Alex pulled at the elusive blade.

The same blade he believed belonged to the Dark Ancient, though ’believed’ was doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

He had no proof, other than the circumstances of the weapon. He had no confirmation that this was the same weapon wielded by the Dark Ancient in his very first dream, the one used to butcher cosmic entities. A blade centuries older than old civilization, older, in fact, than entire worlds.

A blade that had once been held personally by a being who was born at the epoch of creation itself.

Alex had felt a connection when he first saw the blade, but it could simply be because he unconsciously wished for it to be the same weapon he saw in his dream. But then again, he already had a weapon forged personally by Dark, Sorrow, so there was no reason for this to be a replica.

The sword came free in a torrent of darkness.

The plane of reality itself seemed to buckle beneath its presence, not violently, not with any sound or resistance, simply melting away wherever the blade’s form touched it, dissolving into a pitch-black canvas that hung suspended for the barest fraction of a second.

The bones of creation itself. The raw fabric on which reality had been woven, glimpsed for a moment beneath the dark blade, indistinguishable from its cold metal, before it stitched itself shut again as though nothing had ever disturbed it.

The phenomenon lasted less than a heartbeat. A millisecond, if that, and gone before either Alex or Zahra had time to properly react to it.

They looked at each other.

Their eyes met for a single, silent moment, both of them checking the other’s face for confirmation that they had actually seen what they thought they had seen, and not simply imagined it.

Alex returned his attention to the blade.

It hung suspended before him now, fully drawn, a long sword forged from the deepest, most absolute black he had ever encountered in any metal.

Its shape was strange, unlike anything conventional smithing would have produced. The base was broad, closer to that of a greatsword, before narrowing gradually to a fine point, the whole of it double-edged and stretched to the length of a proper longsword.

It had been forged from a single continuous piece of metal, without seam or joint. The guard was little more than a circular opening near the hilt, and set within that opening rested a single point of darkness no larger than a fingertip, and yet that small, unassuming point radiated an aura so lightless it seemed to draw the surrounding reality itself into some deeper, more absolute version of darkness.

As his eyes settled on the blade, something surged through his chest. The same kind of emotions he had felt the first time he had laid eyes on it. Except this time, the feeling didn’t pass in a moment and fade.

It stayed.

And where last time, what he had felt had been happiness, grief, and guilt, threaded quietly beneath both of the others. This time the feelings were different. This time, what moved through him was anger, disappointment, and something close to resentment, sharp enough that it startled him with how foreign it felt sitting inside his own chest.

Alex quickly realised that these emotions didn’t belong to him, they belonged to the blade.

Alex sat with that realization for a long moment, baffled, turning it over slowly until understanding finally settled into place. The sword was as old as anything he could reasonably name, older than most things he couldn’t.

It had belonged to an Ancient. Given that, it wasn’t especially surprising that the blade retained the capacity to express something resembling emotion. If anything, he felt, he shouldn’t be shocked if it suddenly began speaking directly into his mind.

But no voice came.

Alex decided to check the blade’s actual status, the one he had earned only after considerable hardship, first losing his legacy weapon and then very nearly losing his own life in the process of retrieving it and earning this one.

Name: ????

Weapon Type: ????

Quality: ????

Grade: ????

Description: ????

Nothing.

The system offered him not a single word of information, refusing to share anything at all, the fields sitting blank in a way he had genuinely never encountered before, not obscured, not partially revealed, simply and completely empty.

He sat with that for a moment. Disappointment settled in first, but underneath it, something sharper was already forming, a question that had been on his mind for some time now.

’By now it should have sent me into a dream state,’ Alex thought, his fingers tracing gently along the cold surface of the blade. ’I know not everything connected to the Dark Ancient triggers one of those dreams into his life. But everything major, so far, has.’

Not worthy!

A thought surfaced in his mind immediately, not his own, arriving fully formed and unbidden, the way a stranger’s voice might cut through a crowded room. His eyes went wide.

He stared at the cold black blade in his hands, and then he chuckled.

"You plan to share how I can become worthy of you," Alex said aloud, and as he thought, no answer came.

He waited for a moment before he used his eyes of the ancient, letting them settle fully over the weapon, curious whether the sight meant to reveal the nature of all things would offer him anything more than the system’s blank refusal had.

His vision went dark.

Not the darkness of closed eyes, or a dimly lit room, or even the abyssal quality his own gaze usually carried. This was absolute, total in a way that erased the very concept of light having ever existed at all.

A breath later, Alex found himself suspended within it, and there was no floor beneath him, no ceiling above, no walls at any distance he could measure, because distance itself no longer seemed to hold any clear meaning here.

He tried to stretch his senses outward, the way he always did when entering an unfamiliar space, and felt his own awareness sink instead, swallowed by a density of darkness that resisted every attempt to push past its surface.

He tried to draw breath.

He had no lungs to draw it with.

He looked ahead, and turned, and found nothing in any direction but the same unbroken dark, indistinguishable no matter which way he faced. He reached inward, toward the anchor that should have pulled him back into his own body.

The anchor wasn’t there.

He stood in the nothing, momentarily lost, uncertain what came next. It was then that he saw it across from him. Perhaps a few feet away or perhaps countless miles. Distance had become a strange and unstable idea inside this place, and somehow that no longer mattered as much as it should have.

Two eyes opened in the dark.

Abyssal black, irises vertical like something built for hunting rather than seeing, dark in exactly the way his own were dark, and they stared back at him with clear, cold intent.

Then two more opened.

These ones looked almost human in shape, but no less drowned in the same absolute absence of light. Then two more beside those, and two more, and more, and more, the pattern accelerating faster than his mind could track it.

Within moments, Alex stood surrounded by thousands of eyes.

Tens of thousands. The number kept climbing with every heartbeat, heartbeats he didn’t currently have, and yet somehow still felt his heart grow cold.

A million eyes settled on him at once, their weight pressing down from every direction, hollow and yet nothing close to lifeless, watching him with the patient, ancient attention of things who could just see through him.

By the time his mind cleared enough to properly register the scale of what surrounded him, the darkness had become nothing but eyes, an endless, expanding field of them, stretching in every direction he turned.

Wherever he looked, more of them looked back. None carried any single, readable emotion. And yet the sheer accumulated weight of that many gazes settling on him at once was suffocating in a way no physical pressure had ever managed to be.

It made him feel, for the first time in longer than he could remember, genuinely small.

Like an ant, pinned beneath the attention of something vast enough to see it clearly and simply register it for exactly what it was, nothing more, nothing less.

There was no contempt in the observation. No anger, no cruelty, nothing so warm as either of those things would have been. Just a cold, total indifference.