The land of the pillars - chapter 35
The wind carried the smell of salt and dust.
Night had fallen over the coastal city, streetlights flickering like uncertain stars.
Abyss moved through the crowd with that calm, cutting presence that made space part for him without a word.
Elysium followed behind, her hood up, the white glow of her eyes faint beneath the streetlight.
He stopped by a local vendor and held up a small photo — a smiling girl with ocean-blue eyes.
"Excuse me," Abyss said, voice even. "My sister's missing. She's about this height—"
He motioned with his hand, describing her hair, her voice, the small silver pin she wore shaped like a seashell.
The old man shook his head, muttering, "Haven't seen her, son."
Elysium sighed sharply behind him. "You know, I could just use my resonance sight and find her in seconds—"
Abyss didn't even look at her. "No."
"Why not?" she demanded, crossing her arms.
He turned slightly, his expression unreadable. "Because I don't want her found by power. I want her found by me."
Elysium clenched her fists. "That's the dumbest sentimental reason I've ever heard."
Abyss didn't answer. He just kept walking.
After an hour of searching, they sat on a bench near the harbor, the wind quiet for once — almost respectful.
Abyss leaned back, eyes on the water. Then, without turning his head, he said calmly,
"I know you're here. Show yourself, Mirage."
A soft chuckle slipped through the air. The shadows at the edge of the pier curled like silk, and from them stepped a woman — graceful, unreal, eyes like liquid dusk.
Mirage.
Her form shimmered faintly as if she wasn't bound entirely to one reality. She smiled with that mix of sweetness and sin that only she could manage.
"Oh, Abyss… you've gotten sharper," she teased. "Did the mortal world finally teach you to look behind you?"
Elysium's eyes widened, her breath caught in her throat.
She'd read about Mirage — the Harbinger of Shade, the one who walked out of Tartarus beside Abyss himself.
But she wasn't what the logs described. The records painted her as eerie, half-void, monstrous.
This woman was beautiful.
Too beautiful.
That thought hit Elysium harder than it should have.
Abyss sighed. "You always appear when things get complicated."
Mirage tilted her head, smiling. "Maybe I am complication."
Elysium's irritation burned in silence behind him, but Abyss didn't notice — or pretended not to.
As they began walking again, Mirage fell into step beside him, her movements effortlessly smooth, like shadows dancing in rhythm with the wind.
Elysium clung to Abyss's arm possessively, shooting Mirage a glare.
Mirage glanced at her, lowering her voice to a whisper that brushed like smoke against Elysium's ear.
"And who are you supposed to be?"
Elysium hissed back, voice trembling with pride, "I had my eyes on him first. Leave."
Mirage's smirk lingered — faint, knowing.
The air between them thickened, a silent war of presence — divine pressure against shade-born arrogance.
Neither blinked. Neither yielded.
Finally, both let go of Abyss's arm at the same time.
He didn't react.
He simply said, "Elysium, go find Ethan. Tell him I'll handle this."
Elysium frowned. "Abyss—"
Mirage interrupted sharply, her tone soft but commanding. "No. She stays."
Abyss turned to her, the faintest edge of warning in his expression. "Why?"
"Because," Mirage said, her voice dripping honey and venom, "Ethan's trial isn't meant to have gods or Harbingers meddling. You know that as well as I do. I can't afford you two spoiling the fun."
Elysium's gaze hardened. "You're talking about not meddling?"
Mirage smiled wider, stepping close enough that her shadow overlapped Elysium's. "Oh, I meddle all the time. I just make it look like fate."
That made Abyss's jaw tighten. "Enough."
His tone made the wind stir. Both women stepped back, though neither looked away.
Elysium sighed, gave Mirage one last glare, and vanished — her form dissolving into a shimmer of starlight as she teleported away.
The city grew quieter. Only the sound of the sea and the whisper of lanterns remained.
Abyss walked alone now — or so he thought.
He heard a voice behind him. Familiar.
"Abyss?"
He turned — and froze.
It was Leyla.
Her eyes were wide, trembling. She looked exactly as he remembered her — same height, same hair, same seashell pin.
He stepped forward slowly. "Leyla…?"
She smiled weakly. "You found me."
For a moment, the world felt right again. The breeze softened. His shoulders lowered.
But then — her smile twitched. Her reflection in the puddle beneath her didn't move.
Abyss's eyes narrowed. "…You should've changed your reflection, Mirage."
Silence.
Then, her form shimmered — the illusion tearing like smoke in a gust. Mirage stood there again, her beauty now edged with mischief and regret.
She laughed softly. "You always ruin the moment, you know that?"
Abyss exhaled, calm as ever. "You're getting sloppy."
"Or maybe," Mirage said, stepping closer, her voice lowering to a whisper, "I wanted you to notice."
She slowly walked closer to him as she looked up to met his gaze
"abyss do you even have something you genuinely love? I feel like we lose the meaning of that word"abyss scratched his head trying to figure out something he love as he said
"royal bandit a dog I adopted in my last came here he's nice someone I don't think would ever betray me seems like we don't need speech to establish connection"as he sighted"even a mindless dog can understand me better than Aphrodite ever did"
Their eyes met again— shadow and wind, history and heartbreak.
And for the first time since Tartarus, Mirage didn't look like a Harbinger.
She looked like the girl who once ran beside him, breathing the first wind of hell.
Abyss looked away. "We're done playing games, Mirage. Tell me where my sister is."
Her smile faded. "…You'll find her soon. But when you do—"
She touched his cheek, her fingers cold as the void. "—don't forget who helped you breathe in the dark."
Before he could reply, she vanished into mist — leaving only the whisper of her laughter and a faint, bittersweet echo of wind chasing after it and anyway he founded leyla which was annoyed abyss looking for her as if she's a child she was just shopping.
Now fate sisters pov
In the loom of fate the sisters asked Mira
"why mirage act differently with that so called abyss?"mira let an"oof how would I know? She doesn't tell me full details let me just look into her threads if we can't see abyss threads we see hers"as she looked into them
We don't care I will just show you flashback dare you to say I. Iralings is a bad author
Tartarus had no sun, no sky, no ground — just breathing darkness.
Every heartbeat echoed like a scream swallowed too deep to rise again.
That was where Mirage was born.
Not born — made.
A thought of Nyx given shape.
A shadow that learned to dream.
And when she dreamed of freedom, her mother threw her into the pit that devoured dreams whole.
For the first hundred days, Mirage hunted monsters. For the next hundred, she hunted silence.
And on the next, she found him.
He sat on a pile of cracked Titan ribs, eyes half-shut, wind curling faintly around his shoulders — the only thing in Tartarus that still moved freely.
"You shouldn't sit there," she said from the dark, voice soft but edged like a blade. "The bones remember who broke them."
He didn't even look at her. "Then they can hate me. I'm not leaving."
Mirage tilted her head, half amused. "You've got attitude for something still breathing."
The boy — Abyss — finally turned his head. His eyes were cloudy, sight half-faded, but something in his expression carried weight, like he listened to the world instead of seeing it.
"I listen to the air," he said quietly. "It tells me where death sleeps."
They didn't get along. Not at first.
She survived by tricking and deceiving. He survived by force and patience.
But Tartarus wasn't a place that rewarded solitude.
They ran into each other again, starving, wounded, standing over the corpse of a cyclops.
Abyss tore into it with his hands, primal and unashamed. Then, without a word, tossed her a piece.
For a long moment, Mirage just stared. Then she took it.
That was their first meal together.
From then on, they kept meeting — not by choice, but by fate.
When one was wounded, the other appeared. When one was lost, the other found the way.
Tartarus shifted daily, corridors changing, horizons bleeding into screams — as if the prison itself knew they were trying to escape and took joy in watching them fail.
And yet, failure after failure, they stayed together.
Her cunning and his will.
Her shade and his wind.
Two years.
That's how long they clawed through the living labyrinth, through monsters that wore gods' faces, through nights that felt longer than eternity.
They became each other's anchor.
When Mirage lost herself to madness, Abyss whispered to her — not words, but sound. Wind curling around her wrist to remind her she was still there.
When Abyss collapsed, Mirage mocked him until he stood. "The wind doesn't kneel, idiot," she'd say. "So stop acting like it."
It was ugly, it was desperate — but it was real.
For the first time in her existence, Mirage felt alive.
And she would never admit it, but part of her feared what would happen the day they finally escaped.
One day, they found it — a wound in Tartarus's endless flesh.
A rift.
A tear that breathed.
The ground shook as they approached, the prison howling like it knew what they planned to do.
Mirage turned to Abyss. "It's closing. You go first."
He shook his head. "We go together."
"Don't be stupid—" she started, but stopped.
The air had changed. It wasn't just wind anymore — it spoke.
A whisper, older than time, echoed through Abyss's ears:
You can both leave… if you remember what you are.
Abyss reached for her hand. "Trust me."
The wind around him began to spiral, wrapping around Mirage's shadow like threads of light binding night itself. Her body flickered, her form turning mist-like — and for the first time, their powers didn't repel each other.
They merged.
The boy of wind and the girl of shadow — two impossible survivors of the pit — became the first breath of air Tartarus had ever felt.
They ran — no, they became motion itself.
And as they surged through the wound, leaving behind the screaming void, the prison howled after them:
The wind should not exist here!
But it did.
Because they made it.
And in that moment — they became the first wind that ever breathed in Tartarus.
When they emerged into the mortal world, the wind around them still sang faintly of Tartarus — heavy, alive, ancient.
They stood together under a bleeding red sky, the first true color they'd seen in years.
Mirage looked at Abyss, a smile breaking through the exhaustion.
"You actually did it."
He turned to her, quiet. "We did."
They didn't hug. They didn't cry. They just stood there, two children carved out of hellfire and shadow — knowing they had changed something the universe itself didn't allow.
And as the centuries passed, and fate turned cruel, and the world forgot their names…
Mirage never forgot that moment.
The first wind of Tartarus.
Her first memory of freedom.
And her first love — the one she'd spend eternity trying to reclaim, even if she had to burn heaven itself to do it.
If you ask about timeline mirage is 12 when they entered and 14 when they escaped abyss was 10 when they entered and 12 when escaped if you think about it now connect to the Athena chapter when she found abyss
But anyway back to fate sisters
The chamber of the Fates was always dim — threads gleaming faintly like stars caught in eternal dusk. Lachesis sat in silence, her fingers tracing the line of a boy's fate — Ethan's.
For once, even the loom hesitated to move.
"His trial must be chosen carefully," Clotho murmured, wrapping the thread around her wrist. "One wrong trial, and the balance collapses."
Before any of them could speak further, a soft click echoed. A chair scraped across the marble.
"Actually," said a voice with an amused lilt, "I have an idea."
Mira lowered herself gracefully onto the chair, crossing one leg over the other. Her eyes gleamed like shifting glass. "Why not send him to Ermad?"
The sisters turned toward her, momentarily thrown off their rhythm.
Atropos frowned. "Ermad? That domain is beyond Olympus's reach. It lies between the sands of Egypt and the rivers of Mesopotamia. It is—"
"—untamed," Lachesis finished. "And dangerous."
Mira smiled, resting her chin on her palm. "Exactly. It's perfect."
She leaned forward, voice soft but sharp. "Ermad is known for its brutes — the City with the Pillars. Every mortal there is a walking storm. Flesh and bone hardened by endless trial. They say even demigods hesitate to brawl with them."
Her tone turned almost playful. "If Ethan is truly Olympus's chosen, let him prove it where brute strength rules. Let him survive Ermad."
The sisters exchanged glances — silent but weighted. They all knew what Ermad represented: the border between pantheons, a realm untouched by divine law, ruled only by power.
Finally, Lachesis nodded. "The city of pillars, then."
Atropos reached for her scissors but hesitated. "If we thread him toward Ermad, the pattern may tangle with other pantheons."
"Let it," Mira said, rising from her chair. "It'll make the story interesting."
She extended her hand, and one of the golden threads glided into her palm, alive and trembling. With a flick of her fingers, she connected it to another — a line leading west, across sand and stone, into the unknown.
The loom shivered, the air trembled.
"Then it's decided," Clotho whispered. "Ethan's next trial… is Ermad." of course ermad is a city lost in time after gods punishment all remain is the version inside the loom
And of course ermad entrancing arc
The light shifted before either of them noticed.
One moment, Ethan and Clarita were walking along the forest path, still laughing about the failed date that turned into a sparring match. The next, the air around them began to shimmer — the trees warping like reflections in disturbed water.
A faint hum filled the ground.
Then came the pull.
A heartbeat later, they stumbled forward — into heat, stone, and shadow.
Ethan steadied himself, eyes widening. Before them stretched an impossible skyline — towers of black obsidian rising like mountains, each carved with ancient runes. Between them moved beings so colossal that even the air seemed to bend around their steps.
Clarita blinked, then froze.
"Ethan…" she whispered. "Why is everyone huge?"
He looked down at his own hands — his fingers thicker, the muscles layered with divine density. The ground cracked slightly when he stepped.
"I… think we are too," he said slowly.
The shortest of the figures passing by — a merchant hauling a cart of stone blocks — stood at least forty meters tall. Yet somehow, it felt natural. Like his body already knew how to move this way.
Fate adjusted us, Ethan realized. So we wouldn't stand out.
Even Clarita had changed — taller now, twenty meters of graceful power. Her hair shimmered faintly under the desert light, the way gold catches flame.
They stood in the heart of Ermad — the City with the Pillars.
Ethan turned as one of the giants approached — broad-shouldered, his skin patterned with streaks of ash and bronze. He looked like a sculpture carved by a god who loved the idea of strength too much.
"Hey," Ethan called, raising a hand casually. "Sorry to bother you, man. Just wanted to ask — where exactly are we?"
The giant blinked, squinting.
"You're not from here?" His voice rumbled like thunder trapped in a cavern. "Strange. You look like you are. You lack a b'sard, though — every warrior here has one."
"A… what?"
"A b'sard," the giant said, tapping his chest proudly. "The scar of the pillar trial."
Ethan tilted his head. "Pillar trial?"
The man laughed, a sound that sent dust spiraling from the ground.
"This city wasn't built on pillars — it was built by them. We drive them into the earth with our bare hands. It's the way we prove we belong to Ermad's military."
Ethan followed the man's gesture — hundreds of obsidian monoliths piercing the ground around the city's perimeter, stretching into the horizon like a forest of midnight stone. Each one radiated power, each one humming faintly with restrained might.
Clarita's eyes widened. "You mean… all of those were lifted by people?"
"Lifted, carried, and buried," the man said with a proud grin. "Here, strength isn't a blessing. It's a language."
Ethan exhaled, staring at the horizon of black towers.
"Guess we're about to learn how to speak it."