Prologue | Rebirth
Stronger, yeah, but at what cost?
Screamed my lungs out on that cliff, asked the empty sky why.
Begged for a reason.
Sunrise painted the world in hues of hope.
Maybe, just maybe, the grief's losing its hold.
※
There was death. There was rejuvenation. But it was a vast world of nothing, up and down, left and right. Above, there was no sky, no sun. Below, there was no ground, no earth. As above, as below. As within, as without. Neither was there substance, nor was there form. It was an amorphous world of oblivion.
Reborn of the void between states of beings, he opens his eyes dimly. Darkness—nothing but darkness far and wide, stretching everywhere endlessly in this sea of complete emptiness, in a tide of eternal nihility.
The sensation of ripping off of something else enveloped him. It was an unpleasant feeling. As per all beings associated with the primordial, egoless great spirits that were the facet of the world—as a true demon lord and an archetype of the element of darkness—he finds himself resurrected, but not in a way he'd expect.
Death, Lymur Tempest realized once again, is surprisingly peaceful. There were no pearly gates, no fiery pits—none of the grand visions of afterlife that humanity had believed throughout the ages. There was heaven, and there was hell, but not in a way one was familiar with.
Even the violent end he met, flesh shredded by indescribably cold glacial forces, concluded in a tranquil dissolution. A life that was done and a life that was gone, twice now, fading like mist in the morning sun.
The thought should have been bitter, tinged with regret and the acrid taste of a battle lost. But what was Lymur Tempest if not strange? Instead, it floated by, as weightless as he felt in this bottomless ocean of oblivion. It was a death of a life unfulfilled, of connections unmade, and of a forgotten glory.
Even in the face of true death, one of the mightiest of beings was just another statistic. Just another life snuffed from the face of the world. He wanted to speak, to hear his voice one last time as he headed off to the promised oblivion. But there was no sound. Words formed in his mind, dissipating before they could reach his lips.
He sank deeper and deeper into this void that felt more real as time went by. Yeah, right. Like that'd ever happen again.
A chance he thought of, and a chance he received. It was a passing wish, an empty plea hurled into the void with no expectation of an answer. Yet, in that moment, something shifted. The currents of life and death began to part like a cosmic curtain, like the parting of an ocean.
Between them emerged a new force, neither fully of life nor entirely of death. It pulsed with potential, with the promise of the unprecedented. This was something beyond the natural order, a loophole in the universe's programming.
The characteristic danger for most Spiritual Lifeforms, of losing their ego upon death and resurrection, applies to him too, despite the overwhelming power he possessed. Will he be the same Lymur? Or will he be not?
Welcome back, my lord.
The words echoed through Lymur's being. Oh? You're still here.
The ultimate skill Raphael, bound to Lymur by soul, as well as the Lord of Wisdom, welcomes his newly awakened master.
This was not the peaceful oblivion he had resigned himself to, nor was it a return to the life he had known. It was something else entirely—another chance, yes, but one that came with the element of unknown.
Should I be happy or not? He pondered. He was prepared to meet the end, but the end was not prepared to meet him.
As a light appeared—a bright singular light in this void—enveloped him, Lymur felt his sense of self begin to fragment. Memories, and his identity, the very essence of who he was—all of it began to swirl. He was being unmade and remade simultaneously, transformed into something that could exist in this liminal space between life and death.
By what? Lymur questioned in the vast void space.
Lymur opened his eyes to a world both unfamiliar and alien. The demon lord who had died unfulfilled was gone, replaced by a deity who's awakened from a slumber in the void.
The dance between life and death had spawned something unprecedented, something cursed to defy his own fate, to wander around and forever seek a solace doomed forever beyond his reach.
The realms of both the living and the dead would never be the same.