"Now then, boy." Envy’s voice rolled through the darkness with the grinding, layered wrongness it always carried, though something beneath it had shifted, a note of impatience that had not been there before. "Where are you? Come out already. I know my Domain override did not kill you."

As though answering the call, a form rose through the pool of darkness.

It came up slowly, without urgency, a tall figure climbing out of the void the way something surfaces from deep water, unhurried and inevitable. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

It stood nearly two and a half meters tall, clad in an ink-black mantle that somehow appeared dimmer than the pitch dark color of his skin, as though it absorbed even the void’s quality rather than simply matching it.

Beneath the mantle, living muscle moved with each slow rise, and the body it covered was familiar and not familiar in equal measure.

The struggle that had been playing out within the shared existence of Alex and Odysseus had changed something again. The form carried the same fundamental resemblance to Alex that it always had, the same structure and proportion, the same origin readable in its lines.

But it was older now, more settled, the features more perfect and more chiseled, matured past the version the world knew into something that looked like what Alex might become given enough time and enough of the wrong kind of refinement.

Its arms hung loose at its sides as it rose, and its eyes were two pools of absolute nothingness, giving away no emotion, no intent, no suggestion of a mind working behind them. They simply were, open and present and entirely empty of anything that could be read.

Envy went silent.

A frown crossed his copied features, slow and genuine, the expression of something encountering a problem it had not prepared a response for.

He pressed his perception into the figure floating in the distance, bringing every aspect of his awareness to bear, pushing past surface and appearance into the structure beneath the way he always could, the way he had always been able to read the nature of anything he turned his attention toward.

He received nothing in return.

It was not the nothing of something hiding, or deflecting, or shielding itself behind a constructed barrier. It was a more fundamental nothing, the nothing of something that simply was not there to be perceived.

Looking at it was like looking at an absence that had been given a shape, a form that occupied space and reflected no light and carried no presence whatsoever, as though the world itself had declined to acknowledge it.

If he had not been looking directly at it, watching it float in the darkness with those empty, lightless eyes fixed on him, he would have concluded he was hallucinating. Because nothing that existed could fail to exist in the way this thing failed to exist.

It had no presence. None. Not reduced, not concealed, it was simply absent, an impossibility in itself.

’How can this be?’ The question formed in Envy’s mind with the sharp edges of genuine incomprehension.

In the same breath, instinctively, he reached for his Authority, attempting to do what he had always been able to do, to take the envy he felt toward a thing and use it to mark that thing, to place his law upon it and begin the slow, inevitable process of becoming it.

The world rejected his will.

Cleanly and completely, without resistance, without the pushback of a superior force meeting his. Simply rejected, the way the world rejects an instruction that does not make logical sense, because to be envious of nothing was not a thing that could be done, and what stood before him registered as nothing, and Envy’s law had no purchase on nothing.

It raised its hand.

The space around it twisted in response, a quiet and precise distortion, and from within that twist it drew a sword.

The blade was long, broad at the base, and narrowing with deliberate geometry to its point, forged from pitch-dark metal in a single unbroken piece.

Between the hilt and the blade, where a conventional guard would have sat, was a circular hole, perfectly formed, and suspended within it, held in place by nothing visible, was a single small point of darkness.

Not darkness as a color or a material. A point of it. Pure and contained and entirely self-possessed.

A ripple moved through the figure’s empty eyes.

It was the first sign of anything behind them, a single pulse of something that might have been recognition, there and gone so quickly that it left Envy uncertain whether he had seen it at all.

But the blade responded to it without uncertainty. Its metal came alive, a visible pulse running from hilt to tip, the dark metal brightening slightly in the way that a thing brightens when it is returned to the hands it was made for, thrilled in the particular, wordless way of objects that have been waiting.

Envy stared at it.

’Why am I not calling it, and now by any of those names? Boy? Hidden One? Ruler?’ The recognition that flashed through his mind in the next instant was not gradual. It arrived whole, and with it came the weight of the unknown, something that unsettled even his vast mind.

"You wretched thing," Envy growled the words, not one bit happy by the strange emotions he felt.

Envy closed the gap between himself and it in an instant, crossing the space with the kind of speed that did not allow for reaction, his hand reaching for its neck.

He blitzed back in a fraction of a moment.

The retreat was not chosen. It happened before the decision to retreat had formed, pure reflex overriding everything else, and he found himself at a distance with wide eyes.

An expression that mirrored, with uncomfortable precision, the expression Alex had worn when Leviathan had first taken hold of him, all those years ago. Eyes filled with alarm, and with something that had no business being in a face like his.

A moment passed in absolute silence.

Envy looked down at his right arm. His fingers came up slowly and touched the skin beneath the shoulder, finding the razor-thin line that ran across it, shallow, not deep enough to threaten anything, barely deep enough to be called a wound.

A thread of blood traced its edge with patient slowness.

"How," The word left him with nothing around it. No context, no framing, no performance. Just the word itself, pulled out of him by pure astonishment.

Because it was not the cut that had shaken him. Wounds were irrelevant to someone like him, and this one would close before it finished bleeding.

What had shaken him was the simple, impossible fact that he had not avoided it. That the blade had found him at all. That something had moved in the space between his reach and the thing he was reaching for, and he had not perceived it coming until it had already been.

He raised his eyes.

The same empty, lightless stare looked back at him. No satisfaction in it, no acknowledgment of what had just happened, and no recognition that it had done something worth noting.

Just the void of those two pools of nothingness, open and present and entirely without content.

The terror that moved through Envy was unlike any he had experienced. It was worse than what the unknown thing in the coffin had produced in him, worse than anything he could place in a category and name and therefore begin to manage.

And because it sat beyond his ability to contextualize it, it made him angrier than he could remember being in a very long time.

’A puny insect,’ Envy roared within himself, the internal voice carrying a fury that the external one did not yet have an outlet for. ’Thinks its tricks can frighten me. Envy. The Sin of Envy. The manifestation of the world’s oldest and deepest desire.’

His form began to move.

Not shift or adjust. Move, in the way that fundamental things move when they stop performing a shape and return to their actual nature.

The darkness of the Domain retreated before him, the pitch void bleeding away and giving ground to the cerulean sea that had briefly dominated before.

The blue of the sea also faded until what remained was not water or void but a mirror, vast and perfectly flat and utterly still, its surface reflecting an empty sky upon itself.

What floated above it was no longer the form the world had known as Leviathan.

The thing that remained was a faceless, featureless apparition with no fixed form, drifting in the air with long and lanky limbs that could generously be called arms, six small legs hanging beneath a long torso, the rest of it resisting description the way some things resist being looked at directly, always sliding slightly away from focus when the eye tried to settle on any particular part of it.

Beneath the surface of the vast mirror, far below the transparent depths, shapes drifted.

Thousands of them.