Chapter 160 The First World

Chapter 160 The First World

"What..." Erebus's voice came out low, threaded through with a confusion he hadn't felt in longer than memory could reach. "What is this?"

He was no longer at the heart of the phage. The noise had gone with it — the legion-voice of the Primordial Darkness that had rung inside his skull for longer than he could count, the churn, the dead weight pressing on every inch of him. All of it, simply gone.

He looked down at his own hands. No rot along the skin. No weakness in the joints. No chains. He felt alive, felt like himself, felt, for the first time in an age, like Erebus before he had ever become this Erebus.

He was standing atop a hill he had never once set foot on. It was beautiful beyond reason, green in every direction, wildflowers and orchids threading color through the grass, their scent so fresh it ached. Small creatures darted in and out of burrows at the treeline. A stream ran the length of the valley below, gazelles bending to drink from it without fear.

Smoke curled lazily from distant chimneys. The smell of honey and fresh bread drifted up from somewhere he couldn't see. Homes nestled beneath the green slopes, and somewhere close by, a soft sound rose that he couldn't quite place — laughter, maybe, or a song half-remembered.

It was perfect. Too perfect to be real.

"Where..." He breathed the air in deep, and let it out slow, something in his chest unclenching for the first time in ten thousand years. "I love it here. I could stay like this forever."

"It was your birthplace, Erebus."

Zuri's voice came from behind him. Erebus turned, sharp — and then understanding landed, and the breath went out of him in one long sigh.

"By the spirits. What illusion is this, Darkmoon?"

"It's Zuri. At least use my name, before the end." He said it without any edge to it at all. "It's warm here. Serene. I could lie down in this grass and never leave." He turned to face Erebus fully. "You don't remember it? This is your home, Erebus, the world the Hands of Creation shaped for your kind, before any of what came after. It isn't an illusion. This is a hundred thousand years gone, when you were still a toddling god learning to walk. I turned time back, further than I've ever dared to reach before. Before... well. You know."

Erebus's eyes went wide. He looked back down at the hillside, unwilling to believe it even as it stood in front of him.

"You're telling me this is..."

"The first world, Erebus. Where every godhead and custodian was born. Mine, too." Zuri watched him carefully. "Would you like to walk it?"

"Give me a moment." Erebus stood frozen, stunned. "I don't remember any of... wait." He turned back sharply. "Are you certain of this?"

"Don't you feel it? The familiarity in the air itself? This is the Aether, Erebus. The Dawnless Realm. This is home."

"You brought me here to see it, before I go. Is that the idea?" His frown didn't quite hold.

"It's the only timeline the Primordial Darkness never touched. A sacred memory, preserved whole."

Erebus stared at him for a long, uncomfortable stretch of silence.

Then a laugh broke loose from him, loud and completely unguarded. "You mad genius." His face split into a grin. "I love it."

He took off down the hill like a child who'd found his way home after a day lost in the fields, laughing the whole way down the breezy path. Zuri followed at a slower pace behind him.

Erebus went at it like a man starving. First the stream — he dove straight in without a thought for the startled gazelles, coming up gasping, the water hitting him like something holy. He splashed through it, laughing at the cold of it against his skin. Then a beehive, which he struck without thinking and fled from howling with laughter as the swarm rose after him. Then the trees. The undergrowth. The orchard heavy with wildflowers. The horses running loose at the valley's edge. The hum of the apiary at the tree line.

Zuri watched him from a distance, a small, warm smile settling into his face. A single tear slipped free without him noticing it had.

He let Erebus have his hours. Let him ride the wave of something he hadn't felt since before he had a name for what he'd lost.



"Erebus." Zuri called to him eventually, as he lay sprawled and laughing in the flower garden, crushing a season's worth of careful planting beneath him. "Someone tended those with real care, you know. You're ruining their work."

"I'll apologize to them later." He sat up, brushing petals from his robe, breathless. "Let me have this. I feel young again, Zuri. Is this what happiness feels like?"

"It's almost time, Erebus." Zuri's voice dropped low. "You're already beginning to fade. There isn't much time left."

The joy drained out of Erebus's face all at once, replaced by a sorrow he had clearly carried, quietly, for thousands of years.

Zuri crouched down beside him. "I need to take the reins of the cosmic phage. Lend them to me."

"Why don't good things ever last, Zuri?" His voice had gone quiet, quieter than even he seemed to expect from himself. "It isn't fair. Some of us are born into a world like this, and some of us rot in the slum-planes of creation without ever knowing the difference existed. I'm tired, Zuri. I want to lie down on this hill and sleep. Let all the rest of it be nothing more than a bad dream."

"Your life force..."

"Was forfeit a long time ago." He cut in gently. "I've been an empty husk for longer than I can remember. My whole existence, I planned and plotted how to unmake creation, to make the Hands pay for casting us out the way they did. But now..." He looked down at his own hands, still damp with garden soil. A tear fell onto them. Then another. The first he could remember shedding in longer than he could count. "I'm sorry, Zuri. For every bit of ruin I set loose on the world. I'm past redemption. Past saving. Let me rot for what I've done, let this be my atonement. If I'd only remembered that the Aether, our first home, was ever like this, I don't think destruction would have crossed my mind at all."

"The Creators made us. But what we do with that making, that's ours to choose. Our fate might have been given to us, inborn, but I've learned something from a mortal that I intend to carry the rest of my days: we are not the makers of our fate. We are the shapers of our destiny."

Erebus laughed, soft. "I like that. I think I'll carry it too, wherever I'm going. Thank you, Zuri." He extended a hand. "Here."

Zuri took it.

A small tremor passed between them. "Even reaching this far back, this realm won't hold violence. Let me take the torch I handed you once, long ago, without ever meaning to burden you with it. Rest easy now, Erebus. The Primordial Darkness is mine to carry, far from reality's reach. What was unmade will be remade. The Hands will come, and set the rest of it right."

"Thank you. I can rest now. Pass on in peace." Erebus exhaled, long and slow, and something left him in that breath, invisible, but immense. "There. It's done."

"How does it feel, old friend? Dying?"

"Better than living with fury and regret ever did." Erebus laughed, quiet and real. "We lied to ourselves, Zuri, all those years."

"About what?"

"Feeling anything at all." He looked at his open hands. "We were never separate from empathy, rapture, fury, malice, greed, envy, love. We were the ones who made them possible in the first place. Fighting that truth was the worst mistake either of us ever made." His eyes met Zuri's, clear for the first time. "Farewell, Zuri. Perhaps in another life, another reality, we won't be enemies at all. Perhaps we grow up side by side. Friends. Brothers, even."

They shook hands, firm and sure.

"One more thing, my friend." Erebus said.

"Anything."

"I love it here. Let me stay." His voice cracked, hopeful in a way that hurt to hear. "Maybe it was always meant to be this way, maybe that's why you brought me here at all. Let me rest in the one home I was ever truly given."

"Erebus, I..."

"Erebus! Where are you hiding, you mad child!"

They both went still.

The matron's voice. The one who had nursed every godhead born into the Aether, Erebus among them, once.

Zuri had no words left. His mouth opened and found nothing to fill it with.

"Erebus!" The voice called again, closer now, threaded with the particular exasperated fondness of someone who had called that name a thousand times before.

"Zuri..."

"Go." Zuri let go of his hand. "You're home. I won't be the one to take that from you. Farewell, Erebus. Making peace with you was the one thing I wished for, more than anything else in this long, long life."

Erebus's eyes filled, unshed, and he broke into a grin wide enough to hold every version of the boy he must have once been.

He turned and ran for the house without looking back.

Zuri watched him go until the hillside swallowed him whole. He had already passed on — being here, this far back, changed nothing about that.

But perhaps it would branch into something new. A timeline where a small god was never abandoned, never turned rogue by grief he had no name for. Perhaps somewhere, in some fold of reality he'd never see, it would turn out differently for him.

Zuri turned away and started up the hill alone.

His hands pulsed suddenly, hot enough to make him wince. He opened his palms and found them swollen red, veins of light already spreading beneath the skin.

"The Primordial Darkness." He murmured it like a fact he'd been waiting to confirm. It has already taken root inside him.

The space folded in around him, darkness rising to meet it.

"Let's end this," he said, to no one. "For good."