it had made. In a split second, a wave of power spread rapidly across the whole world. The Overlay System that so worried the shade’s instincts was dislodged. A new overlay slipped into its place.

One of the shade’s pairs of arms moved quickly, drawing several lines of Nether to connect the layering. With a shudder, the Nether Core was finished. Energy rapidly began to rush through the layering, rising in intensity with every revolution. The ground beneath the pillar began to crack. Sizzling bolts of ambient energy lashed off of the pillar, charring several spots in the surroundings.

The shade watched intently. Above, the Nether Being struggled to rip through the remnant defenses in the area and descend. The shade’s focus narrowed. It would not be distracted, despite the extremely tense situation.

This situation had become a race. Although the System could no longer observe this place, the shade still needed the Nether Core to be complete to move to the next step.

Energy pulsed through the pillar, suffusing through the entirety of the Engraving. The energy soaked outward, running through the concurrent layers. The grey-green pillar shuddered. After several long seconds, the revolution of energy was completed; there were no obvious flaws in the Nether Engraving. The Nether Core was complete.

The gamble paid off.

The shade looked upward and winked. Then, the Nether Core’s energy exploded outward. The Nether Being descended from the sky, intent on the shade. But the energy of the core was faster. Soon, it covered even the atmosphere of Expira.

Where there was a core, there could be a ‘bubble’.

There was a flickering pulse and Expira vanished, slipping through the small allowance of space left by the Nexus. The Nether Being’s force crashed into empty space. After searching the surrounding area, it raised its head and howled its fury.