Randidly had waded through violence since the System had arrived. Almost immediately, he had been tossed into a Dungeon and forced to struggle to live. Something tried to trample him and then something else tried to melt him with acid. Monkeys had Then Shal had arrived and shown him how to rigorously encourage his acceptance of pain and violence. In his master’s mind, such things were simply a part of life.

In a lot of ways, the past ten years had proved Shal right.

But Clarent had not been the one who had lived through those experiences. She had grown up under the peaceful rule of the Skykings. She was lonely and ostracized, but that did not prepare her for the sensation of her blade sinking into the chest of the first Skyking.

The squelching noise, the surprising spurt of warm blood, the dull grinding as she ripped through the man’s ribcage… all of these shook Clarent to her core. And she was so numb and shocked that she didn’t even notice the instincts she had inherited from the Limina rising within her.

The central jewel of her existence allowed not even the slightest glimmer. The black veins of her hilt pulsed and she began to suck out the light from the Skyking. By the time her father hand-planted his foot against the chest of the man and kicked the body away, he was but a husk of his former self.

And being stabbed with a sword was only the second-worst of his wounds.

‘What have you done?!?’ The central Skyking gasped. ‘Guards! Guards!’

Weirdly, through the numbness and unfamiliarity of her current form, Clarent felt the hint of warmth, for the first time in her life. She sensed the powerful spark of light she had stolen from the Skyking, floating in her body. She clustered around it, desperate to feel more of that warmth, especially now in this horrid situation where she was powerless yet soaked in blood.

The more her veins sucked at the light for more, the more the spark dimmed. Simultaneously she felt her own darkness growing more sinister and hungry. Although sucking away the light's power briefly titillated her with the sensation of warmth, it faded just as quickly. In its wake, the absence of that warmth made her ache with the craving for more.

Clarent was still coping with the rapid series of developments, but her father was not distracted from his task. He lowered his stance and accelerated forward. He cut down a guard with a blow to the side of her knee and spun out of the way of another’s thrust. Then he smashed the hilt of Clarent into the jaw of the central Skyking, crushing the bone.

The man yelped and fell backward. When he was sprawled out on the floor, Clarent barely even whispered as she slid down through his heart. This time, her father had avoided the ribcage.

It was so, so easy.

Clarent reflexively sucked out the second spark of life in only a half a second. Her darkness greedily spread and began to feed even more actively on her captive energies.

Then Clarent’s father turned to face the final Skyking. His guards were ashen-faced, but he was not afraid. He spoke quietly, full of urging. ‘You must stop. You will regret this.’

He did not dodge as Clarent’s wickedly sharp blade cleaved into his gut. And she could feel him willingly surrender his spark of life. Suddenly, her once transparent blade housed three drifting sparks of light and warmth that could do nothing to make Clarent feel any less alone. Worse, the scent of them invigorated her dark veins. Seemingly of their own accord, they stretched upward, the weight of their desire slowly warping the purity of her blade with their need.

Quickly, her father finished off the remaining guards. Unfortunately, word had gotten out due to the Skyking’s yells; the waiting army had retreated, horrified by the violent actions of Clarent’s father. For now, her father did not pursue. Instead, he retired to his chambers and favored Clarent with a smile. ‘Sleep, child. Today’s work is done. The rest can wait until tomorrow.’

Clarent could not sleep. She was a sword. So she just watched her father, horrified at how easily he could rest after having destroyed the order of things. Through the window of his chambers, she could see that twilight shrouded the whole of the world. It seemed that the lights she had taken were not just the lives of the Skykings.

When he woke, her father walked back over to him. ‘Now, it is time to finish things. With me wielding you, we can completely eradicate those that would resist us.’

‘But father… I’m not a sword,’ Clarent pleaded, feeling the lie even as she said it aloud. ‘Besides, they retreated. Why must we fight more? Let’s just leave each other alone.’

‘You heard the Skykings, they and their ilk would do anything to stop my plan,’ Her father’s visage darkened. ‘They are jealous of my pure light. They wish to pollute it. And each of the Seraphim holds their own seed of light. If we allow this to fester, more Skykings will appear that will sabotage us. No, we must exterminate them all.

‘Besides,’ he continued, his tone suddenly shifting to placating. ‘Do you not feel how you can feed on him? Do you not want to grow strong?’

‘No I don’t!’ Clarent shouted. The black core in her hilt swirled and hummed with the violence of her rejection. ‘I just… I just want to go back to the way things were.’

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Her father’s expression hardened. He cracked his knuckles. ‘Unfortunately for you, you do not get to decide your own fate; you are just a sword, Clarent. My hand will be the one who makes decisions-’

Seeing the utter contempt in her Father’s face was the last straw. The vibrations through her intensified until Clarent exploded with force. Her core cracked open and she shot toward the window like she was launched from a cannon. Her father’s hand whipped out to catch her, but she was already gone.

Sobbing and leaking her hungry darkness, Clarent drifted in the universe. She soon escaped the twilight and found herself amongst the empty planets. And the rest-

The world flickered. Randidly floated in the Field of Talons, looking meaningfully up toward the barren moor that now housed Clarent. With her understanding of herself and her emotional support shattered, she could not control the darkness within the blade. So the desolation spread, when those three sparks within her satisfy her baser desires any longer, and completely extinguished the Lizakh.

As soon as he moved, Randidly found himself on the dark staircase; the Visage of Obsession had activated once more. After an eye roll, Randidly took a single step downward. His mind moved toward the images he had seen, trying to find the final resting place of Clarent’s emotions.

A single step was all it took. Randidly swayed in place, looking blankly down in front of him. Below, there were no more steps. Just an emptiness, above the swirling mists that completely obscured the ground.

“You need to jump,” A voice whispered in his ear. Randidly nodded; he knew what he had to do. And as though it understood his concern, it continued to explain. “To jump is to let go of the boundary between most defined phenomenon. Including truth and lies. You’ll be freed, in a way. But be careful. Sometimes, viewing the whole of what is and can be leaves lasting damage.”

Randidly stepped off the edge of the staircase and into the air. His body rushed downward and plunged into the fog… which was suddenly the fog wafting up from the Field of Talons. He settled on the ground and steadied himself. Randidly couldn’t feel the chill they radiated, but he could observe it. Glancing around, he realized that of all the layers he had seen thus far, this was the further forward.

The closest to the end of this planet, crushed under the desperate grip of an unwilling sword.

“Randidly.”

He paused, just as he was about to gather himself to work on the core details of Claudette’s image once more. He pivoted and was suddenly somewhere else entirely. He stood on a boat, at night, the vessel bobbing up and down beneath him on the water. Only a short distance away, thick knots tied this vessel to others, forming a giant flotilla that was a city.

He accepted his sudden presence on Tellus without comment.

And there she was. Much younger than he remembered, and thin in her forearms and calves. She hadn’t yet sharpened herself into the deadly weapon that she would become. Her mouth twisted at the end in a very familiar way, however, even if the current version of that was much haughtier than what would follow.

She was lovely and graceful as she bowed at the waist, her eyes defiantly on him. She practically dared a rejection out of him. “I offer you my services as a Spear Attendant.”

Randidly’s vision split as his emotions roared to life, independently of each other. One was black and grey, filled with guilt and depression. He saw Helen broken and opened, left dead on the ground as a message for him. The other was red and violent, full of rage and hate and an endless craving for revenge. He heard Commandant Wick’s dismissive snort. These emotions would both be his gloves today, as he deftly guided the emotions around his hands.

With these gauntlets, he would finish forging Clarent.

“There are something things that cannot be done without you,” Randidly answered. He could not cry, but he ached as Helen raised a brow at his mysterious response, even as the mirage dissipated and spun around the seething furnace of emotions within him. His images were forced to expand slightly and draw again from the atmosphere, pulling in more vital energy to sustain his high functioning state.

Congratulations! Your Skill Tide of the Void (L) has grown to Level 361!

Congratulations! Your Skill The Wandering Deity Demands (T) has grown to Level 399!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Glittering Leaves of Yggdrasil (L) has grown to Level 396!

“Is that a yes?” This time, Helen raised her spear and faced off against him with her swirling lines of wicker blackness orbiting her. The Depths of Horror Domain flared. In the dark waves of energy behind her, something stirred.

Randidly absorbed his roaring emotions from this image too, taking everything into his hands, one grey, one red. “Yes. You are my knight. Always.”

In that moment, Randidly felt the whole of himself. He saw his journey under the System, all culminating to this moment as he forged Claudette’s image. He was a broad sea constructed of strokes of color that flowed and eddied. After he met Helen, he could see the way that they had impacted each other; the way their colors had steadily stained each other. Their seas rippled and seethed.

“Always?” Helen was there within his Dreamcatcher, tears in her eyes as she realized why he looked at her so solemnly.

He felt her death hit him with the same force as it had at the moment it had happened, her broken body reminding Randidly of all the ways that he had failed now and would fail again. Yet simultaneously he could see that the single event of her death changed nothing- he would remain stained by her. Their interactions had no beginning and no end.

Time would not affect that.

Always.

Yet that word and the shattering of Helen in front of him darkened his thoughts. Randidly’s awareness expanded forward, following the mark that she had left on him. He rushed forward to find his revenge on the Commandant but was stopped by Yggdrasil.

“Why?” He thought he spoke only mentally, but he felt the whole of Neveah’s Engraving shudder beneath the weight of that world. The grey hand and the red one moved restlessly, the knuckles straightening and tightening. His Nether Core used three grey bubbles to anchor itself and still it was almost collapsing inward with the ferocity of its rotations.

Yggdrasil shook its canopy. Some things should not be known. Not now. You have another task; a task that requires the touch of Helen, your greatest Knight.

Randidly pursed his lips. But still, he turned away, accepting the word of Yggdrasil. The layers fluttered past, like pages of a book. Suddenly he was back at the edge of that black moor, watching D’min pray to his Patron of the Sun as he was consumed by Clarent.

His gauntlets of emotional power crackled as Randidly drifted forward, preparing himself for the final adjustments.