Sya opened her eyes and radiant white light shined from them. In the dark of the night in a lightless building, it was blinding.

  Arden shielded his eyes, but that wasn't enough. The light was combined with an otherworldly heat that started burning his red-tier skin. The heat and the light were fierce but brief. When Arden felt them both diminish, he opened his eyes.

  To his shock, Sya was no longer nailed to the wall. She stood in front of him with closed eyes and bloody wrists. Strangely, it seemed that the injuries she had when nailed to the wall were gone.

  “Sya?” He asked cautiously.

  She twitched in response. She gave no other response to being spoken to.

  An otherworldly voice pounded into Arden’s soul. He couldn't understand the words, but he felt the intent. He coughed up blood and fell to his knees. Just like he had when the being from the trial judged him. A pressure weighed down on him, preventing himself from standing up.

  “Bow down.”

  He felt a voice inside of him, telling him not to resist. It told him to submit. To grovel before greatness. To prostrate himself before his honorific being. Who was he to resist?

  ‘To hell with that!’

  With that mental shout, Arden managed to force his head up off of the floor and glare hatefully into the closed eyes of the thing wearing Sya’s skin.

  “What are you?”

  The pressure around Arden doubled. His head and his entire body smashed into the ground beneath him. His ears and eyes felt warm as blood leaked from them. Even in that state, Arden refused to lower his gaze. He would not submit before this thing.

  “Let…my sister…go!” He yelled with his face pressed against the cement.

  The eldritch whispers returned. They licked the back of his mind as Sya’s mouth moved, and her mouth spoke with a voice that was not her own.

  “How feeble you are, o brother mine. An insignificant agent of the Lone Star.”

  “I am not your brother!”

  “You are many things, RedShift. A survivor. A world ender. An agent of the fallen star. An Archon. As such, you are my brother, as I am your sister.”

  ‘Oh fuck. An Archon.’

  Arden was horrified that another one of these deity-like bullshit entities was here. He wanted nothing more than to run away. Last time one of them descended, he lost himself. But as much as he wanted to attempt an escape, he knew that to do so would be abandoning Sya.

  “Sya is my sister,” he forced out, along with some blood. “So get the hell out of her body now.”

  Arden felt his mind begin to shatter as the whispers turned to menacing laughter.

  “How foolish you are, youngest. Have you not felt my power? In the grand scale of the cosmos, you are nothing more than a speck. A miserable human. You stand in the presence of a god, and your first instinct is to threaten me, when you should be bowing to me.”

  “There’s only one person I’d submit to, and you’re not her.”

  “How insolent, o brother. Divinity is before you, ascension incarnate. And you make jokes.”

  Arden laughed. With mad eyes and a wild smile he stuck out his hand from under his body and raised his middle finger.

  “You’re strong, I’ll give you that, but that’s all.”

  His hand was smashed to pieces, but he ignored the pain and continued.

  “I’ve seen a real god. Compared to the star, you’re nothing.”

  Arden clutched his head in pain as another round of laughter from the Archon resonated inside his mind. His hands gripped his head hard enough to draw blood.

  “What you have seen is nothing more than a vestige of fading starlight. Just like all of your kin. Be warned, all stars eventually die out, and all light will be smothered by the darkness of cosmic winter. The Stargazer may have come first, o brother mine, but when its light fades, the coin will flip, and the Blight will reign.”

  The Archon controlled Sya, lifting her a few steps off of the ground. Her foot rested on Arden’s head, ready to crush it at any time.

  “My agent asked me to make your death slow and painful after completing his task so diligently. Children should be spoiled after a good job, and that child did a great job creating this prime vessel. Your death won’t be slow, o brother mine, but it will be unimaginably painful. Remember the feeling of your beloved sister killing you in the afterlife.”

  There was nothing Arden could do. He knew from experience just how powerful an Archon was. When the Archon of Life descended into the doppelganger’s body, the entire building became akin to a tumor and no one got out unscathed. And that was in a broken, flawed vessel of a husk.

  Arden didn't know what a prime vessel was, but he could tell that it wouldn't be good for him. What would happen if an Archon descended in a prime vessel?

  Death. That was the only option Arden could see,

  He braced for a moment of sharp pain to pierce his skull and blackness to follow, but it never came. He looked up at the Archon wearing his sister’s skin.

  Her face was expressionless, but silver tears fell from her closed eyes.

  Sya was resisting. She wasn’t as much of a prime vessel as it originally seemed.

  ‘Vessel…’ Arden thought.

  Sya hadn’t given up full control yet. If she wasn’t giving up, then neither would he.

  Arden grabbed Sya’s leg with his hand that wasn’t destroyed.

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  ‘Sorry, Sya, but this is going to hurt!’

  Arden activated his only ability. His plan was a simple one. Sya was a vessel for the Archon controlling her. Arden hoped that by damaging the vessel, Sya would be able to regain control. The tendrils that had come to define Arden’s power wrapped around his sister’s ankle and pierced the skin.

  The being in Sya looked down at him with a bemused expression. In an alien tongue, she spoke.

  “Really now. You attempt to harm one such as me. Futile does not even begin to come close to defining this act. Do you really think your feeble power granted by a dying star is enough to defeat a god?”

  Arrogantly, she didn't even attempt to shake Arden off. She just let him repeatedly devour the biomass from her leg. She was convinced that he was so far beneath him that there would be no possible threat.

  That would be her mistake.

  Sya lost her balance and belatedly realized that everything below her ankle was gone.

  “Impossible.”

  Arden’s body regained strength after repairing himself with the large pool of biomass obtained from an Archon’s prime vessel. The quality of said biomass was no joke. Just from devouring the foot, Arden could tell that his reserves had been filled to the brim.

  His hand tightened around Sya’s leg harder as the tendrils continued devouring this bountiful harvest.

  ‘Get the hell up!’

  With that thought, strength suddenly flooded into Arden’s legs so quickly that it left him shocked for a moment. He forced himself off the floor and through the wave of pressure created by the Archon.

  He didn't have any time to think about how he did that. He was still in a life or death struggle with his possessed sister.

  ‘Hit her harder!’

  He pulled Sya towards him with one hand, and smashed his other hand into her head, sending the Archon’s vessel rocketing into the wall with a sickening crack, alongside an explosion of dust and rubble.

  Arden’s eyes went wide in fear, believing that he had just crushed her skull. A second later, he felt extreme pain in the arm he had used to deliver the strike. His right arm was completely shattered after being unable to withstand that much power. No bone was left intact, and every muscle was torn.

  “Ugh!” he groaned through clenched teeth.

  He stepped toward Sya, feeling the bones in his legs strain. They too had gone beyond their limit, but thankfully they were intact.

  ‘Does the quality of Biomass change the quality of my power?’

  “Intriguing, o brother mine.”

  Arden shuddered. The one stealing Sya’s skin didn’t sound harmed at all.

  The cloud of dust knocked up by Arden’s strike fell to the ground with such force that the floor beneath them cracked.

  Arden could see the damage done to his sister. Her foot was still missing, but it was emitting a milky white haze. She didn't seem to be having any trouble standing. She stood with a neutral expression frozen on her pristine face.

  “It is true that you are no mere human. It is beyond comprehension for a young agent of the fallen star to possess such power, but it is just as improbable for an Archon to have so little power. No Archon can walk among worlds. Our might is so vast that your world, your universe would end the moment we enter with our true forms.”

  Gravity multiplied by several times in a moment. Arden felt the bones in his legs shatter and he collapsed to the ground again. The dreadful voices flooded his mind, and he was once again compelled to show submission. Everything started disappearing from his vision.

  ‘What is this?’

  “Brother RedShift. Tell me what you are.”

  *****

  It felt like claws were raking themselves against his soul, trying to pry it open and grab the answers that the Archon desired. Arden screamed out in pain as he felt his soul being flayed.

  He felt more pain than he had ever felt before. Yaan setting his mouth on fire was nothing. Burning with the Maverick hardly compared. Losing his body to the doppelganger didn’t feel anywhere close to this. Nux Valtorin’s proclivities towards torture fell way short compared to the Archon. Harnessing the power of the Godstone was on the same spectrum as this, but it fell short by light years.

  Only one type of pain came close to this, and it was something Arden hadn’t experienced since becoming a Starborn. It was the feeling of his soul being reforged that came with the activation of Beyond’s legacy.

  But this was different than that.

  Beyond’s Legacy was always meant to heal. It just hurt like hell because it reformed Arden’s body and soul. It was like using antiseptic spray on a scrape. It was painful because it killed off cells that could regenerate. Beyond’s Legacy worked that way so the owner of the legacy can keep going forever, for eternity.

  The same could not be said for what the Archon inside of Sya was doing. It told Arden to submit to it. To give up. But Arden refused.

  The soul was inviolable. It could only be entered if the host allowed it. And Arden refused to let the Archon in and take what it wanted from him. This was his domain.

  The Archon’s will weathered him down. It wasn’t hurting him as part of a healing process. It was inflicting immeasurable pain to Arden’s soul for one reason: to let the Archon in. Only by yielding to the vast will of the Archon would the pain stop.

  The monstrous claws tearing at Arden’s soul turned into blades, carving their promise of pain into his very being. His soul would not be destroyed, but he would yield eventually beneath supreme power.

  There was nothing left around Arden. He didn’t know when, but at some point during this torment, he had retreated inside of himself. He couldn’t see anything. Nor could he hear his own screams of agony or the dominating words. His five senses were gone.

  But his sixth was opened.

  He could feel the area around him. It was a place of pure will. It felt warm and comforting. Familiar was the best way he could describe it. This was the threshold at his soul’s border. Nothing would be able to breach it without his consent.

  Arden felt the malice coming from everywhere else inside of him. He could feel the hostile intent. He could feel the words threatening to carve their will upon his most vulnerable spot.

  He could feel the source of his torment. Like how he felt his own soul as familiar, he could feel the will of the Archon attempting to force him to submit.

  Its will was limitless.

  It was far too large for Arden to come close to feel even a fraction of its size. It was larger than the universe, and deeper than the void. Unfathomable was its nature, and hostile was its intent.

  Before it, Arden saw that the concepts of creation and destruction were nothing to it. It transcended those mortal concepts. He could feel how nothing he was compared to it. He still lived, and he would at one point die. This great will was something beyond life. Death was pitiful to it.

  And Arden was the only thing preventing it from getting what it wanted.

  But Arden didn’t need much to stop it from getting in.

  The Archon threatening Arden’s soul could not claim it.The soul was inviolable, so as long as he still had the will to defy it, he would survive.

  He stood in between his soul and the approaching storm. He couldn’t be sure because he wasn’t in his physical body, but he was sure that if he was, he would be grinning with a hint of lunacy shining from within his eyes.

  ‘I think I have to use it now.’

  *****

  The Archon watched Arden’s body scream in agony. She watched in utter indifference as his hands grabbed his face and tightened, tearing out chunks of his own skin. Blood and tears mixed as they ran down his face.

  She felt nothing.

  This was simply what happened to anyone with the gall to refuse the call of subjugation.

  She didn’t feel anything, but she could feel the emotions of the body’s true owner inside her.

  They were going wild. Raw feelings of pain, sorrow, and rage flooded the vessel, but the Archon suppressed them from getting out. Archons didn’t need emotions. That was something that both the firstborn and the heretic failed to understand.

  She watched in utter indifference even when Arden’s body stopped screaming and collapsed silently in a pool of his own blood.