The wind of Eden stopped dead.
As if choked by the gravity of the question that had just been cast into the void.
Upon the sterile white marble terrace, suspended over the indigo abyss, the silence became a suffocating shroud.
Seven did not move.
Motionless like a statue carved out of mourning, his black wings slightly ajar caught the silver reflections of the eternal twilight.
But it was his gaze that froze the atmosphere.
His eyes, a sharp and electric azure blue, contrasting violently with his caramel skin, pierced through the young woman's facades.
He waited, his breath caught in his throat.
Demanding a truth that Heaven itself seemed to want to conceal.
Liah did not flinch.
The mask of divine serenity she had worn since the massacres of Eryndor cracked imperceptibly.
A dry breath, devoid of the slightest joy, escaped her lips before instantly dying out in the overly pure air of the celestial realm.
She turned slowly, breaking her contemplation of the horizon to lock her amethyst pupils into the blades of ice that served as his gaze.
— "You are direct, Seven," she whispered, her voice of crystalline sweetness betraying a millennium-old fatigue.
She took a deep breath. The violet glow of her eyes darkened.
— "Yes. I am dead. A long time ago... during the Twilight of Souls."
It was not her words that shook the Scythe's Heir, but what happened next.
Liah's ether, an abnormally dense mass of energy, ruptured violently.
Her secret escaped her like blood from a wound compressed too long beneath armor.
A wave of pure energy, saturated with the poison of the deceased's regrets, flooded the marble terrace.
Out of a purely instinctive reflex, Seven's black ether reacted violently to this spiritual provocation.
The two fluids collided, merging in an invisible yet devastating discharge.
A sudden vertigo made the world sway beneath Seven's feet.
His reaper senses were sucked in, projected through the meshes of Liah's soul.
Through a total psychic breach, he was condemned to feel the exact, painful truth of her past existence.
***
The transition was a sensory agony.
The indigo sky of Eden was swept away by a golden, almost blinding light, exhumed from the depths of a sealed memory.
Seven suffocated under the onslaught of sensations completely foreign to him.
He felt the warmth of a spring morning, the heady scent of wild mint and thyme crushed under light footsteps.
A hill of white stones rose in his mind, crowned with a house whose red-tiled roof gleamed under a benevolent sun.
In that house, ecclesiastical incense mingled with the smell of fresh bread.
Their father was a rigid priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church. A man of faith, but above all, a secret exorcist who spent his nights fighting what ordinary mortals refused to see.
It was his shadow, his sacred whispers, and his nocturnal rituals that had inoculated his daughters with this morbid fascination for the occult.
Two identical twins, Liah and Leah, two souls forged from the same shard of sky, secretly watching their father repel the darkness.
Leah, the elder by a few minutes, overflowed with fanatical energy.
Always digging through their father's old parchments, books of rituals and legends, she was convinced that myths hid a key to alleviate the suffering of the dead.
Seven, a silent spectator of this memory, heard her voice echo:
— "Liah! Look!" the little girl cried, brandishing an old manuscript stolen from their father's study. "It talks about spirits that wander when no one prays for them!"
And Liah's laugh, still innocent, resonated in Seven's head:
— "You mean we could help them, too? Like Papa?"
— "Exactly!" Leah said with a brilliant smile. "If we understand their regrets, we can grant them peace!"
They had sworn that day, before the well of white stones, that they would save lost souls.
But Heaven did not care for the promises of children.
One morning, fever struck the house. An implacable disease, fallen from an indifferent sky.
No prayer from the priest, no paternal exorcism could stem the decay of Leah's strength.
In a matter of days, silence replaced the laughter.
Bread often burned in the oven, abandoned, because no one had the strength to tend to it anymore.
Leah passed away in a final, frozen sigh.
Liah was left alone, her small hands tightly clenched around her sister's wooden rosary.
But death did not set Leah free.
One stormy night, as Liah wept before the open window, the air split in two.
A sharp, unbearable burn tore through the young girl's eyes, and Seven felt it in the deepest depths of his own flesh.
The veil of reality tore open. Liah became an Awakened, a living anomaly brutally forced to perceive the very texture of the invisible.
And amidst a tide of pale spectres, she saw her twin.
Leah floated, a prisoner between two worlds, her features disfigured by the infinite sadness of the deceased.
— "I'm here, Leah! Look at me!"
— "Liah... you shouldn't be able to see me... There is no more light for me..."
— "Then I will create one for you!"
That was her oath as an Awakened.
From then on, the memory slowed, miring into a slow and methodical ordeal.
Liah plunged body and soul into occult science, begging Frater Silas, a bitter and worn-out old exorcist, to train her.
The man had initially refused, frightened by the child's abnormally dense ether. But faced with her morbid obstinacy, he finally gave in.
The training was a descent into hell.
Seven perceived the physical pain of sleepless nights. Liah's fingers, scraped raw and bleeding from tracing containment glyphs onto the cold stone of chapels.
Her lungs burned. For Liah possessed an incredibly rare affinity, a gift that Silas himself considered a terrifying miracle: Sound.
She didn't just recite prayers. She harmoniszed the frequency of her soul with that of the dead.
Every incantation tore at her throat. Her vocal cords bled after long sessions of sacred chanting.
But her mastery became so absolute, so destructive to the darkness, that Silas would sometimes whisper that she possessed the aura of an archangel descended to judge the world.
And at fifteen, after years of voluntary torture, consecration arrived.
In the family chapel, at the center of a circle of blood and pure light, the air sang.
A dark silhouette took shape in the swirls of incense, fighting against the pull of the living world. Then, the shadow broke, revealing the peaceful features of Leah.
— "You... found me..." the elder sister whispered, her voice echoing as if from afar.
Liah fell to her knees, tears streaming down her gaunt, fatigue-hollowed cheeks.
— "I kept my promise, Leah," she sobbed. "I am here."
— "I am so tired, Liah..."
— "Sleep now. No one will hurt you anymore. I love you."
— "I am proud of you, little sister..."
Leah vanished in a flash of white, leaving a gentle warmth behind.
Liah collapsed onto the floor, trembling, believing she had granted her twin eternal peace.
But it was a lie. The worst of heresies.
Purifying souls in a world where the Realm of the Dead no longer existed was a mathematical aberration. Where could they go?
The reality Liah had blinded herself to, and which Seven understood with horror through her ether, was the price of this "rest."
She had used her own soul as a substitute for the Realm of the Dead.
Leah hadn't gone to the afterlife. She had been absorbed, sealed inside Liah's spiritual essence.
And that was only the beginning.
Having become an elite exorcist, Liah traveled the country. Every spirit she "purifiying" ended up locked within her. She became a purgatory of flesh and blood.
At seventeen, the weight became unbearable.
Thousands of voices, pleas, and rages thundered in her chest day and night, devouring her sanity.
It was during this daily agony, in the frozen silence of her bedroom, that another presence forced its way into her memories.
Since her Awakening, Liah had felt a luminous shadow watching over her. His guardian angel, Malakiel.
The law of Eden was absolute: a guardian observes, but never interferes. They do not speak to mortals.
But Liah, driven mad by the din of the dead within her, spent her nights speaking to him, weeping toward this invisible presence.
— "Make them quiet... Please, make them quiet for just a second..." she would whisper in the dark.
For a long time, only silence responded.
Until that night when the light in the room shifted. The air grew warm, and a vibrant voice, far too gentle for a celestial entity, echoed in her ear.
— "I cannot make them quiet, Liah."
Liah had flinched, her eyes widening into the empty space.
— "You... you are speaking to me? It's forbidden."
— "The silence of Heaven became unbearable to me ever since I started hearing your tears," the angel replied.
Over the months, the line was crossed. Malakiel spoke to her every night.
He gave her no solutions, he didn't help her exorcise, but he stayed. Sometimes, Liah felt a warmth brush her shoulder, as if an immaterial hand sought to comfort her.
— "Your soul is the brightest thing I have seen since Creation," he would sometimes breathe to her, with a fascination that warped the laws of the universe. "You consume yourself for them, Liah... Why are you so beautiful when you suffer?"
This ambiguity, this obsession of an angel for a mortal's dying light, did nothing to lighten the young girl's burden.
One night, at the end of her strength, her mind entirely fractured by the thousands of spectres she harbored, Liah made her final decision.
In the dark chapel, she traced a final circle of runes.
At fifteen, she had successfully sealed Leah within her. At sixteen, she had condemned herself to carry the world. At seventeen, she decided to take everything to the grave.
She committed spiritual suicide, triggering an ether implosion to permanently erase herself from reality.
But destiny possessed a nameless cruelty.
By destroying the vessel—her soul—all the thousands of souls she had saved and stored within herself over the years were instantaneously released.
They did not join the light.
They were violently spat back into the world of the living, condemned to wander once more, to become forgotten souls fated to dissolve into nothingness.
Even Leah.
Everything Liah had accomplished—the training, the pain, the madness... had all been for nothing.
***
Liah opened her eyes—or thought she did.
There was nothing left to see. The world had vanished, and with it all sounds, faces, scents, and the weight of things.
Even the pain no longer existed.
She could no longer remember the sky, nor her own name. Memories frayed like dust carried away by the wind.
One by one, the fragments of her being faded away: Leah's laughter, the scent of warm bread, the warmth of the hearth, her voice, her faith, her dreams... Everything dissolved.
And yet, something remained.
A minuscule, almost imperceptible fire burned at the center of the void. A flame that stubbornly refused to die.
It was her will. The very same will she had once breathed into those she saved.
Time lost all meaning. Centuries? Millennia? Liah had no idea, a prisoner of a subjective eternity.
Two and a half years.
That was the amount of time she had managed to contain that barrage of souls within her before imploding. A superhuman feat, a prowess that no Awakened should have ever been able to achieve.
And yet, the final outcome was revoltingly mediocre.
Around her, in the sterile immensity, other glows began to drift. Blurred contours, torn from nothingness.
Her parents. Her master, Silas. And finally... Leah.
Their silhouettes were already disintegrating, slowly sucked in by the vacuum of the vortex. Liah felt a jolt of pure spiritual agony rip through what remained of her being, phantom tears burning against her invisible eyelids.
She wanted to scream, to reach out her arms, to howl her regrets, but no sound passed her matterless lips. A wild, dark, and desperate rage set her last spark of consciousness ablaze.
*All of this... All of this for nothing.*
*What's the point...?*
The futility of her sacrifice overwhelmed her, breaking her more surely than death itself. And when the void finally took advantage of her flaw to try and seize her last remaining flame, a light flashed.
A hand pierced through the darkness to tear her away from oblivion.
— "Liah... that's enough. The world has not forgotten your name."
Liah looked up in this hazy dream. Before her stood Malakiel.
In her fogged mind, she barely noticed a terrifying detail: the angel's light was flickering, his once-translucent wings tainted with a sinister shadow.
For having broken the laws and descended to find her, Malakiel was already falling from grace.
But in her agony, she paid it no heed.
She was reborn. A new body, a new life, her ether heavily scarred by that erased first existence, retaining nothing but vague nightmares.
Until, years later, Malakiel's shadow guided her toward the Nexus Animarum.
Where she saw, for the very first time, that young man with caramel skin and an onyx rosary.
Seven. The Scythe's Heir. The one fulfilling the duty she had failed to bear.
***
The spiritual link shattered with a dull detonation.
Seven was thrown backward, his boots skidding across the real marble of the Twilight Gardens.
His chest heaved with violent spasms.
His black ether spat out plumes of toxic smoke, while his electric blue eyes stared at Liah with a frozen fury.
Liah was on her knees, her face bathed in tears. Her secret lay bare. The nightmarish vacuity of her previous existence had just crashed into her with the force of a stone wall.
— "I hid the truth from you... I'm sorry, Seven," she breathed, her heart crushed by the resurgence of her absolute failure.
Seven did not answer right away.
The air of Eden remained frozen, majestic and indifferent.
The young man advanced slowly. With a sinister rustle, he slipped his hand beneath his coat and drew his scythe.
The onyx blade sliced through the pure air of Paradise with a lethal hiss, unleashing an aura of pure terror.
He did not approach to lift her up or console her.
He stopped before her, the tip of the weapon grazing the white marble, his immense shadow draping over the Awakened's trembling body.
— "Eden is not responsible for your fall, Liah," Seven said, his voice sharper than the steel of his scythe. "Eden doesn't care. But your angel... Malakiel, he knew."
Seven's blue gaze turned into an absolute darkness.
— "He knew what you were enduring. He took advantage of your pain, watched you destroy yourself out of pure celestial selfishness, and dragged you back into this mess to satisfy his own designs as a fallen entity."
He slowly raised his scythe, pointing it directly at the young woman's throat.
— "Malakiel will pay for what he has done. I will rip away his traitorous wings and consume his essence until nothing remains but ash."
Silence fell once more, heavier than the entire world.
— "The only question left, Liah... is whose side you will stand on. If you walk with me, you will have to raise your blade against your own guardian angel. You will have to help me kill him."
The tip of the scythe drew closer to her skin, grazing her carotid artery.
— "Give me your resolution. Because if you hesitate... you will not see the dawn."