Vescrutia: Legacy

The wind never reaches Veacrutia’s western shelf the way it should.

It breaks instead—splintering across stone ribs that rise like the vertebrae of a dead god, each one carved smooth by centuries of unseen pressure. Below them lies the Gloam Expanse, a basin of pale glass-sand and black water where reflections lag half a second behind their owners. Travelers who cross it swear the land watches them blink.

At the heart of this expanse stands a structure older than cartography.

They call it The Liminal Reliquary*

Once, it was a place of judgment—raised by an extinct priesthood who believed the soul could be measured before death. Now it is something far more dangerous: an entry point.

The book Nagase recovered—its pages stitched from treated bark and spirit-skin—names the Reliquary not as a temple, but as a hinge. A fixed place where Vescrutia presses too closely against the realms in between. Where the Unseen does not merely listen, it speaks back.

The Reliquary is not a tower, nor a gate.
It is a depression in the world.

A vast circular hollow sunk into the stone, its inner walls engraved with spiraling sigils that refuse to stay still. When viewed directly, the carvings resemble prayer. When seen from the corner of the eye, they resemble restraints. At the bottom rests a shallow mirror-pool—perfectly still, perfectly black—fed by no visible source.

This is the Stillwater of Crossing.

No moonlight reflects from it. No stars hover above it. Shadows become motion filled silhouettes of a shadow once familar to a different time—sometimes your own, sometimes not. The book warns that the pool does not open for blood, nor for spellwork alone. It opens for alignment. For those whose intent resonates with the Unseen strongly enough to thin the boundary.

Nagase stands at its edge now, her presence warping the air the way heat does above the sands. Beside her waits another Crown of the Acrix—silent, watchful, aware that stepping through will not be a journey *to* a place, but a surrender of orientation itself.

Because the Unseen is not a realm one enters whole.

It strips context. It unthreads certainty. It answers questions by asking better ones.

When the Stillwater of the Gloame Expanse activates, the sigils along the Reliquary’s invert—turning inward, sealing the basin from the waking world. Sound dies first. Then color. Then memory begins to loosen its grip. Those who cross describe the sensation not as falling, but as being recognized by an unseen force.

What lies beyond is not death.
Not quite spirit.
But the space where meanings are negotiated before they harden into reality.

And Nagase is about to step into it—armed with forbidden knowledge, an incomplete map, and the quiet understanding that the Unseen never gives without taking something in return.

“The boundary is thinning, it recognizes our intent. The crossing…begins.”

A moonless sky, a starless heaven. Was all that stood above and around the obsidian lake.

A canopy of cascading black akin to falling night. A deluge of dusk, unlike anything he had ever witnessed on the material plane. Only in the blackest reaches of his own soul, the gore of his own abyss. Yet this blackness, which once haunted his every dream, echoing sins of lives long lost, names like crowns now broken, no longer caused him trepidation. If anything, they ushered him forth, the scorn abated with...

Acceptence

Yet despite their likeness in apperence this darkness around them was different. Vast, yet finite, inviting yet stern, discerning, as if lulling a tune few were meant to hear.

Primevil

He stepped from beyond the veiling blackness of the land's shadow. His boldly sanguine hair stood out the most. His face held the faint twinge of itrigue. The earth here, it's naten buzzed around him intrestgly. As if warning him, preparing for something that defied all he knew. But he had to remain steadfast in why they had come here. Beneath the shy whispers of the pale grass lay the strong smell of ambition. As if the realm itself bore an agenda. scouring over anyone who stepped close to the Stillwater. He gazed into its waters, yet found no reflection. Sometimes he wondered if Myotis truly were vampires after all, but glancing over at Nagase's lack of a reflection as well, he coly dimissed the musing.

"This place...it feels like the Moon Flow..."

A pooled bridge to the afterlife that resided in the Maaluki Woods. A place where those trekking upon the last moments of life go to have one last sip of water before passing on. A sanctuary for the souls of the departed and a vestige of remembrance for the living. A site of immense spiritual power coveted by Desires and fiends alike. A realm of which he was the guardian. Perhaps it was their likeness and the fact that the Moonflow coursed through his body like lifeblood that caused him and the Still Waters to push and pull from each other like so.

It...resited him at first, as if scanning his essence, reading and questioning his intent.

"It...hesitates for me."

His bond with the natural world was only newly restored. It served to reason that some of her most intimate sanctum may still be hard for him to access... reservations about his presence. The last time...he....Allen wounded her with his chaos.

It was a silent assurance, a negotiation before ever getting a chance to sit at the table. Assurance that his company would not be the reason the world suffered.

"Let's not linger then."

He said outloud to Nagase before stepping through the inverted sigils ahead of her.

The Stillwaters' prior hesitation ultimately receded as Inari bore in mind their purpose, his anchor. Sound left him first. The thrum of the earth, the faint whistle of wind, the beat of his own heart—all were silenced by an all-encompassing caesura. Had he not been able to feel the ghost of a pulse in his chest, he would have denied its existence. Then color bled from the world, the stark crimson of his hair and the deep shades of the land dissolving into a uniform, featureless grey.

Then memory began to loosen its grip.

Faces became blurred watercolors, names became shapes without meaning, and the long chain of his past became a series of disconnected sensations. He was not forgetting; he was being unmoored from the narrative he had built around himself. It was a terrifying, exhilarating dissolution. Perception shattered, the self was undone, removed, and remade again. Newly forged, yet unchanged. What awaited them on the otherside of this jounery he was sure, would place them in a position to defy the fate of a world ruined.

The crossing of realms came with a price.

And that price was pain refined into knowledge.

Pain did not vanish between the realms—it was curated, rendered down until only its utility remained. Every fragment stripped away became something sharper, something that cut deeper because it understood more.

Nagase felt it begin the instant the Liminal Reliquary accepted her and Inariel.

There was no splash. No ripple. No moment of entry that could be named now. Meaning itself loosened its grip first—definitions unthreading, truths softening like wax held too close to flame. What she had once known as fixed and inviolate bent inward, pliable, reshaping under pressures she could not see.

It felt like falling.

Not the clean fall of gravity, but a plummeting without direction—faster and faster toward an ending she could sense but could not alter. The Unseen did not rush her. It allowed acceleration. It allowed inevitability.

Color bled into geometry. Geometry dissolved into intent. The universal constants she had relied on—distance, causality, sequence—were no longer laws but suggestions, kneaded and reformed by an unseen hand. Principles became clay. Clay became breath.

And still she fell.

There were moments—brief, treacherous moments—where she knew she would land on her feet. Where the world aligned just long enough to promise survival. Then others, just as certain, where she knew she would strike something unyielding and die. Not metaphorically. Truly. Endings stacked atop endings, each equally valid, each awaiting selection.

It was refreshing.

And it was terrifying.

Time, impossibly, existed here—if only as a pressure. It had no direction, no flow, yet she felt its tug like a tide against her spine. Solid. Defining. Order masquerading as restraint. She clung to it instinctively, desperately, as one might cling to a cord dropped from a retreating aircraft.

The sensation was agony.

Holding onto time here was like gripping a fishing line while descending at light speed through a void. It burned. It flayed. It ruined. Each fraction of resistance carved understanding directly into her being, bypassing thought entirely.

What choice did she have?

She was lost. Out of her element. And perhaps—she acknowledged it without shame—unprepared.

Fear followed.

Not as a thought. Not as a spiral of doubt. Her mind had been abandoned long before the crossing of the Still Waters. This fear took root deeper—in the architecture of her existence. Worry without language. Dread without image.

The Unseen pressed closer.

Not hostile. Not welcoming. Merely attentive.

Nagase felt the infinite mechanics of the crossing begin to paralyze her—not through force, but through wonder. Endless systems unfolding, collapsing, recombining faster than comprehension could chase. She and Inari were becoming observers, pinned by awe, reduced to reflections drifting through an immeasurable calculus.

No.

She would not fall like this.

She would not be reduced to a variable.

“Merkabah!”

The word tore itself from her without hesitation—triumphant, defiant, alive. Sound returned to her voice even as sound itself refused to exist. She clasped her hands together, and reality responded.

Triangles bloomed into formation across her arms, burning into place with surgical precision. They spread over her militant uniform, interlocking, rotating, asserting geometry where geometry had been denied. Not decoration. Not symbolism.

Structure.

She refused to leave herself to chance. Refused to descend endlessly through a temporal chasm of shoreless computation, waiting for the Unseen to decide what she would become. This was what Crowns of the Acrix were forged for, Order.

She fought.

The seals of Merkabah released—not explosively, but
decisively. Experience crystallized into form. Memory became mass. Will gained edges. The falling slowed—not because gravity returned, but because Nagase imposed resistance and resistance became structure.

No longer would she and Inari be forced to simply witness the infinite machinations of realm-crossing. No longer would they be paralyzed by the beauty of systems too vast to name.

The descent did not stop.

But it answered her.

The Unseen reshaped around the declaration—not in submission, but in acknowledgment. The pain sharpened, deepened, refined further, converting itself into understanding that could be wielded. Loss completed its transformation into gain.

She emerged aligned. The realm inbetween became stable.

The toll of crossing the divide was less like a drop into the unknown and more like a hurdle through infinity.

A weightless collapse, but not of the world around him.

But within.

A scalding stripping of synapse into synoposis. Inariel felt his consciousness unraveling, the neat spools of memory and identity fraying into raw, vibrant strands. Things clearly defined—left and right, up and down, realm and fake—became little more than suggestion, theories of how something could exist rather than a definition of what is or even what once was. He witnessed his sense of self fracture, bleeding into the ever-expanding yet infinitely folding expanse around him. The thinning of these once consecrated notions of anchoring to reality crumbled like dried clay. Determination became wind, fleeting, unable to be held; thought transmuted into structure but bent, unreliable, and spinning.

The only thing that proved to be constant was the dissolution of comfort. The price of pain, undiluted, ravaged his being, a torrent of inescapable torment that felt like the tearing of scabs close to healing yet never quite becoming so. His eyes shut tight, but this agony began to distill into presence.

But not singular.

Quite the contrary.

When Inariel next opened his eyes, he was no longer in the stainless realm of shifting greys and blinking shades. He was in a realm of deep ruby, wading in an ocean of endless vermillion. Crimson currents pulsed like slow arterial blood, thick and vital. The air, if it could be called air, tasted of iron and salt.

He knew it instantly.

Akai Kizu.

The Red Wound.

His Soul space.

Only this time, it was not a place he entered. It had ruptured outward. The Unseen, in its merciless excavation of self and soul, had torn open the vessel that contained his inner world, spilling its essence like spilt blood onto snow. It stained the unseen in deep cardinal. Strokes of darker claret, like old sinew braided through flesh, began to coalesce. Shapes swam beneath the surface — amorphous at first, then horrifyingly clear.

Bodies.

Hundreds filled the wallowing, sanguine waters like a drowned battlefield. Male and female forms, all bearing sparkling green eyes, all bearing manes of crimson locs. His eyes widened. Their expressions were mangled, horror etched into their faces as if sculpted by fear itself. Limbs twisted into an obtuse manner and impossible structure. Spears through the guts, blades embedded in backs, claws tearing the jugular from throats.

It was a mirror of his many incarnations. Those whose agony and pain he carried within him to this day. Though form may change, the darkness of those prior journeys had clung to him like a wasp to honey. Each was a life designed for torture. Each clamoring for that which was stolen from them, stolen from him.

Each was willing to sacrifice everything and anything to obtain that which they yearned for most…

Only to be granted nothing but death and betrayal instead.

The scars of the trauma, though the flesh eventually renews and resets… the blood never forgets. Carrying the torture of the previous life into the next, another ethereal link in the chain of cursed ether that once bound them all.

Inariel was confounded by this at first; their screams, each a haunted echo of a lifetime of being hunted and tormented by the Red Eye’s diabolical pursuit of his soul. But he… he had conquered this darkness. He had stood against the Red Eye. He had broken its curse. He earned the right to speak of healing, of recognition, of growth. He wore his progress like armor, believing that forward motion equaled recovery. But here, in this non-space where lies dissolved, and shadows spoke, he saw the truth.

Performing healing, decorating spent developments as growth, recognition, and acceptance, when in truth he had only taken the first step upon the journey towards healing. Fooling himself into thinking that by always moving forward, the lane towards an ameliorated life was linear.

But here, beyond the Liminal Reliquary, everything was anything but linear. It was a smorgasbord of mirrors big and small, reflections bearing something foreign, obscuring recognition of the familiar. Only showing that which we tend to flee from.

This pain continued to sharpen, and with each laceration of his certainty of who and what he was, another thread of truth threaded into the needle of understanding. Although it was a feeling that was less of Inariel understanding more of himself, but rather the act of observing his will, piecing together the things his ego wished to turn from.

The Unseen showed him the things he shied away from seeing. Forcing him to acknowledge the fact beneath the facade.

The Red Eye had not created the suffering — it had cultivated it. Like a parasite feeding on rot, it had found the emotional ignorance, the rage, the fear, the selfishness of his past incarnations — and weaponized them. It did not create monsters in him. It revealed the ones already there.

These bodies — these drowned, broken versions of himself — were not phantoms.

They were memories. They were not figments.

They were real.

Each scream echoed not just pain, but abandonment. Abandonment by himself — by the version of Inariel who moved forward, who declared healing, who spoke of growth while locking the past in a cellar of denial. He had not honored their deaths. He had disguised them as stepping stones. Without any true know-how on what was needed to mend. To turn that agony into purpose...into evolution.

So he continued to sink

Every second stretched into an eternity. The red waters closed over him, thick as blood, suffocating. He was drowning not in liquid, but in the accumulated despair of a thousand dead selves. The weight was unbearable — not of sin, but of responsibility. Responsibility to remember.

To grieve.

To witness.

A weight insurmountable for him.

It was exactly this that made his Animus, the weapon born of his soul, his mana given physical form, impossible for him to wield even now.

The sanguine waters pressed against him, a crushing weight that felt less like water and more like liquid lead. He tried to push them away, to shield himself with the lies he had told himself for so long—that he was healed, that he was strong, that the darkness was a relic of the past.

But the Unseen knew better. The Red Wound knew the truth.

He was afraid. Scared that he would revert back into something unthinkable…unknowing.

The vermillion abyss began to swirl, a vortex of pain pulling him deeper into the core of his own trauma. The faces of his past selves loomed closer, their green eyes locking onto his, filled with a silent, accusing plea.

Inariel’s chest tightened, the air stolen from his lungs by the sheer pressure of their collective sorrow. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. The red waters turned black, thick and tar-like, clinging to his skin, seeping into his pores. This was it. This was the consequence of his denial. By refusing to acknowledge the depth of the wound, he had allowed it to fester, to become this all-consuming ocean.

He was sinking into the abyss of his own making.

Just as the darkness threatened to consume his consciousness entirely, a flicker of light pierced through the crimson gloom.

It wasn't a memory of battle or survival. It wasn't a vision of power or triumph.

It was a memory of quiet faith.

He saw a face—distinct from the sea of green-eyed specters. A hand resting gently on his shoulder, a voice steady and calm amidst his past turmoil. "You don't have to carry it all at once, Inariel."

Hyomyn

A friend turned demon, but a friend before all else.

Another memory surfaced. A humanoid shape within a blinding golden light. The feature couldn't be described, but the warm invitation of the gold wafting from it, like the earth of a well-loved home, was unmistakable

"You are more than pain, than torment. Those are things you've suffered, not what makes up all of what you are."

Aurelius...

"Do you know the secret of the moon? On its own, the Moon has no light. It only shines...because the sun is so brilliant. Together, they sing a song of cosmic accordance. When the sun needed to rest, the moon continued its work. It is a primordial performance that will continue to dance and sing long after you and I are but afterthoughts of fables lost in the winds. Though your body might have been cursed by darkness... your soul...that seed. Is the life-giving rays of the sun itself."

These were anchors. Not anchors to a false sense of security, but to a truth he had minimized. He had been so focused on projecting an image of the healed warrior, the one who had overcome the Red Eye, that he had forgotten the true cost of the journey. He had to be reminded that healing wasn't a destination to be reached, but a path to be walked.

The ego that had shouted, "I have conquered this!" was finally silenced by the whisper of truth: "I am still hurting."

And that was okay.

It was ok to hurt....it was ok to be hurting still.

Strength did not mean being unbreakable, unmaliable.

It meant being able to persevere despite being bent,

Though that realization didn't erase the pain. Though it didn't banish the screaming echoes of his past aches. It did, however, allow him to see those wounds through a new lens. He stopped fighting the current. He stopped trying to hold his breath against the crushing pressure.

He allowed himself to feel the weight.

Echoes of love. Of faith. Of people who had seen the darkness in him — really seen it — and stayed.

And in that moment, Inariel wept.

Not in sorrow.

In surrender.

He did not need to pretend. He did not need to wear healing like a mask. He didn't need control. He did not have to be whole to be worthy. With this, a shift occurred. The suffocating weight of the Red Wound didn't vanish, but it transformed. The inky blackness of the tar-like water began to thin. The aggressive vermillion softened, bleeding into a gentle, dazzling red, like an immolated sun of ruby.

The screams of his past lives quieted, fading into a distant hum—the sound of a memory acknowledged, rather than a wound ignored.

The sanguine waters, once a prison of his own despair, began to dissolve into countless points of light. The ocean of blood became a canopy of "stars" forged from the wept tears.

Inariel stopped sinking.

He floated, drifting in the vast, silent expanse of the "cosmos". He was still within the Unseen, but his will began to bring semblance. The stars weren't distant, cold entities; they were pieces of his soul, his history, his trauma, and his hope, all glowing in the dark, beautiful in their complexity.

He took a breath—a deep, shuddering breath that tasted of possibility. Not fear of the unknown...but anticipation, fervor.

The destination no longer mattered; he would end up exactly where he needed to be. He wason the right path, however tangled, however jarring. It was his

It...had always been his.

Nagase didn’t need to look at him to know.

The Unseen carried Inariel’s wound openly—no modesty, no restraint. It leaked outward in vermillion threads, staining the liminal fabric between them. Pain here wasn’t private. It was communicable. Resonant. She felt it brush against her like heat from a forge: the drowning weight, the chorus of dead selves, the slow, terrible honesty of grief finally allowed to speak.

She saw the bodies.

Not as visions—more like awareness. A string of them, trailing him endlessly, each one tugging at his spine. Each one asking to be acknowledged. The Red Wound pulsed, and with it came the ache of responsibility he carried like penance.

Nagase snorted.

“Oh, Inariel,” she said, voice easy, almost amused. “My wittle Alli’-poo.” She glanced sideways, eyes half-lidded, casual in a way that bordered on cruel. “You’re so serious. Honestly? It reminds me of someone…”

A soft laugh escaped her—short, dismissive. As if pain were an old joke she’d heard too many times to respect anymore.

Then something *shifted*.

Not in him.

In her.

The Unseen didn’t challenge her words. It simply followed them to their source.

The amusement evaporated.

Emotion slammed into Nagase without warning—no ramp, no mercy. It hit her like a gravity well snapping into existence. Her breath caught hard in her chest. The laugh died mid-echo, her posture faltering as something ancient and unwanted tore through the armor she hadn’t realized was still there.

“...Azazel.”

Not the name—the feeling.

Warmth. Uncomplicated. Human.

The Unseen opened like a wound she’d cauterized long ago and never looked back at. Childhood spilled out: sunlit days with scraped knees and stolen food, Azazel’s grin too wide, too alive. The sound of laughter echoing down narrow streets. Her mother’s hands—gentle, grounding, real—pulling her close without asking for strength in return.

Safety.

Love without cost.

Nagase staggered, eyes unfocused.

This was what she had burned.

This was what invulnerability demanded.

She had wanted to be untouchable. Unbreakable. An island—self-contained, impervious, sovereign. And in doing so, she had severed the very thing Inariel was now drowning in and daring to face.

She’d mocked it.

Mocked him for it. Mocked her father. Mocked Azazel—right up until the day warmth became weakness and weakness became unacceptable.

For a long moment, Nagase said nothing.

She stood there, lost in a place she never allowed herself to be—inside memory, inside feeling. An experience she derided as inefficiency. As indulgence. As failure.

The irony didn’t escape her.

The Unseen held her gently, almost respectfully, as if acknowledging that this—this pause—was rarer for her than pain ever was for Inariel.

Then the space changed.

Gold bled into the void—not blinding, not invasive, but organizing. Structure blossomed outward, as if reality itself straightened its spine. Stone formed beneath their feet. Distance learned how to behave. Voices emerged—not loud, but present. Countless. Alive.

A city revealed itself where liminality had been. Nagase lifted her head as the familiar presence resolved beside them—radiant, composed, inevitable.

“You…”

His light was warmth without demand. Order without chains. The Unseen did not recoil from him; it coalesced, Streets took shape. Towers rose. Kinship replaced isolation. Meaning returned—not rigid, but shared.

He regarded them both, eyes kind and knowing.

“Welcome to Akasha.”

And for once—just once—Nagase didn’t have a joke ready.

She only breathed.