Harald blinked.

All was still.

So, he’d survived Eclavistra’s attack. She’d been honest about that much, at any rate.

Groaning, he put his hand to his head and sat up. The demon was gone, and the air was clear and crisp and smelt of nothing more than the orchard.

Sam lay outflung beside him, unconscious in her ruined armor.

She was alive though. That’s what mattered.

Harald thought of how she’d stood up to the demon. How Sam had challenged her, denied her, and felt an upsurge of pride. Whereas he’d been mesmerized, his thoughts dulled, his very being resonating to Eclavistra’s physical presence.

He hoped it was due to some demonic aura.

Blinking, about to climb to his feet, he froze when a message appeared in before him:

You have become a focal point of the celestial war.

Your potential has been noticed.

By the authority of the Fallen Angel, you are hereby bestowed a new class:

Abyssal Initiate 1

Do you choose to accept?

And then beneath that, a new message appeared, as if distinct and private in nature:

The Demon Seed Has Stirred

There it is, thought Harald, inhaled raggedly as he absorbed the implications of the Fallen Angel’s message. Whereas before his resilience, bravery, and prowess had been noticed, now it was his very potential that had summoned the Fallen Angel’s attention.

And a focal point of the celestial war? That sounded grand, but it couldn’t be good. Not if it meant creatures of such power as Eclavistra and Vorakhar were going to contest for his loyalty.

Somehow elated yet sobered both, he summoned the description of his new class.

Abyssal Initiate: The path of the Abyssal Initiate is one of stark introspection and mastery over the abyss within and without. These rare individuals have peered into the chasms of existence and embraced the bleak truths to be found in their depths. This transformative path elevates them beyond mere mortal constraints. Initiates are marked by an uncanny aptitude for walking the darkest of paths, their souls resonating with the resolve of the cosmos.

Harald read the description thrice before acknowledging that he simply didn’t understand what it meant. My soul resonates with the resolve of the cosmos? Then, on impulse, he summoned his window and examined his Soul Nature again:

Insatiable Void: You are the aching heart of ambition, the howling hunger that yearns to consume the world. A child of darkness, you will always seek the light, but will destroy all that you pursue.

“That’s some synergy right there,” he whispered, shaken and unsure of himself. Already he’d changed so much—what would it mean if he doubled down on this path?

Sam was still unconscious. Eager for a distraction, Harald crawled over and pressed his fingers to the side of her neck. Her pulse was steady and strong.

Eclavistra was gone, but so was her protection. Wary, he rose to his knees and scanned the periphery of the orchard. Nothing but the crater where the statue had been blasted apart—and hovering over the ruins, a scale.

Harald’s eyes widened. It’s deep blue hue betrayed its value even from here: a Zenith Tide, easily worth 10,000 Copper Moons alone.

Did Eclavistra not care for wealth, or was such wealth so far beneath her that she’d disdained it?

Or had she left it behind as a parting gift, aware of what it might mean for Harald?

Sam groaned and winced, turning her head from side to side as if seeking to deny some awful truth.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, taking her hand. “Sam, I’m here. It’s all right.”

“Harald?” She blinked several times then focused on him. “Oh. I had the worst dream…”

He couldn’t help but smile. “Worse than this place? Must have been pretty terrible.”

“This…?” She sat up, the leather of her ruined armor creaking, then stared around them in horror. “Then it wasn’t…? Oh!”

“Message from the Fallen Angel?” he asked softly.

“Yes. Class award. It’s… Netherwarden Knight?”

“Never heard of it. What’s the description?”

Sam frowned. “Sworn defenders against entities that emerge from beyond, Netherwarden Knights wield the power of light and darkness in equal measure. Their solemn oath to protect reality from the encroaching nether forces grants them abilities that are both awe-inspiring and fearsome.” Her eyes widened. “Harald! That’s…!”

He couldn’t help but grin. “Sounds like your distrust of the demons has paid off.”

“You think?” She frowned, gaze still darting from side to side as she reread the message in the middle distance. “Oh wow. To defend reality from the encroaching… Harald!” Her joy was radiant as she grabbed hold of his arm and squeezed tightly. “It’s… this is perfect!”

He frowned. “Are you sure? It’ll mean giving up Majordomo. That’s a huge loss.”

She shoved him away playfully, biting her lower lip, then caught herself. “Oh. Did you…?”

“Nothing so noble. Abyssal Initiate. Listen.” And he read her the description.

“Elevating beyond mortal constraints? Sounds a lot like your Soul Nature,” said Sam. “Oh wait, let me check mine.” She focused, and then her brows rose higher. “It’s gone from Bright Star to Brightest Star. It now says: You are the beacon that cleaves through night’s veil, the unwavering luminescence that guides the lost and forlorn. Your strength is a promise to the world: a light that not only reveals, but elevates.”

Sam’s face grew pale as she glanced back to Harald, clearly awestruck.

“What was it before?” asked Harald.

She clearly knew it by heart, as everyone did: “You are steadfast among shadows, a symbol of hope and guidance. A gentle yet resolute force that seeks to uplift rather than outshine.”

Then her hand flew to her mouth. “Harald. My Soul Rank. It’s…”

“Divine?”

She nodded, horrified.

“It’s what happened to me after Vorakhar’s intervention.” He squeezed her shoulder tightly. “And it’s earned.”

“But… Divine?” Tears stood out in her eyes. “I don’t, I mean, I can’t…”

“Brightest Star. How could it be anything else?” Harald felt a burning warmth suffuse him, a mixture of pride and joy. “You’ve earned this, Sam. You chose to follow me down here into the depths. You stood up to Vorakhar and Eclavistra both. While I was entering a daze around her, I remember you staying sharp and true. And now with a Divine rank, there’s no telling how far you’ll go.”

“By the angels,” whispered Sam, overwhelmed. “I don’t feel worthy.”

“You’re going to have to get used to it.”

“And my Soul Ability.” Her voice had grown faint. “It’s now Celestial Guidance. And…” She dry swallowed, then read: “Your light transcends mere physical radiance, becoming a beacon for souls adrift in both darkness and doubt. Your journey illuminates paths not just through the world, but through the hearts of all you encounter.”

“Hmm,” said Harald, pretending to consider. “Sounds right to me. But we should hurry up and accept out classes so as to get out of here. I’d hate to have another statue wander by while we sit here chatting.”

“Right.” Sam inhaled sharply. “You’re accepting yours?”

“I don’t think I have a choice.” He considered the message again. Abyssal Initiate. Some classes could evolve if you progressed far enough, if your level reached sufficient heights. The ‘initiate’ thus seemed to be an implicit promise.

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He considered telling Sam that his Demon Seed had stirred, but decided to leave that for later.

“All right. We’re out of time. I think I’m going to accept. That’ll trigger our portal out of here, so we should do it together.”

Sam wiped her cheeks with the edge of her hand and nodded briskly. “Yes. Ready?”

“Let me grab one thing.” Harald leaped up, jogged over to the destroyed statue, and snagged the Zenith Tide. It was beautiful, its curvature gradating from black and slate blue at the base to a rich, royal blue at the upper reach. A quick glance around revealed them to still be safe, so he hurried back.

“A Zenith Tide?” Sam’s brows shot up. “She left it behind?”

“Guess it shows she cares.”

“Or doesn’t care. Still.” Her eagerness was apparent. “Ready?”

“Count of three?”

She nodded.

“Three. Two. One. Go.”

And Harald accepted Abyssal Initiate.

Class Acceptance Confirmed: Abyssal Initiate

The abyss whispers your name, and you whisper back. With this sacred bond, your journey into the depths begins.

Active Ability Granted: Abyssal Attunement

Harness the abyss's caress; let emptiness become your spear. Your strikes drain the essence of your foes.

Passive Ability Unlocked: Aura of the Aching Depths

Silence surrounds you, a cloak that saps the will of adversaries, making them falter where they stand.

Stat Boosts Applied:

+5 Ego: For the will to resist the abyss’s embrace.

+3 Constitution: To endure the pressure of the depths.

+2 Strength: The abyss tempers your might.

Your path is one of contradictions, a journey to master the abyss that seeks to master you. Rise, Abyssal Initiate, and claim your destiny in the depths.

But before he could process this information, his entire being underwent a profound change. At first it felt as if a icy feather brushed against the edge of his consciousness, like a shadow passing over the sun, causing his skin to prickle and his blood to run cold.

The abyss.

Never before would he have been able to intuit its call, understand its vastness, interface with its alien nature.

But now a profound silence enveloped him, a quiet so deep it hummed with the latent power of creation and destruction, both held in precarious and tenuous balance.

Harald drew a breath, feeling as if he were suffocating, and the sensation changed. Now he stood upon the edge of a precipice, peering down into an unfathomable chasm whose dark depths beckoned to him, defied his comprehension. The power of that abyss coursed through him like deep, cold water suffusing his being, making him feel at once vast and eternal yet paradoxically empty and rich with nothingness.

This pull, this siren-call of annihilation threatened to untether his mind, his very soul. Disoriented, panicking, he fought the urge to lash out, to struggle, and then anchored ever more firmly in his sense of self, in his will and essence. A sense of strength boosted him, not just infusing his muscles with iron, but girding his mind with a resilience to withstand the abyss’s siren call. His thoughts felt sharper, his resolve hardened. Even his efforts these past few weeks felt haphazard, prone to upswings and crashes based on mood and external events.

No longer.

The abyss was within him, without, and he rode its existential terror with surety, aware now of its terrible darkness but comfortable with his place in it.

And with that acceptance, the overwhelming vision faded away, leaving him once more kneeling in the tall grass of the orchard, himself once more but irrevocably changed.

“By the angels,” he whispered, blinking and gazing about. Everything felt more vivid, brighter, richer, as if by being contrasted with the emptiness of the abyss the inherent reality of the world was more pronounced and beautiful.

And his body.

It had absorbed the power of the abyss, the potency of it, and warped, changed, capitalized on the growth he’d been chasing these past few weeks.

He felt stronger. New muscle corded his arms, was layered across his back and chest, bulked out his thighs. Harald passed his hand over his chest, down his stomach. The fat hadn’t exactly melted away, but now he felt larger, made solid by deep, powerful strength.

And more: a new vitality smoldered within him, energy asking to be spent, reserves to be tapped. He felt as if he could run for miles without resting, could sprint now without immediately breaking a sweat.

He felt reforged.

Repurposed.

A purple portal appeared to their side, oval and coruscating with black shadows.

Then, like feeling the first warm rays of dawn unexpectedly at dawn after a long and intractable night, Harald felt a shift in the air, a lightening of his spirit, his breath steadying, his heart buoyed by gentle hope.

Sam, who had lowered her head as she wrapped her arms around her knees, exhaled deeply as she raised her face, eyes closed. Harald studied her, touched by an aura that had manifested about her form. Then her blue eyes opened, and within their depths he saw a new resolve, a bright focus, and kindness and radiance that made it appear as if the sun were shining through the heart of an azure glacier.

Her face had a new maturity to it, her golden complexion gently sun-kissed. She held his gaze with a new surety, and when she smiled, it made Harald inhale reflexively in amazement.

“Wow,” she whispered, then reached out for his hand, interlacing her fingers with his own and squeezing. “Harald. This is like nothing I could have dreamed.”

He laughed quietly. “And you want to know the best part? It just feels like you’ve become more yourself. This is always who you’ve been. Now you’re just able to show it.”

Her smile was warm, skeptical, but accepting. “How are you? You look… different.”

“The abyss is with me now,” he said, and realized that was meant as a joke was actually true. He could sense it, its depths invisibly somehow within everything, not part of the world, but lying between the smallest gaps, an omnipresent sense of yawning dissolution. He still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it, but it made Sam’s presence all the more welcome. “I haven’t had a chance to look at my new Abilities, though. Shall we do that when we’re out of here?”

“Sure. I guess I meant your physique?” She scrutinized him. “Your arms, for example. There’s more muscle on you. Strength gain?”

Harald nodded, trying not to smile.

“Very nice. I mean, yeah. Not bad.” Sam was clearly attempting not to look impressed. “But like you said, we don’t know how long the portal will last. Even with this new class of mine I’d hate to have to fight our way up to the 46th Level.”

Harald rose smoothly to his feet. Casting around, saw his badly scorched and warped longsword, and pulled it from the grass. Sam collected her own weapon, and they took one last look around the 47th Level.

“It’ll be awhile before we come back through here,” said Harald. “But I’ve a feeling that we’ll be returning.”

“One day,” said Sam, and held her hand out to him.

He took it, and together they stepped through the portal.

The sensation this time of transporting through space was completely different from last time; where before Harald had felt a terrible sense of dislocation and nausea, he now felt a moment of complete equanimity. No desire to scream, no urge to vomit.

Just a oneness with the absolute darkness, the wrenching nothingness through which they passed.

Then they were through and back in the warren on the 4th Level. There was no mistaking it, though it was clear Vic and Nessa were gone.

“How long were we down there?” asked Sam, turning in a slow circle.

“Hard to say. Awhile? However long it took the elixir to bring us back multiple times.”

“I guess Vic and Nessa moved on.” Sam trod warily to the archway and peered out into the main hallway. “Not that I blame them.”

“We’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.” Harald’s heart sank at the prospect. Nobody had gotten hurt due to his not mentioning Vorakhar, but forgetting to bring up a relationship with a major demon could conceivably be taken poorly. “And apologizing.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. This place looks relatively clear. Shall we take a moment to experiment with our new Abilities?”

“Yeah, absolutely. No sense in wandering out there without them. What did you get?”

“My Active is called Shield of Valor.” Sam backed away from the archway as she quickly scanned her description. “I can summon a spectral shield that both absorbs incoming damage as well as reflects a portion back at the attacker. It can be used to either protect me or an ally. It says it symbolizes my burgeoning ability to turn adversity into strength.”

“Great,” said Harald. “I appreciate your Ability already.”

Sam gave him a deadpan look. “Yours?”

“It’s called Abyssal Attunement.”

“Ominous.”

“Let me reread what it does.” He summoned his window and then focused on his new Active. A thrill rushed through him as he did: he finally had a class, and one so rare that he couldn’t even begin to guess what it might offer. The description appeared in the air before him:

Abyssal Attunement: Harness the void's caress; let emptiness become your spear. Your strikes drain the essence of your foes.

“Right.” He reread it one last time then dismissed the message. “Sounds like pure offense.”

“Compliments mine, then.”

“Sounds like the emptiness of the abyss both amplifies my attacks and makes it so I drain my enemies. Whatever that means.”

“The question is by how much. I guess we’ll find out soon.”

There was a new confidence to Sam’s tone that Harald enjoyed hearing; she was making more declarative sentences, not asking him as much for his opinion. It suited her.

“My Passive is Beacon of Hope,” she continued. “It’s an inspiration aura, I think. Helps my allies stay strong.”

“I felt it the moment you activated your class,” smiled Harald. “It’s wonderful. I can feel it right now. Like sitting beside a fireplace, or seeing a sunrise after a really dark and cold night.”

Sam grinned. “That’s me. Fireplace lady. What about you?”

“Aura of the Aching Depths.”

“Ominous again.”

Harald summoned the description and quickly read it out loud. “Silence surrounds you, a cloak that saps the will of adversaries, making them falter where they stand. So an aura effect. I think it’s a bubble of silence that saps the will of my enemies?”

“Well I don’t feel anything. I guess that means we’re friends.”

He closed one eye and grinned at her in amusement. “Guess we’ve finally got proof. So you’ve got your shield, I’ve got my draining strikes, you inspire me, and I sap the will of our foes. Not bad.”

Sam laughed. “Not bad? It’s all a question of how powerful those abilities are when we use them. But seeing as we’ve both only awoken our cosmos, they’ll be severely limited.”

“About that.” And Harald dug out the Zenith Tide scale. “This is enough to Ascend to our first Throne.”

Sam pursed her lips and nodded. “For one of us, at any rate.”

Harald turned it over in his hand. It was mesmerizing to gaze upon. He rubbed his thumb over the subtle striations. “If we take it out with us the city will tax forty percent. We’ll get six Aurora Veils back. We could split those two ways?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Her smile turned rueful. “You’ve got a huge duel coming up. I don’t. The choice is clear.”

“It doesn’t feel right for me to consume it all.”

“It won’t feel right for Yeoric to pound your head in, either. And then we’ll owe more Horizon’s Whispers than we know what to do with. Absorb it, Harald. I’ll stand guard. Then we’ll fight our way out of here and see what comes next.”

He wanted to protest, but a small voice in his core rejoiced. The scale represented power. Pure, unadulterated might. He’d absorbed an Aurora Veil to awaken his Cosmos, and that experience had been sheer bliss; he’d walked around in a daze for days afterwards, grinning like an idiot.

How would it feel to absorb an entire Zenith Tide all at once?

“All right,” he whispered. “But the next one is yours.”

Sam turned to face the archway, blade resting on her shoulder. “Sure. We’ll see.”

Harald lay down on the cold flagstone. In a pinch, you could just absorb a scale through your hand, but the effect was more instantaneous and powerful if you did so through your brow or your heart.

He rested the Zenith Tide over his chest. Interlaced his fingers over his stomach, and closed his eyes.

He’d not absorbed any scales since that Aurora Veil. Whereas most people enjoyed getting a bump of ecstasy from absorbing random Copper Moons or Silver Starbursts, he’d abstained from such minor hits out of a sense of misplaced pride; he wanted his ascension to be grand, purposeful, a single majestic rise in power.

Or so he’d told himself.

Now, here, lying on the cold stone floor, he could be honest with himself. He’d avoided incremental gains from a fear that they’d never amount to anything, that he’d never be good enough, or worthy of Ascending to his first Throne.

But those days were long gone.

The time had come.

Without an Ascended Throne, his new class abilities would be toothless.

Harald took a deep, settling breath. His stomach felt acidic, his body restless, but he schooled himself to stillness and focused on his deeply buried Cosmos, that elusive core of his power.

Where awaited the first of his many long ignored Thrones.

“Strength,” he heard Sam whisper.

And with that blessing, Harald absorbed the Zenith Tide into his Cosmos.