Private The Storm Feeds the Beast

[Darth Prazutis]

Dromund Kaas, Over Grathok'ta...

The shuttle cut through the ash-choked sky like a black dagger through dying light.

Even from the clouds, the continent of New Gratos revealed itself for what it truly was, a wound. A land where the planet itself had been brutalized into submission, beaten down so far its very nature had been transfigured. Rivers of slow-moving magma glowed like open veins across volcanic plains, casting blood-orange reflections across the obsidian hull of the descending vessel. Thunderheads of soot rolled in endless procession overhead, vomiting black rain and caustic winds across a charred wasteland where nothing natural survived, not anymore. For the Graug of the Dark Legion saw to that. The Shadow Hand's shuttle moved in silence, its sleek silhouette veined in faint crimson pulses that mirrored the lifeblood of the land below. Aerik would see it for what it was displayed before him, a descent not just into geography, but into something deeper. An initiation. A crucible. The deeper they went, the heavier the air became, not only from heat or pressure, but from presence: the kind of psychic weight that filled the lungs with memory of violence.

Below them loomed Grathok'ta, the black citadel of monsters. Long had the Dark Legion faithfully served the Dyarchy ever since the falling Eighth Sith Empire, they were infamous reavers, conquerors who blazed trails through every major foe the Sith had faced. In the past they had been given worlds for their reward, Fornow, Moridinae...now their reward was an entire continent all their own. The city did not rise up from the land; it grew out of it, like bone driven through cracked skin. Monolithic towers of fused basalt, blackstone, dark iron and bloodsteel stabbed toward the sky like broken spears, their sides engraved with crude trophies, skulls, flayed banners, fused armor plating from a hundred conquests. Great furnaces lined the city's walls, their smokestacks billowing columns of firelit ash. Somewhere in the industrial haze, the dull roar of war drums echoed, slow, guttural, and hungry.

There were no streets visible from above. Only chokepoints, kill-zones, barricaded walls, and fire bridges that stretched over slag-pits like spines of beasts. The denizens were even more horrific: Graug warbands stalked openly in the smoke. Towering brutes with furnace jaws and flesh-welded limbs, augmented, mutated and vicious monsters alike. Some bore brands of old campaigns, scars of battles past that would've killed lesser men. Others dragged prisoners in chains, screaming until their voices broke. This was a city with no place for peace.

Inside the shuttle, Darth Prazutis stood unmoving, arms folded behind his back, His towering shape wreathed in the gloom of the red-stained viewport. He hadn't spoken since they left the Jutrand Academy. There was nothing to say. Everything He wished to say was below them now, as they came to a corner of the world the Kainate ruled unchallenged for decades. Everything was etched into every howling wind and burning crater. "Look well." He rumbled, the words low, volcanic. "This is where you will bleed. This is where we will truly see what the Jutrand Academy taught you."

Aerik Lechner​

 

[Aerik Lechner]

TAG: Darth Prazutis​

The shuttle cut through the smoke like a blade, and Aerik watched the world below unfold in silence. New Gratos stretched beneath the clouds like a scar that refused to heal. The land did not breathe. It bled.

Rivers of molten rock wound through the plains, their light flickering across the hull. Every reflection was the color of blood. The sky hung heavy with ash, turning everything gray and lifeless. The air seemed to press inward, filled with a weight that went beyond heat. It carried memory, the kind that whispered of things broken and never repaired.

He had studied places like this. Worlds that had been stripped and scarred until nothing living remained. But this was different. The Force here was raw and unbound. It filled every inch of space like something alive. It was not kind. It was not patient. It was a test waiting to be answered.

The citadel came into view. Grathok’ta. It did not look built by hands. It looked forced out of the ground. Towers of black stone rose in uneven lines, etched with the marks of conquest. Skulls, banners, armor—everything fused together until it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. The forges that lined the walls glowed like open wounds, and the smoke from them drifted into the sky in endless spirals.

He felt the sound before he heard it. Drums. Slow and deep. The rhythm of war. It made the deck beneath him vibrate. It made the air hum with hunger. The Graug below moved through the smoke, their shapes caught in flashes of light. Flesh mixed with metal, eyes bright with madness, voices shouting in a language that sounded like thunder.

Aerik let his gaze rest on them and felt the lesson take shape. This was what the Dark Legion called strength. To live in ruin until ruin became part of you. To let the fire burn away what was weak and leave only what could endure.

He glanced toward Darth Prazutis standing at the viewport, silent and still. The power around him was not spoken, it was felt. The kind that needed no words. Aerik understood what the silence meant.

This is where you will bleed.

The thought settled in him without fear. He knew what waited below was not a battle but an initiation. Every Sith faced a place like this eventually. A place that forced them to see what they were made of.

He drew a slow breath and let the heat fill his chest. The drums grew louder, and the citadel loomed larger.

Let it begin, he thought.

“I do not intend to bleed if I can avoid it,” he said as he finally pulled his gaze from the city below and fixed it on the one he now called master. “What is the test?”

 

[Darth Prazutis]

The great shadow didn't move at first.

The silence thickened, not any sort of absence, but density, like the way a tomb holds silence. Crimson light from the viewport crawled across the surface of his obsidian warplate, tracing the engraved runes of agony and dominion etched into Qâzjiin'vraal. The towering figure loomed motionless, as if carved from the same volcanic stone as the towers rising below. But beneath the iron stillness, the Dark Side breathed, not in sound, but in gravity. The planetary dark side nexus, the Umbral Maw bore down hard here, its presence changing among a continent so gripped in darkness, that it flowed freely from the cracked earth.

Then, one massive gauntlet lifted and pointed. Out beyond the glass, the citadel's furnace gates loomed, great chasms belching flame, where titanic doors of darkened steel yawned open to receive them. Pillars of molten steam curled upward as the infiltrator shuttle circled low. Right at its base, Graug sentinels formed ranks in anticipation, their warbrands still glowing from the last execution, heavily armored. "The test." Prazutis said at last, voice deep as seismic rumble, "Is not a simple trial of strength. Not here. Strength is expected. What is tested is something far more... intimate." He turned then, slowly, so Aerik could see the faint red glow pulsing in the hollow of His helm, the eyes of the Xûl-Karzaan, not merely seeing, but consuming.

"Every apprentice can strike a foe. Every savage can survive a wasteland. But very few can do what must be done when victory demands the death of comfort, the betrayal of certainty, the extinction of mercy. That is what I will take from you here. Your final illusions. So that when you kill next, it will be as a Sith, not a boy clinging to a shadow of righteousness." The shuttle descended through fire-wreathed thermals, its hull rippling with heat distortion. The great landing claws spread wide as it touched down upon the scorched blackstone of the courtyard, a circular ritual square rimmed with mounted skulls, braziers, and obsidian shrines. The moment the engines powered down, the surrounding Graug roared in unison, united in bloodlust. The boarding ramp extended.

The stink of sulfur, iron, and sweat poured into the cabin like a living thing. Beyond the open hatch, war priests waited with axes and charred incense; armored brutes knelt with their heads bowed low in reverence. It was not for Aerik. It was for the god in his company. A deep reverence for their undying, merciless destroyer god who expected nothing less from his butchers, for in a land devoid of mercy these brutes fought to bow lower, show deeper devotion to their Dark Lords. The Shadow Hand didn't look back as He stepped down the ramp. "Come, Aerik Lechner." He called without turning. "We begin in the flame."

Aerik Lechner​

 

[Aerik Lechner]

TAG: Darth Prazutis​

Aerik stood in silence while the figure before him remained still. The air inside the shuttle felt heavy, thick with unseen pressure. It was not quiet because nothing moved but because everything waited. The red light from the viewport slid across the Dark Lord’s armor, touching each carved rune until they glowed faintly. The light moved like blood across metal. Aerik could feel the power that lived in those markings. It was not wild or loud. It existed like breath, steady and unshaken.

The presence in the cabin grew until the space itself seemed smaller. The air pressed down with invisible weight. Every breath came slower, and the sound of the engines faded until only the hum of the Force remained. It was not peace. It was command. Aerik had stood near strength before, but this felt older and far more certain.

When Darth Prazutis raised a hand toward the viewport, Aerik looked beyond him. The gates of the citadel were open. Fire poured through them and spilled across the plain in long waves of red light. Towers stood beyond the gates, jagged and black against the clouds. Graug soldiers filled the square below, their armor still glowing from the forges. The air trembled with the heat. The sight was not ceremony. It was worship.

Then the Dark Lord spoke. The sound filled the shuttle and seemed to travel through stone and air alike.

“The test is not strength. Strength is expected.”

The words struck deeper than he expected. Aerik understood. The trial ahead would not weigh his skill with a blade or the strength in his arm. It would demand something that could not be measured. Comfort would die. Certainty would fade. Mercy would burn. The purpose was not cruelty. It was to reveal what could not be destroyed.

He turned the words over in his mind. To walk the Sith path meant losing what others called safe and finding worth in what remained. He could feel that truth shaping him, not as threat, but as challenge.

The shuttle began to descend. Heat rose against the hull and turned the glass to haze. When the landing claws met the stone below, the roar that followed shook the floor. The Graug voices rose together, a single sound that drowned everything else. The ramp lowered. Air rushed in, carrying the smell of ash and metal.

War priests stood ready beyond the threshold. Warriors knelt in formation, waiting for their god. Their eyes never left Darth Prazutis as he walked forward.

“Come, Aerik Lechner. We begin in the flame.”

Aerik did not move at once. The name still echoed in his mind, stripped of title and weight. He drew a breath that tasted of fire and dust. The heat met his face as he stepped forward. The chants grew louder. The drums quickened.

We begin in the flame, he thought, and he walked down into it.

 

[Darth Prazutis]

The path into Grathok'ta did not wind. It descended.

Beyond the shuttle's ramp stretched a corridor of scorched blackstone, lit by braziers belching dark flame that threw shadows like clawed hands across the walls. War priests marched ahead in absolute silence, their axes turned inward over their chests, a gesture of reverence, or warning. Behind them came the Shadow Hand. His armored tread echoed with each step, a steady, thunderous cadence like the tolling of a funeral bell. The sound swallowed all others. The deeper they went, the more the world narrowed. Symbols etched along the walls pulsed faintly in the flame-glow, ancient Sith sigils carved by rites long buried. Each one seemed to watch, judge, remember. The tunnel felt like the throat of a beast, pulling them deeper into the heart of something alive and waiting. Heat rose with every step, until breath itself carried the taste of cinders and iron.

At last, the procession emerged into a cavernous chamber. It wasn't a throne room. It wasn't a cathedral. It was a pit.

The arena yawned open in a vast depression of volcanic glass, its obsidian floor etched with spiraling battle sigils and scorched footprints from trials past. Around the edges stood jagged spears, totems of horn and bone, and towering flame-cages that belched smoke into the vaulted dark above. The arena's walls were lined with Graug, thousands of them, packed shoulder to shoulder in total silence. No chants. No cheers. Just breath held in bloodthirsty anticipation. Across the pit, a second gate groaned open.

From its shadow staggered something monstrous. It was once Graug, at least in shape, but its form had been mutilated by warcraft and sacrificial design. Its limbs were wrapped in molten chains. Its back bore jagged blades driven straight through its spine. Its skin had blistered into cracked, charcoal plates. And in the hollow of its chest, where a heart should be, burned a contained inferno, a living furnace thudding with unnatural life. The Dark Lord stepped forward, just enough for His shadow to stretch into the pit.

"Your trial." He said, His voice cold iron and finality "Is not to kill it." He turned His head slightly, black iron helm glinting red in the firelight. "It is to kill yourself, the part that clings to the old shape. The part that still wonders what others would think. That second-guesses. That doubts. That bleeds." He said nothing for a moment longer, and in the silence, the beast across the pit began to slam its fists into the earth, roaring without words. The Graug above didn't react. Their silence only grew heavier, deeper.

"If it dies before that part of you does." Prazutis intoned "I will leave you here." His voice didn't rise. He didn't gesture. He didn't need to do anything at all. Every word was a nail in a coffin. "Step into the pit, Aerik Lechner." He said, stepping aside. "And show me what remains…when you burn."

Aerik Lechner​

 

[Aerik Lechner]

TAG: Darth Prazutis​

The corridor gave way to heat and darkness. Aerik followed the Shadow Hand in silence, feeling the weight of the air close around him. The light from the braziers made the blackstone glisten as though it were wet. The walls pulsed faintly with red runes, their light weak but constant, like veins under the skin of something alive. Every step seemed to carry him lower into the world’s heart, where the air itself moved like breath.

When they entered the pit, Aerik stopped. The chamber was vast and round, carved from volcanic glass that shimmered in the firelight. The floor bore scorched markings of old battles. Nothing here was decoration. Every line, every burn, had purpose. Thousands of Graug filled the walls above, their presence thick but soundless. The silence felt heavier than a shout.

Then the gate opened.

The thing that came out moved with weight that shook the ground. Its shape was still Graug, but the rest had been lost to pain and metal. A furnace burned in its chest, molten light spilling through the cracks in its skin. It drew breath that came out as smoke.

Aerik’s jaw tightened. He felt the heat from across the pit and the throb of the Force inside it, wild and furious. When Darth Prazutis spoke, the words landed like iron.

“This is not about killing. It is about what you kill within yourself.”

Aerik understood enough. He descended into the pit. The stone was slick with ash, and the smell of burnt flesh filled his nose. The Graug above leaned forward, still without a sound.

The beast struck first. The blow missed by a breath, but the wind of it sent Aerik stumbling. He steadied himself and circled, measuring distance. The second strike came lower, and this one he caught, twisting with the motion to redirect it. His boots scraped across the stone. Sparks leapt between them where heat met sweat.

He countered with his palm, sending a sharp burst of kinetic energy that staggered the monster but did not move it far. Its chains rattled as it turned, eyes burning like coals. Aerik could feel it feeding on anger, drawing strength from rage as if the emotion itself were air.

The temptation stirred in him. The power was there, waiting. He could feel his body respond, bones aching as if something beneath his skin wanted release. If he let it come, the fight would end in a single breath. He could tear the beast apart.

He stopped himself. The thought of it felt too easy. Too hollow.

The creature swung again, and this time he met it with movement rather than strength. He slipped under its arm and drove his shoulder into its ribs, hearing the crack of metal against bone. The furnace within it flared, heat washing across his face. He felt it singe his skin, but he did not move back.

Each exchange became slower, heavier. His body ached, but his mind sharpened. The fire in his blood raged against the restraint, begging to be set free. He pushed it down. This was not the moment to become what the Dark Side wanted him to be. It was the moment to prove he could choose.

When the creature dropped to one knee, Aerik stood before it, breathing hard. The roar from above never came. Only silence. Smoke rose from the stone, curling around his legs. He looked up at the Shadow Hand.

He did not speak. He did not kneel. He simply waited, the fire still burning behind his eyes, not yet given form.

 

[Darth Prazutis]

The silence lingered like a breath held by the world itself. From the elevated edge of the pit, the Shadow Hand stood motionless, a black monolith against the glare of molten light. The fires cast flickering red across the carved runes of his warplate, each sigil catching firelight like the last heartbeat of something sacrificial. His helm, Xûl-Karzaan, stared down at the scene not with eyes, but with judgment, layered in myth and dread. It wasn't a face but a sentence, carved in dread obsidian and inlaid with vein-like channels that pulsed faintly with hunger.

When Aerik didn't kneel…when he didn't speak…something shifted. Not in the air, but in the Force itself. The silence from the Graug remained total, reverent. Yet in that breathless pause, the air within the chamber tightened, as though the Dark Side itself had narrowed its gaze and chosen now to bear witness. Just then He descended. The obsidian ramp groaned beneath the armored footfalls of the Sith Lord as He stepped into the pit, each stride a death knell, each movement like the turning of celestial gears. The power that rolled off Him was not like flame or lightning, it was gravitational, an inward spiral of will so immense it bent presence around Him. It wasn't heat that filled the air. It was the slow pressure of inevitability.

He came to stand before Aerik, face to face now, their shadows cast long across the soot-stained stone. The form of the Graug abomination lay smoking behind them, still twitching as the last echoes of its furnace-light sputtered out. "You did not yield." Prazutis said, voice like ancient stone dragged across bedrock. "You did not consume. You endured." He circled once, slow, deliberate, like a black sun measuring the orbit of a world. "But a Sith is not forged in a single moment of restraint. Nor in the heat of one encounter." His voice deepened, not louder but more absolute. "You have entered the crucible. But the flame deepens."

He turned toward the darkened wall of the arena, and the wall obeyed. Massive doors of ritual-etched blackstone groaned open, not with hydraulics, but like bone splitting under strain. Beyond them was no chamber, no corridor. Only darkness, rippling at the edges as if the stone itself were veiled in something not fully real. "The body tests the will. But now we test the truth beneath it." Prazutis turned his gaze back to Aerik. "You will walk into the chambers beyond this gate. I will not follow. Not with footstep nor voice." The Shadow Hand paused. "Everything that waits beyond was drawn from you. Every scar, every lie, every name you've tried to escape. The Dark Side is a forge… but it is also a mirror. You will face what lives in that reflection."

He reached forward, and with one black gauntlet, placed a single finger against Aerik's sternum, not pushing, but marking. "No armor. No allies. No blade." The giant continued on. "The next gate will open only when the Force itself deems you worthy." He stepped back into shadow, and in a final, awful whisper that felt less like sound and more like being unmade, he added: "What breaks in there…never comes back the same."

Aerik Lechner​

 

[Aerik Lechner]

TAG: Darth Prazutis​

Aerik did not move. The air between them was dense and heavy, shaped by power that pressed from every direction. The mark left by the gauntlet still burned faintly against his chest. It was not pain, only presence. A reminder that the moment was not yet finished.

He listened in silence until the last sound of the Dark Lord's voice faded into the firelight. The Graug above had not stirred. Their stillness gave the impression that time itself had stopped to watch. Aerik looked once toward the gate. What waited beyond it did not resemble stone or shadow. It was something in between, a curtain drawn from the substance of the Force itself. The edges rippled like breath but held no warmth.

He gave a slow nod.

”I understand," there was no defiance in his tone, only acknowledgment.

The heat in the chamber felt different now. It no longer pushed against him. It waited. He reached to the side and unfastened his weapon, lowering it to the ground. The sound of metal on stone echoed across the pit. He straightened, the weight of the act settling on him with calm acceptance.

He took one step toward the opening, then another. The void beyond it seemed to draw in the light from the arena, swallowing it piece by piece until only the faint glow of his outline remained. The noise of the crowd above had become distant, fading into the hum of the molten heart below the city.

Aerik stopped at the threshold and turned his head slightly, just enough to glance back. The Shadow Hand stood beyond the flame, his outline unmoved, silent as the stone around him. The firelight from the pit flickered against the armor of the Dark Lord, yet it revealed nothing.

"I will enter," Aerik said. "If the Force intends to show what remains, I will see it."

The words were plain, neither promise nor oath. He gave no sign of hesitation, but the truth was quieter. The darkness ahead pulled at him, not with fear, but with knowing. Whatever waited would not be simple.

He crossed the threshold. The heat vanished. The roar of the forge fell away. Even the weight of his own breath seemed to disappear. The door behind him began to close, slow and final.

The last sound he heard was the echo of the stone settling into place. Then all light was gone, and the silence became complete. Aerik stood still and waited for the next truth to come.

 

[Darth Prazutis]

The sound of the stone sealing behind him died with unsettling finality, as though the room had swallowed its own breath. All warmth vanished. There was no flame. No hum of life. No light. Nothing at all. For a moment, Aerik stood in absolute darkness, the kind that does not merely obscure, but watches, the kind that feels aware. It pressed against the skin like cold oil, seeping into the pores, filling the ears, pooling beneath the bones. It had depth, this dark, and movement, not like air, but like something submerged beneath the depths of the ocean, shifting around him at the edge of perception.

Then came the sound. It wasn't a roar, nor was it a whisper. A rattling breath, exhaled as though from a lung lined in ruin. It scraped from the far end of the void but didn't echo. This chamber had no walls, or if it did, they were not shaped by physics, but by the perimeter of knowing, of what Aerik feared to know. It was in that very moment, light began to bleed.

Not firelight. Not braziers or blazing furnaces. A dim red pulse began to stutter beneath the black floor, like a heartbeat struggling to remember its rhythm. Faint lines glowed beneath his boots, forming a circular platform of obsidian veinwork, runes shaped like roots, branching outward into the void. Where they met the edge of the platform, the dark did not stop, it resisted, as if something immense pressed from outside, desperate to be let in.

Then it was.

The silence cracked. The stone beneath groaned as something stepped forward from the dark, not through a door, but from the space itself, like a memory being forced to manifest into living flesh. The beast arrived, and the chamber obeyed. Its form was wrong.

Not colossal like the Graug. But vaguely human, at first and then...not. It moved with broken grace, a body shaped like Aerik's own, the same height, the same musculature, but where his skin bore scars earned in truth, this figure bore wounds that never closed. Gashes across the face, leaking darkness instead of blood, the eyes hollow pits into which the red light drained endlessly. Its flesh was a shifting mosaic of faces, memories, and failures, blurring across its chest, arms, back, as if every decision Aerik had regretted had been skinned and stitched into its hide. When it stepped forward, its movement made no sound. But each motion struck a tone in the Force, like a bell tolling in reverse. It didn't speak. It only looked. And where it looked, the chamber responded.

On the far wall, flickering scenes appeared:

• A boy reaching toward a flame.
• A hand trembling above a fallen saber.
• A woman turning her back in a corridor of light.
• A name whispered like a curse.
• A wolf howling at a crimson moon.

These weren't visions. They were reflections, and the beast was still walking. Now it was close enough for Aerik to see the lips move. No sound came, only the shape of words said in shame, now turned into a litany against him:

"I'm not like him."
"I don't want this."
"That's not who I am."
"Please."

The beast's face shifted, now it wore his face. But ruined. Burned. Not twisted by hatred, but by failure. Its arm lifted. Long fingers, blackened at the tips like burnt roots, flexed as if remembering the shape of a weapon. But it held none. Instead, the runes beneath Aerik's feet pulsed once more, and then the second platform cracked, revealing beneath it not stone… but a pit of lightless water, as if reality had begun to bleed. The arena would not be made of ash this time, but of memory and reflection.

The beast lunged. It bore no flame, no blade, only truth burning within its enflamed claws. The beast snarled, and the sound was not merely a roar. It was a chorus of screams, old screams, countless voices piled into one, straining against the shape of a throat that should never have carried them. This thing was not summoned. It was grown. It had been made in fire and bone and memory, woven from all the buried things Aerik had never spoken aloud. It did not come from any machination born of the academy, or dark sorcery woven by the Shadow Hand

It came from him.

Above, the runes flared blood bright, and the chamber sealed shut with a thunderous pulse of power. The Dark Lord of the Sith stood on the high overlook far above, shrouded in shadow and red light, cloak billowing in the thermal updraft, as motionless as a statue of judgment. He didn't speak, He wouldn't provide aid. There was no need for the trial had truly begun. It would be the will of Aerik if he survived, if he rose beyond himself to push through it.

Aerik Lechner​

 

[Aerik Lechner]

TAG: Darth Prazutis​

The sound of stone closing faded until even the memory of it was gone. Silence followed, deep and absolute, pressing into the space like weight. It was not stillness born of peace but of watching. The darkness that surrounded him did not rest. It breathed, slow and deep, like something patient waiting beneath the surface of a black sea.

A rasping breath cut through the quiet. It came from far ahead, low and rough, as though drawn through a broken throat. Aerik turned toward it. The air carried no echo, only that single sound. Then faint red light stirred underfoot, tracing lines along the floor. Thin veins of fire crept outward in a circle, spreading until the runes beneath his boots began to pulse with rhythm. The glow reached the edge of the void and stopped. The darkness pushed back against it, and something crossed over.

A figure took shape at the edge of the light. Its movement carried weight but no sound. The Force trembled with each step, like the strike of a deep bell. The body was human in outline and familiar in size. Then the features shifted. The resemblance grew clear. It was him. The same frame. The same height. Yet the flesh was carved with wounds that never healed, cuts that leaked shadow instead of blood. Faces swam across its skin, images of people and moments he had tried to bury. Each time the light touched them, they vanished, only to appear somewhere else.

The figure stopped within the circle. Its eyes were hollow but alive. Its mouth moved in silence. The shape of the words was enough for him to know them. I am not him. I do not want this. That is not who I am. Please. The voice he remembered was gone. What replaced it was his own, twisted by memory.

Images flickered across the chamber walls. A child's hand reaching for flame. A saber lying in the dust. A woman walking away without turning back. A wolf beneath a red sky. Each vision appeared for a breath and then dissolved. The chamber returned to shadow, leaving him face to face with what had come from him.

He did not speak. The creature moved first. Its arm rose, fingers curled, and the floor cracked between them. The runes pulsed once, then split apart to reveal a pool of lightless reflection. The creature lunged.

Aerik met the movement head on. The air rippled with the impact, his arm driving against the creature's shoulder and forcing it back a step. The effort sent heat through his limbs, but the form before him did not weaken. It came again, fast and fluid, every strike landing with the weight of memory. Each blow brought another flash across the walls. A mistake. A failure. A choice he had tried to forget.

He fought with control, drawing only what was needed, keeping the fire within him still. The creature pressed harder, its hands like iron. He stepped through the attacks, redirecting the force rather than meeting it. The rhythm of the fight grew slower, more deliberate, as if both knew how it would end.

His body strained. The heat built until it filled his vision. The creature's face shifted again, and he saw his own eyes staring back. The truth came quietly, without denial. This was no enemy. It was him.

The moment stretched. The creature's hand closed around his throat, heavy and cold. He felt its pull, not as pain, but as gravity. Resistance faded. The fight was no longer about survival but understanding. What had been buried had returned, and it would not be denied.

Aerik let the breath leave his chest. His body stilled. The creature leaned close, its shadow covering his vision until the light disappeared. The floor beneath them glowed once more before fading.

The silence returned, deeper than before. He did not cry out. He did not plead. The struggle ended where it had begun, in darkness. The beast overtook him, and the dark closed around them both.