It was a raspy voice, empty and harrowing, powerful but full of nothing but that, and it resounded from everywhere, equally silent as it was empty, something one could truly not entirely answer or even understand, and certainly not convey through mere words, it was as if the moon itself spoke, distant, full of light, powerful and heavy, yet, equally light, dark and surrounded and rewoven with emptiness that would make a normal being cry after being there for too long, just as the surface of the moon had almost nothing and did not keep those that visited there, at least not as strong as many planets kept their visitors.
It resounded and he could not not hear, he felt as if the entirety of the realm heard equally what was being said, simple words, and yet, full of meaning, just a title, nothing more, but he already knew who had said it as soon as it had uttered the words, the body of the being not moving in the slightest, aside from the natural movement it had been doing all this time, having the endlessly big body resembling a hybrid between a spider and a giraffe, it's neck replaced by an arm holding a silver eye, heave up and down as it breathed, something that Cades was fairly certain it did not have the need to do.
"It who carries the moon shall begin"
Cades didn't understand, after all, the moon would never be carried, and even if it was to be carried, who would carry, no, he understood that from what the being had proclaimed, but which moon would they carry..
There were more than just a few moons, Ehetria alone had two moons, one larger than the other, both controlling the tides and even influencing ancient traditions, rituals, legends of monsters and even magic with their gravitational pull that even influenced magic itself, sometimes causing something like a magical eclipse, oftentimes covering each other in a lunar eclipse, sometimes covering ehetria's sun in a normal eclipse, aside from the rarest of all times when they all covered each other, when they had an absolute eclipse, when even magic could not be used due to the unexplainable pull of the lunar gravity that they caused, the smaller one being called Aldreis, the bigger one Hanardeis, if he remembered correctly.
Of course that didn't matter, Cades knew that already, how would that even be of any concern right now when one of those inconceivably powerful beasts had just spoken, one of those that Cades was fairly certain didn't even have something for a mouth that they could use to speak out of, and even more so he was concerned about the fact that it was going to be beginning something, that it was starting something, as such, he was trying to stop himself, to try and calm himself down by thinking, by asking himself questions, by repressing his fear, just waiting for it to cook over and explode right into his face, similar to milk boiled under a metal lid without a watchful eye.
Certainly he already knew what was starting, after all, the old man had already told him that he was going to go through the trial of fighting, though he had not been able to listen completely back then when he thought back on it now, feeling a weird feeling of having heard something but not having understood it despite having understood what was said, something that messed with his brain for a bit before he dismissed it and began to look to his right, seeing the endlessly big beast and swearing to himself that it had switched positions with one of the others but unable to make out which one it had switched with, if it even did, and he looked into the eye, not because of bravery, not because he was ready, but because he knew he had to if he wished to get out of here alive, a primal instinct, a call if you may, leading his movement, grasping at his head and leading it to look at the endlessly big hand holding the intently watching silver eye.
The eye began to grow even more brightly than before, countless stories that Cades could not hear connected within them, the story of a king who lost everything, the story of a dragon without scales, the story of a child who longed to be on the moon, the story of a man who stepped foot upon that very same moon, the story that it was made of cheese, the stories of a tortoise carrying it and the world upon it's large back, and finally, the story of Cades, unfinished, long, painful, but it was there, not within the silver eyes, but reflected from what they saw, as if the silver mirrors were a window to his future, a future he could not bear to see, a future he could not understand, and the being looked into what was behind that future, Cades instinctively realized that, the being looked into his past, as if to find something, and it looked behind him, at somewhere else, the gaze of the creature fixed onto the air itself, as if searching somewhere else for something far away.
Before Cades knew it, there was someone else standing atop the pillar, about a hundred feet away from Cades who was still situated in the centre, staring at the eye that was now being pulled away by the unimaginably huge hand that still couldn't hold a candle to the hand they all resided upon right now, the hand that still looked like an endless flat expense form this position, aside from the five endless pillars in the sky..
Finally, his body trying to resist something he didn't understand, as if it was fighting helpful mana originating from himself, he felt his own clothes change into something else, unperturbed by his bodies resistance that was outside of Cades control, covering Cades with a mask at the same time as it all happened, as the eye retreated, as the new opponent appeared, the opponent he was now going to battle against, as the name of the trial had already implied.