In another realm, this one starkly different from the boy's cage, was a vast space with flashing lights akin to suns, a girl—so beautiful she could charm beings with a single smile—suddenly coughed up blood.
Her aura surged violently, shredding the picturesque scene into nothingness. The lights—revealed to be true suns and ancient stars—detonated in violent succession. Beings that feasted on planets were blown apart before they could even scream. The planets themselves disintegrated into ash and memory.
She coughed again, violently, blood spraying in dark arcs across the void. The blood devoured the fabric of space itself, hissing and writhing as it spread, carving jagged wounds into reality. Countless eyes blinked open and shut in those fissures, each gaze tearing apart what remained of the fractured realm.
Her hair billowed around her like a living shadow, every strand humming with unstable power.
"How dare he... how dare he resist my goodwill?!" she spat. Her voice, once a song capable of soothing gods, now trembled with fear, rage, and uneasy realization.
"He destroyed my clone... so easily. That clone was built to slaughter a fortified cosmos—entire legions would fall before it—and he unmade it without effort."
She trembled, rage and terror seeping into her perfect features. For a moment, her eyes lost their seductive gleam, replaced by raw, calculating dread.
"I have to tell the Council. We've underestimated him. If we allow this to continue... he could kill us all. And we would be powerless to stop him."
She drew a ragged breath, steadying herself.
Her dainty hand rose, fingers curling. She splayed her palm against the empty space before her. Slowly, deliberately, she twisted it counterclockwise.
Reality obeyed her.
In an instant, the destruction wrought by her chaotic aura reversed. Stars reignited in orderly constellations. Cosmic dust reassembled into vast orbs of burning gas. Space itself healed, the rents in its surface stitching back together. Everything returned to its prior perfection—except for the planet-eating monstrosities, which she deliberately erased.
She lowered her hand, eyes glinting coldly as she surveyed her restored domain.
She looked ahead, speaking to no one:
"I summon the High Council."
Light gathered around her, flaring impossibly bright before swallowing her whole. She vanished without a trace, leaving behind a restored but eerily silent cosmos.
***********************************************
Darkness.
All around was darkness so thick that light could not exist. It was not the absence of light, but the devouring of it—a place where even the concept of illumination fled in terror.
Amid this suffocating void floated four beings, side by side, staring into the nothing.
They were formless, featureless. Their bodies were so dark they made the surrounding blackness appear luminous by comparison. They were older than time, and their silence was the silence that existed before the first sound was born.
"He will soon be free," said one of them. It was a swirling void, endlessly consuming the shadows around it. Its voice was like nails scraping across an infinite chalkboard, and with each word the darkness warped, recoiling as if in pain.
"He will soon be free... free to destroy and return creation to what it once was," said another voice—utterly emotionless, perfectly calm. This voice was deceptively soothing, a balm that could lull entire civilizations into quiet despair if heard too long.
"Honey will soon return... hehehe," crooned a third voice, distinctly feminine, dripping with twisted affection. Her tone was charged with unholy emotion, sharp enough to flay sanity itself. Yet none of these beings bore anything like a human shape.
They drifted closer, shadows merging and parting like oil in water.
"The time is near."
"The time is near."
"The time is near."
"The time is near."
They repeated the mantra repeatedly, their voices layering atop one another in a horrid litany, a broken cosmic record that warped the void with every cycle. Time itself seemed to stutter, skipping like a damaged reel.
They did this for an unknowable stretch of anti-time before suddenly falling silent.
A new voice pierced the gloom. Beautiful. Commanding. Inarguable.
"I summon the High Council."
The darkness itself rippled at the words.
"Those fools have called a council meeting," the emotionless one observed, its voice smooth as ever.
"No doubt they're scheming to stop his return," the feminine voice cooed mockingly. After a chilling pause, her tone fell like a guillotine:
"But they will fail."
"But... but what can we do to stop them?" asked the fourth voice, small and trembling. It sounded childlike, pitiful, though its shape was only barely humanoid, like something that remembered once being mortal.
"He will take care of it," the emotionless voice replied, gentle in a way that made the void shiver. "There is no need to worry, young one."
The four ancient things floated in silence again, as if savoring the inevitability of it all.
All around them, the darkness listened.
And it smiled.