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The forest of Sylvaran breathed with an ancient silence. It wasn’t the kind of emptiness one finds in the pause between songs—it was the silence that precedes an omen, when even the birds hold their breath and the leaves refuse to fall. The air was thick, heavy with moss and dormant magic. And through that suspended world, a being moved like a living tear in the tapestry of reality.
Virekos staggered—not from weakness, but because his very existence seemed unstable. With every step, his form wavered like a reflection on water—sometimes solid, other times translucent, as if part of him was anchored in another dimension. His robes were torn, stained with dried blood and substances that belonged to no living creature. In his eyes, a golden light flickered between clarity and madness. Once the god of truth, he was now a contradiction in motion.
He stopped before a wide-rooted tree and leaned his forehead against the damp trunk. His lips moved, whispering to no one:
“Their lies were more beautiful than my truths…”
A laugh escaped—low, dry, like a nail scraping stone.
“And more useful too.”
His voice came layered: one tone serene and deep, the other warped, laced with sarcasm.
That’s how Ray Crosswood saw him for the first time.
She was hunting. Or at least trying to. The tip of her bow rested against her back, and her dark eyes scanned the clearing with the precision of someone raised by hunters, yet never truly accepted by them. Her steps were silent—but not invisible.
Virekos turned his head without even looking at her.
“You breathe like someone choosing between kill or save. Fascinating. Which will it be today?”
Ray frowned. She hadn’t expected to be noticed—especially not by someone in that state. The man—or creature—in front of her seemed ready to dissolve into the air. And yet, there was a sharp, conscious light in his eyes.
“Are you alright?” she asked, her voice a mix of concern and suspicion.
He smiled—a crooked smile, stripped of sanity.
“That depends. Which version of me is asking? What’s left of the god? Or what grew in the hole where he was buried?”
Ray crossed her arms.
“Do you need help, or are you just trying to scare travelers with cryptic lines?”
Virekos turned fully to face her. His height was imposing, but his body trembled, on the verge of coming apart. And still, power radiated from him—ancient, broken, but not dead.
“A spirit with sarcasm. How long has it been since I heard something that wasn’t a chant or a scream?”
“Two minutes, now that you’ve found me,” she replied, raising an eyebrow.
Silence. Then a laugh. Honest. Unstable. Almost human.
“Sit. Watch me. If I start eating stones or reciting poems to mushrooms, you may strike me. But if the voices come back… run.”
Ray hesitated for a second. But there was something in him—something beyond madness. Something like pain. Like loss. Like… shattered truth.
“Alright,” she said. “But if you give me trouble, I’ll charge you. With interest.”
And there, in a clearing forgotten by gods and men, an elf marked by exile and a god forgotten by time sat together.
She watched him. He muttered.
And between them, a new song began to take shape—
A song that only two could hear.
In the days following their first meeting, Ray never left. She never said she would stay—but she also didn’t walk away. She kept returning near dusk, carrying roots, herbs, or the occasional scrawny game over her shoulder. Virekos pretended not to notice, but each time she arrived, the mist around him seemed just a bit thinner.
The clearing became a resting point, a space of truce. There were no promises between them, no formal pact. But there was… habit. A thin thread of repetition. She cooked and ate in silence. He spoke to stones and to echoes of himself. And when the nights were long and dark, Ray lay far from him—but close enough to hear his whispers.
Sometimes he wept. Other times, he laughed like a child with a wicked secret. And one cold dawn, she heard something new: a chant. A deep, trembling melody sung in a language the forest seemed to remember. The trees shivered. The branches bowed. Ray stood still, as if the entire world had held its breath.
“It used to be a blessing song,” he said at sunrise, voice raw. “Once. Now it curses. Everything repeated too long loses meaning. Even a prayer.”
That morning, he walked toward the water. A shallow river ran over the stones, cold like liquid silver. Virekos removed the cloak from his shoulders. Ray turned away—but peeked.
There were scars on his body. Some looked physical. Others looked like… ideas. Cracks in the flesh through which memories leaked. His skin shifted color under sunlight—sometimes alabaster, sometimes golden, sometimes the ashen gray of a burned temple. When he stepped into the water, it bubbled.
Ray watched from a distance. He knew. But said nothing.
“You always observe,” he said later, when he returned to the clearing. “You want to understand but are afraid of what you’ll find.”
She didn’t reply. Just bit into a piece of hard bread.
“I’ve known many like you,” he continued, sitting on a rock that always seemed to await him. “Hunters, monks, wandering mages, widows of war. All with hungry eyes. All with questions they pretend not to have.”
Ray stepped closer.
“Then tell me what I am,” she challenged, locking eyes with him.
Virekos smiled.
“You’re a disappointment to the world. But not to me.”
She paused. It stung. But it also warmed her—in a strange way.
“Your eyes lie,” she said at last. “But not now.”
Days became weeks. And he began to show more of himself.
One day, he appeared wearing a dark tunic embroidered with threads of silver that seemed to move. The garment hadn’t existed the night before. And now it was there, as if woven by shadow.
“What magic is this?” she asked.
“The kind used by those who no longer need fabric. When your form is fluid, your clothes follow suit.”
She touched the cloth. It was warm. It pulsed slightly.
“It has a heartbeat,” she murmured.
“That’s because I was once part of something alive. Before the fall. Before the madness. Now, everything I create tries to remember what it felt like… to be whole.”
That night, he changed in front of her.
It was a gentle transfiguration. His hair darkened to the shade of wet coal. His skin took on the pale hue of forest elves. But his eyes turned red—glowing with calm, inhuman intensity.
Ray didn’t flinch.
“That’s your mask for the world?”
He nodded.
“It’s the form mortals accept. A pale elf is less frightening than… me.”
“And what is ‘you’?”
“A scream that forgot how to be silence.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then stepped forward and raised a hand. She touched his face.
“Even in disguise, you’re still you. I still see it.”
He closed his eyes at her touch.
“And what do you see?”
“Someone trying not to break again.”
In that moment, the world seemed to stop. No sound interrupted them. Just the warmth of her hand. And for a breath of eternity, he let the illusion fall. He revealed what he truly was: skin etched with living runes, eyes made of fragments of light and shadow, hair that moved even without wind.
Ray didn’t scream. She didn’t step back.
“This is also you,” she said.
“And you… you’re the first to say that without fear.”
He stepped closer.
“Let me offer an old gesture. A memory from when I still knew how to touch without destroying.”
She nodded.
The kiss was soft. Warm.
Deep as the forgotten songs of creation.
And the world did not end.
Not yet.
The night was heavy—too heavy. As if the very world was holding its breath, waiting, dreading what was about to unfold. The air refused to stir. Not a single leaf trembled. Even the insects dared not whisper.
In the center of an ancient glade, ringed by gnarled trees and veiled in primordial stillness, Virekos knelt alone.
He was motionless, yet the silence around him felt thinner by the second. A thin veil of mist circled his body like breath from a dying god. The moon hovered low, distant and dull behind clouds, reluctant to witness what would come.
With slow, deliberate motion, Virekos raised his arms and began to chant—not words, but invocations woven from memory and forgotten divinity. Symbols long banished from mortal tongues lit up around him, traced in a circle of ash and amber. As each glyph pulsed into being, the forest stirred. The trees shuddered. The earth groaned. Stones levitated, trembling as if caught between awe and fear.
Reality strained.
Then—sounds. Subtle at first.
Metal on leather. Heavy boots sinking into soil. A dozen whispered prayers, hollowed out and reshaped into poison.
The Inquisition had found them.
Ray Crosswood didn’t need a warning. She was already moving, hand to her bowstring, eyes sharp and burning with controlled rage. She didn’t wait to see the full formation—just the first glint of armor through the trees.
“They’re here,” she hissed.
“Stay alive,” Virekos answered. That was all he said.
Her first arrow was silent and merciless. One inquisitor dropped to his knees, breath stolen. The others surged forward in a roar of divine fury. Magic bloomed—ribbons of gold slicing through the glade, lighting the trees like holy fire. Ray darted between trunks and shadows, arrows loosed with perfect rhythm. She felled two more—
—then a beam of consecrated light struck her side.
She collapsed, breath torn from her lungs, her body limp against the forest floor.
Virekos stopped chanting.
The runes flickered. His hands trembled.
“Ray…?”
She coughed, blood staining her lips, forcing her gaze up.
“Don’t stop… not now. Or this is just another one of your escapes…”
And something inside him shattered.
The glade screamed.
A high-pitched hum erupted from the circle—no sound a mortal throat could produce, but something deeper. Older. The inquisitors froze as the air twisted. The levitating stones ignited with black and violet flames. The very light fled the clearing.
Virekos rose. Not in rage, but in judgment.
With a cry not of pain, but reckoning, he released a surge of raw power—an amalgam of shadow and truth. The trees withered. The ground split. Screams echoed as the Inquisition was engulfed. In seconds, there was no trace left. Only ash. And silence.
Virekos collapsed beside Ray, panting, his hands shaking.
“I won’t let you die. Not after this. Not here.”
He pressed his palms against her chest. His voice fell into ancient rhythm, reciting a sequence no one had dared speak since the Age of Creation. Reality cracked at the edges.
A rift opened.
Not in space—but in meaning. A pocket of stillness, made from fractured time and woven silence. Inside it, Ray’s body floated gently. Her wounds gone. Her breath shallow, but sure.
Virekos stepped inside. Kneeling in this suspended glade, half inside and half beyond the world, he touched her hand.
“Ray… listen. I can give you a choice.”
Her eyes opened slowly. Weak. Alive.
“You can live,” he said softly. “But no one will ever know you. No one can remember you as you are. Not about me. Not about us.”
Ray didn’t flinch.
“Just tell me… I’ll see you again.”
He nodded. Tears welled in eyes that once saw creation bloom.
“Where the world is weakest. Where the sacred and the mad meet. I will be there.”
She smiled. It was faint. But real.
And so, she accepted.
She became a secret never to be spoken.
And he, a broken promise—still trying to fulfill itself.
The glade vanished. The runes dimmed.
And all that remained was silence… and ash.
Ray awoke among stars that did not belong to the sky.
The dimension created by Virekos was a tapestry of memory and silence. There was no time there, no pain, no fixed form. Only the sensation of being… suspended. It was like sleeping upon existence itself.
When her feet touched the ground again, it was no longer the same world. The glade was in ruins, but her body bore no wounds. She was breathing. And she was alone.
The Sylvaran forest no longer recognized her.
Days passed before she found a trail. With no clear direction, she walked. She slept in caves, under trees that spoke with the wind, in grottos where the echoes called her by names that were never hers. She did not age. She did not grow ill. But neither did she feel hunger as before. It was as if she were only half alive—a memory of flesh animated by the promise of reunion.
Those she met saw only an elf with a serene face, distant eyes, and black hair tied with feathers. They never spoke her name. They never asked for hers. And she never gave it.
In taverns, she heard distorted versions of the battle she had witnessed. Some said a spirit of shadow had devoured a unit of the Inquisition. Others spoke of a fallen angel and a demon lover. Ray smiled without correcting them. And she always left before sunrise.
It was on a moonless night that she found the first Place of Convergence.
The sky seemed folded in on itself. She stood upon an old, abandoned altar atop a forgotten mountain. The wind blew in reverse. Crows did not fly—they floated. There, as she hummed the song Virekos had once left her in silence, he came.
Not in full form. But as a trembling shape of light and shadow. A silhouette that pulsed.
“Ray…”
“I’m here,” she replied.
And for one hour, they sat together. They spoke of dreams. Of trees that remembered smiles. Of things that had gone unsaid. He vanished with the first ray of sunlight.
From then on, she began to seek them—those places where the world faltered. Where reality weakened, and something greater could touch the world. The Places of Convergence. Each with its own rules. Some rejected her. Others welcomed her.
Ever since that first encounter atop the forgotten altar, Ray wandered with a new purpose. Her days blurred into a sequence of silent trails, forgotten ruins, and winds that whispered in dead languages. She had become a seeker of fractures—those rare places where reality was thinner, where the world forgot to keep its shape.
Some of these places welcomed her. Others spat her back out, wounded and dizzy. But she never stopped searching.
There were signs: rivers that flowed backwards, mirrors that refused to show reflections, flowers blooming only beneath moonlight. Each time, she hummed the melody Virekos had left in her memory, barely louder than breath. Sometimes, nothing happened. Sometimes, the air grew still, and the earth held its breath. And on rare nights—those precious, impossible nights—he came.
It was never for long.
Sometimes a silhouette, sometimes a flicker in the corner of her eye. Sometimes just a whisper wrapped in fog. But he came.
And she waited.
Until, one night, south of Norvhar…
That night, in a ravine where the river whispered in a tone not belonging to water, Ray arrived exhausted. Her feet ached, but something in the stone called to her. A low sound, like a name spoken in thought. An echo of presence.
She sat in the center of a circle of split stones. The sky was overcast, but the stars revealed themselves behind the clouds like watching eyes. She didn’t need to sing the song. He was already there.
The shadow took shape slowly, as if rising from the ground itself. First the outline. Then the details—flaming eyes, dark hair laced with threads of light, elongated hands trembling with the effort of holding form.
“You look… different,” Ray said, without fear. Her voice was soft, but firm.
“You look… intact,” he replied, with a tone between admiration and sorrow.
They drew closer slowly, like participants in a familiar ritual. There were no words for the next few minutes. Only looks. Virekos circled her, studying her as one tries to believe what they see.
“How many centuries has it been, Ray?”
“Enough to learn not to count. But few enough that it still hurts.”
He extended a hand. She took it.
“I miss your voice,” he said.
“I speak to you every night. The world just won’t let you hear.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, tears ran like threads of light.
“When I touch your hand… I remember who I was. Before even myself.”
Ray stepped closer. She pressed her forehead to his.
“And when you disappear, I become what I need to be. Strong. Silent. But never… never without you.”
The kiss was not rushed. It was slow. As if each second was stolen from time itself. His skin fluctuated between warmth and chill, between form and absence. But his mouth was real. Soft. Full of longing.
“If I could…” he whispered against her lips, “…I would tear the heavens apart to stay. But the chains tighten. And the world has bled too much because of me.”
She rested her face on his chest. There was a faint light there. A heart still beating. Weak. But alive.
“I don’t want the world. I just want one more moment.”
And that night, beneath the cloak of shadows and wind, they lay among the singing stones. He wrapped her in his fragmented body. She anchored him with her mortal arms. And together, they dreamed—though neither of them slept.
For the first time in a long time… the world did not touch them.
Time became a cycle of attempts and absences.
Ray kept wandering. From ruins to deserts, from caves to ancient towers, always searching for the Places of Convergence. But one by one, they went silent. The corners of the world where Virekos could manifest began to lose their power. The old magic withered, and the gaps between worlds seemed to close, one after another.
The meetings became unstable. Sometimes he would appear for only a few minutes — his voice fractured, his eyes unfocused. Other times, nothing. Just a whisper that he had tried… and failed.
Ray did not give up.
She refused to accept the end. She had sworn to wait for him. And she would.
For Ray, time ceased to be a line.
It became waiting.
An endless pause between moments stolen from reality.
Decades passed like leaves carried by the wind. Centuries weighed on her shoulders without leaving marks on her skin, but carving deep grooves into her soul. Every star that appeared at night, she watched—hoping to see him reflected in its glow. Every sound in the forest, she listened for his name whispered between the trees.
But most days were empty.
And when the meetings came, they were fleeting, fragile—like dreams on the edge of vanishing with the morning. Sometimes, he couldn’t speak. Other times, his form flickered so much Ray feared that touching him would break him further.
Still, she smiled.
Still, she waited.
She danced alone beneath distant moons, sang songs to dead trees, carved his name into forgotten stones. Not because she believed he could hear… but because it was the only way to keep love alive when time itself conspired against it.
On long nights, she wept silently, curled around the space where he once had been. On quiet days, she laughed at memories—even when they hurt. Because loving him was the only thing that still made sense.
Ray became a shadow of herself. Not quite alive, not quite dead. Sustained only by a promise that might never be fulfilled.
But in the core of her chest, a spark remained. And with it—hope.
Because to love Virekos was to endure the impossible. To be temple and offering. To wait for someone who existed outside of time… and still call him home.
And then, one day, she found the forest.
Hidden in a valley between mist-covered mountains, there was a crystal-clear lake. The trees there whispered in forgotten tongues. The air was thick with memory. The water did not reflect the sky, but rather fragments of what the soul sought.
Ray knelt at the edge of the shore. She touched the surface. And she sang.
Not the song he had taught her — but one she had created on her own, with notes of longing, love, and persistence. The leaves trembled. The water shimmered.
And he came.
Emerging from the mist of the lake, with steady steps and a stable body. Virekos. Mortal. Present. Real.
He fell to his knees before her, speechless. She ran to him, embraced him tightly. She felt the warmth, the breath, the weight.
“Here…” he whispered. “Here I can be. For a while.”
“Here, you are,” Ray said, her eyes brimming.
They built a simple cabin between the roots of the ancient trees. A home of living wood and sacred silence. And there, they lived.
Virekos would appear and disappear. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for weeks. But he always came back.
On the nights he was present, he told stories. He laughed. He touched her face as if memorizing every line. And he whispered before sleep:
“One day… one day I’ll return whole. And we will no longer part. We’ll walk among mortals, and the world won’t notice. But it will be ours.”
Ray smiled, even when it hurt.
She planted flowers around the cabin. And every time he returned, new ones bloomed — as if time itself waited with her.
And so, between partings and returns, they lived. Not in fullness, but in promise.
And that… was enough.
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Chronicles of Astravara 
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