A shower of sparks surrounded Lucien as he descended, his sword lay sheathed on his hip, his bow hung from his back.
Nephis stared at him, head tilted in a silent question: 'What was he doing?'
"Takes too long to summon them in a fight." He explained, landing down beside her.
Nephis nodded, and then said:
"Is that your awakened ability, flight?"
Lucien hesitated for a moment, "I guess you could say that."
Then, he switched the topic.
"Is that the memory you received after killing the Fallen Terror?" He asked, pointing at her glowing sword.
"Yes," Nephis said, raising the Dream Blade and studying the golden sheen around it. She opened her mouth to explain, but was interrupted by Lucien.
"Interesting, a weapon type memory that doesn't physically exist." He whispered, staring intently at her sword.
Nephis frowned, "How do you know that?"
"Hm," Lucien looked up at her inquisitive eyes, "Oh, it's just an attribute I received recently, it allows me to gleam information about anything I look at."
She stared at him for a moment before gesturing to the draugrs and saying, "What did you learn about them?"
"..." Lucien stayed silent for a while, staring at the corpse as his eyes pulsed red.
"Theyre from inside the pyramid," he said. "They escaped with their leader, but got lost in the desert."
Nephis remained silent and turned her gaze to the giant black pyramid in the distance. Something about it made her skin crawl.
Lucien on the other hand had a different reaction altogether. He stared at the pyramid with a sense of curiosity. He had told Nephis what he learned from the draugr, not what he learned from gazing at the pyramid itself.
Every time his eyes swept past the impossibly far black pyramid, flashes of information flowed into his mind. He learned the name of the pyramid, the Tomb of Ariel. He learned of it's making, an unholy titans corpse. He learned of a river inside the pyramid, and a being whose mere shadow dwelled on those waters.
His mind was in agony from all that information, at least a part of it. Isolated from the rest, it suffered alone. The remaining pieces of his mind focused on the real world.
Lucien's gaze fell on Nephis, but no new information greeted him. He had learned all he could right now. She was a Nephilim, a being that is both divine and profane. And a dreamspawn, one who's rejected by the dream realm and the waking world equally, belonging in neither.
Pushing those thoughts away, he unsheathed his sword and got to harvesting the ascendant soul shards one by one. In the end, they had earned a total of seventeen ascended soul shards.
Without another word, Lucien handed them to Nephis who took a moment to absorb them. After she was done, she handed him the hollow husks. By then, the sun had already begun it's descent towards the horizon.
"Let's keep moving," Lucien said, dismissing and re-summoning his sword to clean it of the blood, "The suns about to set, we should find shelter."
"Agreed," Nephis nodded, doing the same with her own weapon.
But finding shelter in the middle of the desert was no small feat. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, there was only sand. And when night inevitably fell, they were left in the middle of nowhere, with no shelter except the open skies.
The night sky of the nightmare desert was dotted with millions of stars. Lucien gazed at them with a sense of awe, it had been three years since he last saw these cosmic entities. But as he gazed at them, he noticed something off. There were holes in the sky, areas where no stars shone, entire swathes of the night sky had been snuffed out. Some were recovering, the weak light of the stars fading back into existence.
Just then, something within his storm sense shifted. Deep under the sands, the corruption festered and began to rise.
Nephis was moments away from lighting a fire when Lucien stopped her.
"Wait," He whispered, grabbing her arm, "Something's not right."
Far in the distance, a single skeletal hand rose from the ground, pulling along a skeletal body clad in rusted armour. Beside it another soldier rose from the ground and brandished its weapon. White sand flowed through their black bones, the rustling sand fusing into an eerie hum that filled the air with a sense of primal dread.
Cursing under his breath Lucien activated his aspect and dragged Changing Star away. The dune they had been standing on, had already birthed half a dozen such soldiers.
All around them, the nightmare desert was coming alive. Thousands upon thousands of such soldiers tore their way out of the sands, covering the desert like blades of grass, their disorganized mass stretching beyond the horizon. Most of them seemed to have been human once, but not all.
Among the human skeletons, were skeletons of gargantuan creatures whose original forms were lost, having withered into bone. Some weren't even skeletal, and instead were covered in weathered black chitin. Some others had never been made of flesh and bone, instead they were formed from dark stone, crystal, tattered cloth or metal.
Their sizes varied greatly–some were small, while others towered above the desert like gigantic monuments to the calamitous past.
The undead soldiers swayed in the wind in silence for a second, then a wave of malice passed through them, and they turned towards one another with visible hostility, lunging into battle as myriad undead warriors driven by relentless killing intent, their swords flashing as rust shook off, and their empty eye sockets igniting with a cold, murderous darkness.
As Lucien watched, one of them missed their mark and punched the sky, and a new hole tore through the tapestry of stars. He paled.
"Stay quiet," He whispered, stopping Nephis from summoning a memory, "And pray they do not notice us."
Reluctantly, Nephis backed down, and the sparks that had begun to materialize around her hand, dissipated.
And so they waited with bated breath as the undead fought all around them. Every once in a while Lucien would grab Nephis and move to a new spot, and they'd wait in silence all over again. All the while, Lucien never deactivated his aspect.
When the first rays of sunlight broke through the horizon, the fighting came to a halt all at once, like all of the undead had been deactivated. Then, in an almost frenzy-like state they scrambled and began digging, hiding underneath the sand, until every trace of their existence was gone.
A huge wave of relief passed through Lucien as the clamour in the desert died down, and he could finally relax.
"What the hell were those?" He whispered to no one in particular.
"They didn't die," Nephis answered with a hoarse voice, "Not a single one of them died in the night."
"..." Lucien stared at her in silence, he hadn't thought about that. She was right of course, not one of the undead soldiers had fallen during the night. Finally, he opened his mouth to say, "They're immortal."
"No," Nephis shook her head, "Deathless."
Standing up, she swept her gaze across the white dunes, "Their bodies have decayed, but death refuses to come to them."
Lucien got up beside her, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, "Whatever they are, we need to find shelter during the day. There's no telling if we'll survive another night."
Nephis nodded and gestured to a small black structure in the distance, "We should head there, it will hide us once night falls."
Lucien squinted through his visor, his gaze falling on the black stone. Near instantly, information about the ruin flowed into his mind. The image of a temple pushed to the forefront of his mind, a temple, but not to any gods. It had two floors, one above the ground and one below.
"Yeah, sure." He said absentmindedly, and the image of an altar in between flowing sand filled his mind.
Nephis paid no mind to his change in demeanor and continued onward. Lucien followed behind, never once taking his eyes off the temple. Something about that place felt…different.
The sun was directly above them by the time they reached the ruins. The visage of the temple flashed by Lucien's mind as he gazed at its ruins. Although calling it a ruin was being generous. Nothing but broken walls remained of the building, made entirely out of a black stone. The floor of the temple was cracked, and here and there entire portions of the stone floor were missing.
At the far end of the room, stood a single raised stone altar, having survived the throes of time. An ornate bowl had been attached to the pedestal, its white colour contrasting heavily with the black of the stone. It's inside had been stained red by blood.
Carved across the rim of the bowl were runes in an ancient language. Some of them had been weathered by the passage of time, but the few words that remained translated to:
"Truth, Sands, and Dread." Lucien read, walking around the bowl. "It's for a blood sacrifice."
Nephis frowned, "None of the six gods rule over those domains."
"It's not for a god," Lucien said, recalling the information that flowed into him when he first saw the ruins. He frowned, "A Daemon perhaps?"
'Ariel maybe?'
The pyramid was called the Tomb of Ariel. What if, this Ariel was the ruler of these lands, and a god of his own merit? A god who people once worshipped, and made blood sacrifices to? A god who had fallen and been buried in the massive pyramid in the distance.
A god of truth, dread, and the sands.
"A Daemon?" Nephis echoed, her frown deepening, "I didn't think people worshipped them."
"Neither did I," Lucien admitted, "But it's not hard to believe is it?"
"What do you mean?"
"To a mortal, a god and a daemon might as well be the same thing." Lucien explained, "They're both divine beings, far beyond their reach. So powerful that they couldn't even fathom it. The only difference between them was the fact that they opposed each other. People are fickle, and easily convinced."
A dry chuckle left his mouth, "You managed to convince the people of the outer settlements to believe in you, rather than Gunlaug. And you're a mere sleeper. Imagine what a divine being could do."
"..." Nephis didn't answer, only staring at him blankly.
"In that way, you and Gunlaug were rather similar to the gods and daemons wouldn't you agree? Two major forces fighting against each other, rallying the terrified kids to fight with you and kill their kin. In the end, only one person wins, not your troops, but you, and only you."
"And you're suggesting that I'm the daemon here?" Nephis finally spoke, looking up at him, a strange white spark in her eyes.
Lucien stared at her for a moment, and then shook his head and looked away, "Does it make a difference? Gods, Daemons, none of them care for the people following them to war."
The events of his first nightmare flashed by his mind, the war between the stormforged and the stone children. Hundreds died in that battle, the whole city was destroyed, yet Storm never came to help. But Nether did.
When Lucien destroyed the awakened tyrant, the tenebrous daemon had come to help. If it wasn't for the spell kicking him out of the nightmare, Lucien would have died there.
Looking at the sacrificial bowl once again, Lucien wondered what would happen if he were to pour some blood into it. He couldn't see any mechanism connected to it, but human ingenuity knew no bounds.
Take his sword for example, at a glance no one would be able to tell what its main function was. That rotating the grip would push out a tiny needle to draw his blood and summon lightning to the blade.
"What is it?" Nephis asked as Lucien walked up to the altar and unsheathed his sword. "What are you doing?"
Glancing back at her, Lucien said, "Testing something."
Then, he ran his blade across his palm and drew blood, a deep magenta in colour. Holding his palm over the bowl, he let the blood flow out of his palm.
A single drop tinged the inside of the bowl, and then another, and another. Soon, a small amount of his blood had pooled at the bottom of the bowl. Then, the whole structure shook, and the sound of stone grinding against stone filled the air.
Nephis summoned her sword and glared at him, "Why would you do that?"
Before Lucien could answer, a portion of the floor in front of them began to move. Behind the altar the floor opened up. Thin lines appeared on the stone, splitting it into a dozen pieces that fell down one after the other, creating a set of stairs that led into the lower floor of the temple.
The two of them stood there in silence for a moment before Lucien finally moved and said, "I intended for that to happen."
Nephis turned to him with a deadpan stare, and said nothing. The silence was enough of an answer.
"What? I really did!"
Lucien in fact, did not plan for that to happen.
Nephis just sighed and walked up to the stairs, "Let's just go downstairs."