Chapter 98: The Silence Between Devotion and Descent
—He Was Once a Man—
He did not walk with purpose.
Nor with rage.
T'halem, the Phantom, moved through the fissures of the world like a thought too heavy to forget.
Wherever he passed, soullight dimmed.
Not out of fear—
but out of remembrance.
The soul remembers what mind forgets.
And even now, after seven centuries of silence, the air bent around him the way a house shifts when its foundations remember an old wound.
He did not smile.
He did not speak.
He only breathed.
Slow. Even.
Like someone who once knew peace but had forgotten how it felt in the hands.
He came to a place outside of known borders—a plateau of soulstone ruins, nothing more than jagged fragments of ancient architecture.
No one followed.
No one would dare.
Here, he sat.
Not like a conqueror.
Like a man.
And then he whispered—
To no one.
"She still walks."
His voice was deeper than memory and softer than shadow.
Kamharida.
He knew.
Of course he did.
She had been his mirror once.
The First to follow her, the First to believe.
The First to kneel when Ny'thrll smiled.
And yet…
He had wanted more.
Not power.
Not control.
He had only wanted the Progenitor to look at him as she once looked at the stars.
But where Kamharida had accepted distance and reverence, he had tried to rise.
Tried to become like her.
Tried to build what she hadn't granted.
And in doing so—he fell.
Not in battle.
Not in betrayal.
But in the quiet turning of spirit.
Love, unanswered, does not always fade.
Sometimes it festers.
And from that wound—he became the first to twist Soul Energy into something else.
The first to rupture his core.
The first Dark Soulborne.
The father of them all.
Now, he no longer hoped for her gaze.
Now, he wondered what it would feel like to finally see her again—
Not as a devotee.
Not as a dreamer.
But as her opposite.
---
Behind his stillness, shadows curled softly, almost reverently.
They did not whisper to him.
They listened.
Even Mirex, watching from a distance in silent veiling, dared not interrupt.
Because this wasn't rage.
This was truth.
A truth that had waited too long.
And in that space, T'halem opened his palm.
A soul fragment, small and quiet, hovered over it—one the Progenitor had left behind long ago.
He had never crushed it.
Never corrupted it.
He had kept it.
Like a keepsake.
Like a wound.
---
And for the first time in 700 years—
A tear formed.
Not from pain.
Not from weakness.
But from clarity.
"Kamharida… I wonder if you still remember how I looked… before the abyss."
---