The men stood up, their eyes reflecting the holy fire, ready to defend their home.

​He had established the anchor. The humans had their weapon, and the light would hold as long as their hearts remained true.

Alias gathered his power, his mind immediately racing back toward the west, toward the desert. He needed to be beside the mortal he loved. There was no telling when the demons would appear there as well since they were Norx’s target.

Suddenly, he felt a distortion with reality. No, not just a distortion but a kind of descent. Norx had left the heavens and was somewhere on the earth.

He prepared to drop back through the layout of the world to return to the oasis immediately.

Chime.

The soft ring of a bell rang through Alias’s mind, instantly shattering his focus.

The liquid-gold bell in Theo’s hand had been rung. The vibration was short, frantic, and loaded with a sudden, overwhelming terror.

Alias’s lungs locked up, a cold, heavy spike of adrenaline hitting his heart.

"Norx!" He breathed.

Alias flung his consciousness toward the west, abandoning the rain-swept valley before the golden light had even fully faded from the villagers’ skin.

The distance that should have taken a fraction of a second felt like pushing through thick, freezing water.

Norx’s descent into the mortal realm had warped the physical laws of the earth, dragging the air pressure down and making the structural lines of the continents stiff and unyielding.

Alias forced his way through the resistance, his heart hammering against his ribs in a frantic, terrifying rhythm.

When he finally reached the oasis, it was quiet. But the quiet wasn’t peaceful. It felt like the heavy, unnatural stillness before a cliff face collapses.

He stepped through the high jasmine bushes, his silver eyes scanning the perimeter. The cedar fences Theo had built were perfectly intact. The water in the lake was still crystal clear, lapping gently against the bank.

There was no smoke, no blood, and no black fog. Everything looked exactly as it should.

​Yet, a violent, suffocating sense of foreboding tightened like an iron band around Alias’s chest. The air didn’t carry the light, crisp scent of desert evening; it was charged with a stagnant, greasy friction that made his internal energy recoil.

​He didn’t call out. He crossed the yard until he got to the porch, his hand gripping the wooden latch of the front door. He pushed it open.

​Sitting in the center of the main living room was Norx.

​He wasn’t standing in his grand celestial robes, nor was he surrounded by a roaring army.

He was casually leaning back in a chair, resting his elbow on a low table. Both the table and the chair were completely alien—woven out of a dark, pulsing fabric of furry divinity that seemed to drink the light from the room.

In his right hand, Norx held a simple clay cup, lifting it to his lips to take a slow, unhurried sip.

​"You know," Norx murmured, his deep red eyes lifting to lock onto Alias, his voice conversational and smooth. "The concept of tea in this world is quite nice. I like it. It whiles away the time while I wait."

​Alias froze in the doorway, his fingers still clamped onto the wooden latch. He was slightly trembling. It wasn’t a human tremor of fear; it was his divine core reacting to the sheer, oily mass of the energy radiating off Norx’s skin. It was the exact same compound he had just analyzed at the edge of the salt flats—the perverted mixture of holy fire and abyssal void.

​"Norx," Alias breathed, his voice barely a whisper in the quiet room. What had his partner put his hand into? To touch the abyss so deeply that the rot had become a part of his physical presence... It was madness.

​Alias’s gaze instantly tore away from the table, his mind racing as he looked around the empty room. The mats were empty. The kitchen area was cold.

"Where are they?" he demanded, his voice cracking as he took a sharp step forward, his structural awareness sweeping through the walls, through the floorboards, searching for three specific heartbeats.

​Nothing. The house was practically dead.

​"Where is Theo?" Alias yelled, his silver hair beginning to lift as the white sparks of his core flared against the darkness of the room. "Where are Maya and Kael?!"

​Norx watched his frantic reaction, a low, bubbling laugh escaping his throat. He set the clay cup down on the dark table and stood up slowly.

The moment his thighs left the fabric of the seat, the chair and the table dissolved into thin air, turning into a foul grey ash that vanished before it hit the floorboards.

​"Look at you," Norx laughed, his red eyes wide with a creeping, manic amusement as he stepped forward. "You used to be the cool-headed one, Alias. The one who measured the weight of constellations without a single blink. Now look at you. You look like you’ve seen a ghost."

​"Where are they?!" Alias screamed, his divine voice finally breaking through, vibrating the very beams of the house.

​Snap.

​In the space between two heartbeats, the sound of Norx’s fingers clicking echoed through the room. Before Alias could even register the movement, the air pressure behind him dropped violently, and a cold, heavy breath brushed the back of his neck.

​Norx was suddenly standing right behind him, his hand resting lightly on Alias’s shoulder. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

​"Right where I want them," Norx whispered into his ear.

​The moment the words left his mouth, the entire space inside the house distorted. The wooden walls became translucent, warping outward like oil on water.

Through the shimmering, distorted fabric of the air, Alias saw them—Theo, Maya, and Kael. They were suspended within a pocket void, their physical bodies frozen in a deep, unnatural sleep, their very souls visible as three distinct, glowing lights trapped within the dark shell of Norx’s energy.

​Norx hadn’t just captured them; he had locked their souls into the foundation of his descent. He had rewritten their parameters so that if their physical bodies died, their spirits would not return to the natural cycle of the earth. They would remain his captives in the abyss forever.

​"You wanted to see how the clay evolves, Alias," Norx whispered, his grip tightening on Alias’s shoulder until the silk of his robe began to burn. "Now you will see what happens when I turn the page."