Untitled EChapter 3: The Hanging Starpisode
1858 Words
Shadows clinging to walls, floors and furniture tore free from their original outlines all at once, surging, expanding and piling like liquid black mire. Dim indoor light was devoured frantically, blurring vision rapidly—only the fallen star pendant hovered aloft, casting a lonely, frigid silver glow.
The two veteran wardens tensed instantly, raising their firearms until their knuckles whitened. They had witnessed countless aberrations, yet rarely had they seen a low-tier relic capable of manipulating shadows and warping reality.
“Do not stare at the shadow convergence point!” Hale roared sharply. “Stardust twists light and shadow; direct gaze will strip your cognition away!”
But Elias could not tear his eyes away.
At the heart of the layered darkness, countless blurred human faces slowly took shape, crammed and overlapping—men, women, children and elders alike. Every visage writhed in agony, jaws stretched wide, yet not a single sound escaped them.
These were the residual spirits of all past bearers: countless mortal consciousnesses devoured, erased and assimilated by the Hanging Star Pendant, trapped forever within the relic’s shadows to feed its existence.
An infinitesimally faint, icy murmur brushed Elias’s ear, soundless yet piercing straight into the depths of his soul.
“The empty seat awakens… return and take your place…”
Elias’s entire body turned rigid with cold.
The words matched exactly the star whispers Lila had spoken, born from the same source as the throne’s summons within the crimson void. This low-tier stellar relic could somehow link to that hidden expanse and perceive the secret buried in his soul.
The pendant’s rotation spiked abruptly, its silver radiance blazing bright enough to sting the eyes. Thomas, stiff upon the bed, arched his back violently and convulsed all over. His eyes faded entirely to lifeless silver, stripped of every shred of humanity.
“Relic awakening! Premature mutation!” Hale strode forward, drawing his short blade as silver light exploded off its edge. “Seize and subdue it!”
One warden lunged first, gloved right hand reaching straight for the floating star pendant. The next instant, fine cracks spiderwebbed across his glove; silver crystal threads pierced the fabric and sank into his flesh, racing up his veins at breakneck speed.
A scream of agony split the air. The warden stumbled backward, crystalline light flickering beneath the skin of his hand—corruption had already taken hold.
“Superficial corruption flare-up!” someone snarled.
Chaos erupted in the room. The low-risk relic broke free of all restraint, shadows surging endlessly, stardust concentrations skyrocketing as the laws of reality within the space slowly warped. Delay even a moment longer, and the entire block would be contaminated, countless civilians having their sanity drained and mutating silently in their sleep.
Conventional tactics were useless now.
Elias closed his eyes, letting the endless cycle of deaths swirling in his mind crash over him.
Drowning, incineration, crushing, impalement, dissolution into the void… The searing agony of a thousand deaths coalesced into a hollow numbness. Instead of resisting the visions brought on by corruption, he embraced those fractured divergent fates willingly.
Amid all endings and annihilation, he grasped an unseen, hidden path.
The path-forging power unique to the Star Traveler.
The moment he opened his eyes, his perception shifted completely.
Countless slender silver threads of fate crisscrossed the entire room, winding around the pendant, the shadows, the infected laborer and the wounded warden. Every trace of stardust corruption, every mutated taint was drawn, transmitted and spread by these threads.
The thickest silver cord bound the Hanging Star Pendant tight to Thomas’s heart.
“Sever the bond!”
Elias lifted his palm toward the hovering pendant, silently reciting the stellar oath belonging only to him.
“I walk the lost path; I sever twisted fate.”
An invisible shockwave detonated outward. The silver fate thread wrapped around Thomas’s chest snapped cleanly.
The room’s shadows instantly lost their anchor, collapsing and dissipating into stillness. The blinding silver glow snuffed out, and the Hanging Star Pendant lost its levitation, clattering onto the wooden table as nothing more than an ordinary, cold silver trinket.
Thomas’s rigid body slackened, his eyes drifting shut as his erratic, unnatural breathing steadied. Stardust receded from his skin, the out-of-control mutation forcibly halted.
The warped reality of the room snapped fully back into place.
Silence descended once more.
Hale froze mid-swing with his blade suspended in the air, his clouded single eye locked rigidly on Elias, his expression a mix of shock and wariness, as if seeing the rookie warden truly for the first time.
A slum orphan recruited only yesterday, who had ingested no stardust elixirs and unlocked no official stellar path, could peer into the threads of fate and sever stellar bonds.
This far surpassed mortal limits, even the capabilities of low-tier Awakened.
A splitting agony erupted in Elias’s skull, countless brand-new death visions flooding his mind. The backlash threatened to tear his sanity apart. He clung tight to the table’s edge, suppressing dizziness and numbness to keep from losing composure in front of the others.
He knew with absolute clarity: he was irrevocably changed.
The stellar bone throne in the crimson void had long since rewritten the very foundation of his soul. He was no longer a pure mortal, but an anomaly walking the line between fate and the void.
Chapter 5: The First Summons
The return carriage rode in unbroken silence.
The wounded warden sat huddled in the corner; church suppression salves had temporarily stalled the mutation on his hand, yet could not erase the lingering corruption. He kept his head bowed without uttering a word, unshakable terror lurking in his eyes. Every enforcer tainted by stardust knew their end was preordained—madness, or death.
Hale never spoke a word the whole journey, his clouded eye fixed unblinkingly on Elias, a tangled storm of scrutiny, inquiry and vigilance swirling within his gaze.
It was not until the carriage rumbled into the church courtyard, wheels halting as they disembarked, that Hale blocked Elias’s path as he turned to leave alone.
Coal smoke hung thick over the courtyard, cold night wind whipping the hems of their black robes.
“What exactly are you?” Hale’s voice dropped to a near whisper, audible only to the two of them, frigid and devoid of warmth.
Elias’s features remained calm, betraying nothing. “Just a newly recruited warden, Sergeant.”
Hale let out a cold laugh, the scar tugging at his facial muscles to make him look even more ferocious. “Mortals cannot see fate threads, nor sever stellar bonds. You have taken no elixirs, undergone no Awakening, yet wield genuine stellar path power.”
He stepped closer, a crushing aura rolling off him. “I have seen men like you—favored by the void, bound to the stars, born to walk outside the bounds of order. There are only two ends for your kind: become the Church’s sharpest, most uncontrollable blade, or mutate fully into a monster we are forced to burn.”
“Choose your path wisely, Walker.”
With that, Hale turned and left without another word. The Church’s rules were unflinchingly cruel, judging only by results, never questioning origins. Anomalies were either tamed, or eliminated.
Elias stood alone in the empty courtyard as the church’s slow evening bell tolled, echoing across the smog-choked city.
He understood his abnormality had been exposed. His days serving the Church would henceforth be lined with thorns, endless suspicion and probing, never a moment of peace.
Night fell fully, and he headed back to his slum cottage.
Lila slept soundly. The suppressant by her pillow had slowly taken effect, the crystal threads beneath her skin quieting, no longer spreading or writhing. Tormented by auditory hallucinations for days on end, she had at last found a fleeting reprieve.
Elias locked the doors and windows tight, sitting cross-legged on the cold floor and closing his eyes to gather his focus.
He reached out of his own will to the crimson mark deep within his soul.
The next instant, reality peeled away, shattered and dissolved.
Coal smoke, night breeze, wooden cottage, the entire decaying, bustling Silvermist City—all swallowed by boundless scarlet mist.
The crimson void lay deathly silent, untouched by sun, moon, day, night or life and death. Only the colossal stellar bone throne floated at its center, silver dust drifting slowly around it, forming a barrier shielding it from all divine gaze and void intrusion.
But the space surrounding the throne was no longer empty.
Twelve round-table seats forged from starlight and shadow stood arranged neatly around the throne, forming a sealed, hidden realm transcending every faction of the mortal world.
The highest Speaker’s seat belonged solely to him.
Suspended within the void in soul form, Elias finally understood the true gift of the throne.
This was no divine seat bestowing power, but a sanctuary for those trapped in despair.
Every Awakened hunted by the Church, poisoned by stardust, chained by fate, coveted by the void—every lost soul with nowhere left to turn—could be summoned here by his will.
He lifted a hand, channeling his soul power to release the first void summons that spanned the entire continent.
Soundless ripples cut through the scarlet fog, crossing mountains, oceans, city walls and faction divides, touching every broken soul struggling alone across the Aerya Continent.
You are cast out by the world, hounded by order, gnawed away by fate. You have no one to rely on, nowhere to flee, no soul to trust. Come to this round table. Trade secrets for secrets, shield lives with lives. We who dwell in despair stand together against the Tide of Annihilation.
Deep within the void, pinpricks of light flickered to life one after another.
From the outermost shadows, a silent, lifeless shadow slipped into a seat—no aura, no fluctuation, no movement. This was Lina Vane, the Silent Wanderer who had renounced all speech and bore the weight of a slaughtered clan.
Deep within the mist, countless false illusions flickered and intertwined: laughter, mockery, disguises and masks layered one over another, hiding a deeply broken soul crippled by inferiority. This was Jax Cohen, the Illusion Trickster who survived on phantasm and lies.
Far off in the Void of Forbidden Knowledge, an ancient lone book glowed faintly, brimming with taboo scriptures banned by the Church—cold, rational, unfeeling, driven solely by the pursuit of truth. This was Elvin Thorne, the heretical scholar exiled from the Library Church.
Above the boundless sea of stardust visions, a solitary lantern swayed amid raging storms, bearing oceans of blood vengeance and unwavering loyalty, adrift on raging tides. This was Captain Sorin Gale, who had lost everything to aberrant monsters.
The Crimson Round Table awoke at last.
Elias hovered before the Speaker’s seat, gazing down at the four glimmers seated around him, his mind crystal clear.
They were all outcasts abandoned by the world, each burdened with secrets, sins and obsessions. No saints, no heroes, no pure-hearted good men among them.
Yet against the coming Tide of Annihilation, these fractured souls would become the continent’s only hidden hope.
- Writer
