Chapter 12 — The Dark God's Scrutiny

Deep night, Emberfall Camp.

The raging high-altitude black storm raved above the astral blind spot; a shrill horn-call whistled on the wind. Fine metallic slag hammered the outpost's scrap-iron roofs in an ice-hail-like, teeth-aching ding-ding-dang-dang. Inside, all was dead silence; only a few low-power waste-oil lamps spat faint yellow in the cold, damp metal corridors.

In the next room over.

The Dark God Umbra, alias Vespera, sat cross-legged on the narrow iron bunk.

She had shed the black insulated cloak; a close-fit black protective suit wrapped her slender, elegant mortal body. She slowly closed her eyes; her jade-white ears twitched faint, listening to the wind's howl beyond the window and the uneven breathing of mortals sleeping all around the outpost.

For a higher-dimensional god, adapting to this coarse mortal cell-body was still a thing needing patience.

Breathing through this narrow body, the air thick with tar and bitter-herb sting; seeing with these bare eyes, only dim light and杂乱 scrap-iron. The mortal flesh was crushingly heavy, every cell dragged by gravity — far from the freedom and vastness of her higher-dimensional star-track shadow-form.

"Higher-dimensional negative-energy drainage… open."

Umbra breathed, in her heart, a cold whisper only she could hear.

She pinched her slender fingertip; the Dark God-core lurking in her soul gave a faint tremor. In an instant, a pitch-black flow of negative energy — laden with terrible higher-dimensional sedimented waste and karmic toxin — was slowly drawn out from the depths of her divine core.

This was the great backlash from days earlier, when she had forced down the shadow-blade and cut the whole of Tartarus clean from the LinBoo Astrolabe's map. Left undrained in the body, even a supreme god's divine form would suffer unhealable physical dulling and divine-core toxin sedimentation. And returning to the Sanctum while the Divine Court's inner politics churned with undercurrents, she risked Jupiter or Saturn sensing her weakness.

BOOM!

A supremely hidden higher-dimensional ripple spread soundless in the black room.

Through the thick scrap-iron wall, Elias on his bunk in deep sleep jerked in a violent spasm!

On the soul-level, the karmic buffer covenant Umbra had built in his extremity was activated instantly! A vast惰性 higher-dimensional dark negative-energy, like a cold black serpent, poured endlessly along the soul-band's dark track into Elias's bodily cycle!

"Hngh…!! Guh…!"

Elias on the bunk wrenched his lips open, loosing a mute cry of extreme pain deep in nightmare.

Cold sweat burst dense on his brow; subcutaneous capillaries burst from the violent negative-energy impact, raising a strange, chilling black-violet halo. His body arched like a full hard-bow, twitching and convulsing on the narrow bunk; the motion too large, the freshly bound steel plates on his back groaned a teeth-aching scrape.

Higher-dimensional waste-energy entering the body — a pain of ten-thousand-corrosions piercing the heart no mortal flesh could bear!

In the boy's unconscious nightmare, the black cosmic vacuum swept in again.

He seemed back in that snow-lashed Tartarus dusk. Sister Aira sat at the broken cabin door, charring crooked stars on the wall, laughing up at him: "Big brother, look at my stars!" Yet the next second, a supremely cold black law-beam descended from the heavens! The whole of Tartarus, in a god's careless stroke, collapsed and broke apart! Old Barnaby the tinker turned to ash in the fire; little Aira's body scattered inch by inch into the vacuum before his eyes!

Extreme hypoxia, heart-rending grief of loss, and this toxic negative-energy from a supreme god's backlash — like thousands of red-hot blades, stabbed and cut wanton in his soul!

"Aira… don't go…! Gods… I'll kill you all… drag every one of you down from your altar!!"

The rasping, shrill, mad murmur squeezed from between Elias's clenched, crushed teeth, a blood-weeping fury that broke the hearer's heart.

Yet — terrifyingly — even under this agony that could burn and shred an ordinary mortal soul in an instant, Elias's fragile mortal body did not break!

The unusual wavelength in him — the off-track Anomaly — was like a greedy, hard black cotton, forcibly locking this violent higher-dimensional negative-energy in the deepest bone and muscle. By his boundless hatred of the gods and his obsession with revenge, he brutally turned this toxin into the cold firewood that kept him alive!

In the next room.

Umbra slowly opened those night-black eyes.

Through the faint divine sense linked to the karmic buffer, she observed, close and unreserved, all that the mortal boy next door was enduring.

Every heartbeat, every pained catch of breath, the blood-red gale of sorrow and killing-intent raging in his soul's depths — all amplified to the extreme in her divine sense. She could even perceive the faint glow from the half star-core pendant in Elias's palm, flickering with his violent heartbeat.

"Thirty percent negative-energy… fully received."

Umbra watched the black toxin fading in her slender palm, and let out a long, turbid breath. The heavy pressure deep in her divine core lifted clean away; she had never been so light, so clear.

As the beneficiary of this cold bargain, she had used Elias to shake off the divine-backlash trouble.

Yet this Dark God, enthroned for ten thousand years, keeper of judgment and silence, now watching the boy who clenched his teeth and lived through the absolute pain on hatred alone — for the first time a wordless shock and strangeness stirred in her heart.

On the golden ledger of the highest Platinum Sanctum, the erasure of a mortal mining-world like Tartarus was but a cold rune-fluctuation in the "karmic fuel rate." Jupiter the God-King called mortals "stupid, greedy weeds"; Astra the God of Light thought smoothing panic with holy light granted peace. Umbra too had once firmly believed mortal life and wailing held no physical meaning whatsoever — they were but consumables and batteries keeping the Astrolabe turning.

But now, when she truly listened with mortal ears to that rasping cry, felt with mortal touch the feverish blood and twitching muscle — only then was she shocked to find —

Mortal pain was not data.

It was real, existent — a towering fire hot enough to burn the soul to ash.

"Astra uses light to wipe their memory, thinks that brings true peace…" Umbra lowered her head, looked at these pale, fragile mortal hands of hers, a mocking, cold, bitter smile at her lips. "But she has no idea — this pain the Divine Court treats as dross and scrap was never quelled. It only accumulates in the dark, pressing inch by inch into the container called 'Elias.'"

She rose; her tall form cast a deep shadow under the dim oil-lamp.

She walked slowly to the wall, and through the cold scrap-iron panel, gently pressed her cool slender palm to the spot where Elias's bunk lay.

On the other side of the panel, the boy's breath, after the most violent spasm of pain, gradually steadied again. He still clutched his sister's half star-core pendant, jaw clenched even in sleep, radiating a frightening stubbornness and cold.

"How much hatred can this container hold?"

Umbra's gaze was deeply complex. She did not know what bloody gap this off-track Anomaly called Elias, after draining her dark-energy, could one day tear in the Astrolabe-prison the Divine Court held so tight.

But she faintly felt — the track of fate had utterly jumped the rail.

The abyss watched the mortal, and the mortal was roaring in the mire, biting at the gods.

Night deepened.

The storm screamed across Emberfall Camp, and in this shadow-dead-angle the gods had forgotten, the bond of god and mortal locked itself tight in the cruellest, most hidden way.

And light-years off, on the dome of the Platinum Sanctum, the central Astrolabe's golden ledger was silently turning the next epoch's karmic taxation. The high-and-mighty planetary gods, sunk in a false eternal order, had no idea that in this dead-angle struck from the map, a lethal rebel-flame against divine authority had, tempered in blood and negative-energy, quietly whetted its edge.

And on his bunk, Elias, having with extreme difficulty borne that violent higher-dimensional waste-impact, turned faintly awake from the spent, drenched deep-sleep. He could feel his shattered, collapsing cells, under this cold dark-energy's forced maintenance, miraculously reknitting, healing. He looked down at the half star-core pendant in his palm; the cold light in his eyes was keener than the deep cold of winter space. A mortal may be low as grass — but so long as a single breath remained, he would become the deadliest poison-thorn.

Night would pass. And the mortal's off-track blade had only just been forged its first blood-groove.