Time literally froze in the suspended village of the Dark Elf. This was no figurative stillness born of shock, it was closer to a genuine distortion in the very fabric of reality surrounding Lumia.
The cold winds that had howled endlessly through the branches of the World Tree stopped dead in the middle of their gust, as though they had collided with an invisible wall of absolute density. The muffled whispers, the creak of drawn bows, even the sound of the surrounding warriors breathing, all of it cut out completely. The Void Aura had swallowed every sound wave, every mote of energy within a fifty-metre radius, leaving in its wake a silence that was heavy, white, and suffocating, pressing against the eardrums until they nearly burst.
The elite Shadow Warriors, seasoned killers who formed Okonnor's personal guard, men who in their long lives had faced catastrophe-class magical beasts, imperial sorcerers, and countless natural disasters without so much as a flinch, now found themselves utterly helpless. Their knees did not tremble from ordinary biological fear, nor were their minds calculating odds of survival; they felt a strange, overpowering, and soul-deep urge to drop to their knees and grind their faces into the wooden floor. This was not fear of death at the hands of a more skilled executioner. It was sacred dread, a primal terror that predated their language and their history, leaping from ancient instinct at the sight of a being that surpassed their biological and magical comprehension by thousands of years. They were like ants staring up at a giant's shoe poised to crush the colony, possessing nothing but surrender to the inevitability of annihilation.
As for Okonnor, the legendary general, hero of the Battle of the Burning Plains, the man whose sword had never trembled in the face of entire armies, who had endured savage battles with a sardonic smile, his limbs betrayed him for the first time in one century.
The fingers encased in his metal gauntlet slackened without warning, as though the tendons binding his muscles had simply dissolved. His broadsword, forged from pure lunar silver, said to be capable of cleaving a mountain in two, slipped from his grip in agonising slow motion.
Rang… rang… rang…
The sound of that heavy silver blade striking the hardwood floor was the only sound in this absolute void. The metallic echo reverberated with painful clarity, like the tolling of a funeral bell formally announcing the collapse of the Dark Elf nation's pride.
At first, when he had seen Lumia beneath her tattered cloak, he had not paid her much mind. True, his sharp Elf senses had picked up strange and faint ripples of mana around her, and he had harboured a few doubts that she was no ordinary human, perhaps a sorceress of rare bloodline, or one cursed by an ancient hex. But his rational mind had never truly believed, could never have even imagined, that the truth might be this utterly, completely insane.
Okonnor staggered back one faltering step, like a drunk old man who had lost his balance. His sharp eyes were blown wide with an indescribable stupor, staring at Lumia as though he were watching a horrifying nightmare and a blood-soaked history made flesh and blood and cosmic light.
"Cel... Celestial…?"
Okonnor breathed the word in a hoarse, fractured voice, as if the mere act of forming the syllables was searing his throat and tongue with sulfuric acid.
"Impossible… this is utterly impossible…" he murmured, shaking his head in denial, fighting against the reality his own eyes were feeding him. "That cursed bloodline… it was wiped out to the last soul! They burned to cosmic ash in the Great War of the Fall, more than a thousand years ago! My ancestors watched their bodies tumble from the sky like blazing meteors… How… how can their blood walk this earth again? How can the Void itself take form?"
The Elf memory was long, stretching across generations, and their historical legends forgot nothing. In the secret manuscripts preserved in the deepest vaults of their libraries, the Celestials were no mere powerful sorcerers or tyrannical kings. They were the Lords of Nothingness, rulers of the ancient dark ages, absolute entities who had toyed with the laws of space and time the way children toy with clay. They had been tyrants of such magnitude that destroying them, toppling their floating empire, had required an impossible and blood-soaked alliance among every warring race on the continent: Elf, humans, dwarves, even some of the demons and dragons, And some mysterious entities from the Death Zone, in a war that lasted decades and had nearly torn the planet asunder.
The appearance of one of them now, here, alive and breathing and radiating that aura in this forgotten refuge, meant one terrifying thing to Okonnor: the laws of the old world had shattered, and the wheel of a blood-soaked fate had begun to turn once more, in a way no emperor or army could ever stop.
Lumia looked at Okonnor. Her gaze, carrying miniature galaxies within her irises, was not malicious, nor thirsting for blood. It held none of the recognisable human hostility, yet at the same time it was filled with absolute authority: the authority of a being examining an interesting insect.
"I am not here to rekindle a forgotten ancient war, child of darkness," said Lumia in her multi-layered voice, which resonated directly within the soul. "Your past does not concern me. Your mortal wars are nothing but a brief flicker within my time."
She raised her luminous hand, cold light emanating from it, and pointed slowly toward Dex standing at her side, who had been watching the scene with stony features that masked his inner stupefaction. "I am here for one reason alone… because I chose this human to be my path. To be the sword that cuts down my enemies and the shield that wards off the tedium of existence. If you, in your ignorance, doubt his strength or his worthiness to stand before you, then you are not insulting him. You are questioning my judgment. You are casting doubt on my discernment."
Okonnor turned with agonising slowness, as though his neck had rusted, to look at Dex with an entirely new and different terror. He no longer saw before him a clever young noble, a calculating politician with a silver tongue, or even a potential low-ranking ally. How had a mortal human, a young man barely into his prime, reeking of vulnerability, managed to tame, or ally himself with, or even stand beside a living cosmic catastrophe like this without his mind shattering and his body evaporating?
"You…" Okonnor managed with great difficulty, staring at Dex's composed face, cold sweat pouring freely from the veteran commander's brow, surpassing his own pride. "What are you. You are not the Marcus Williams's son we know… You walk with the end of the world leashed at your side by an invisible chain."
With great deliberateness, Okonnor leaned down and retrieved his silver sword with a hand that still trembled faintly. But he did not raise it to fight. He did not take a defensive stance. Instead, with a slow and broken motion that spoke of absolute acceptance of what could not be changed, he slid the sword back into its leather scabbard. His head dipped slightly, not in the submission of a slave before a master, but in the respect of a warrior before a force that lay beyond nature's comprehension. He had understood that the game had changed, and that the old rules of survival no longer applied.