CELESTIA - Chapter 36 : The Silence of Nyx
The sky of **Sautohote Nyx** was not a dome of azure, but a canvas of purple velvet where amber nebulae danced. On this planet located at the edges of astral charts, gravity itself seemed to have a scent: that of ozone and ancient stone.
The capital, a metropolis of alabaster and organic glass, breathed to the rhythm of stellar tides. In the crowded streets, the citizens of Nyx — graceful beings with opaline skin and silver eyes — went about their business. The murmur of the crowd was a peaceful symphony, a humming of life that did not know that time, for them, had just stopped.
A mother held her little daughter's hand. The child, whose hair floated like seaweed in an invisible current, stopped abruptly. She raised a finger toward the purple firmament.
— "Mommy… look at those gentlemen coming toward us."
The mother looked up. Her blood ran cold. These were not shooting stars. These were not commercial shuttles. They were two tears in the fabric of reality. Two streaks of absolute blackness tearing through the clouds of gas.
— "Oh… no…" murmured the mother, clutching her child against her.
The whistling of the torn air became a roar of the end of the world.
In the wake of their fall, the wind turned into vacuum. **Error** and **Ryussei** sliced through the atmosphere like meteors born from a forgotten hell.
The voice of the digital entity resonated, cold as absolute zero, directly in the mind of its companion:
— "You take care of the artifact, Ryussei."
Ryussei, whose hair floated wildly during the descent, displayed that permanent smile, that scar of joy that never left his lips, even in the face of the void.
— "And you?" he asked, his voice carried by the air currents.
— "My turn for food," replied Error.
Ryussei smiled even wider, if that was even possible. Then, the impact.
The ground of Nyx did not merely tremble; it liquefied under the violence of the shock. A circular shockwave pulverized the surrounding buildings, turning the glass into diamond dust and the alabaster into smoking rubble. The central square was now nothing more than a crater of desolation.
The dust had not yet settled when the first screams tore through the air. The citizens fled, but there was nowhere to go.
Error stood up. His body crackled with red pixels, a visual corruption that seemed to devour the light. With a slow gesture, he summoned a dozen geometric portals around him. From these rifts burst forth scarlet energy beams, pure streaks of death that did not merely burn flesh, but erased it from existence. The aliens fell, their bodies disintegrating into erroneous code sequences before even touching the ground.
While Error began his macabre feast, Ryussei was already gone. In the blink of an eye, he materialized in front of the monumental doors of the **Castle of the Ancestral Water Guild**.
The edifice was an architectural wonder, a tower of liquid crystal held by ancient magic. Before him, the elite guards, dressed in blue scale armor, lowered their sapphire lances.
— "Intruder! Back off!" shouted the first guard as he charged toward him.
The tip of the lance was only a few millimeters from Ryussei's throat when the world seemed to twist. The guard stopped dead. A horrible sensation, as if every cell in his body was trying to flee in a different direction, overwhelmed him. Before the horrified eyes of his comrades, his body deformed, his bones becoming soft, his skin turning into a fibrous, red substance. In one second, the proud warrior was nothing more than a pile of meat paste, a shapeless mass that collapsed with a sickening sucking sound.
— "How… how did you do that?!" cried the second guard, his voice broken by terror.
He attacked with the desperation of the condemned. Ryussei did not move an inch. He simply pointed a nonchalant hand toward the assailant.
— "Pathetic," murmured Ryussei.
The guard did not die. Not right away. His flesh hardened, his features froze in an expression of eternal surprise. His joints became springs. In an instant, the man had disappeared, replaced by a mechanical toy in the shape of a soldier, which began hopping on the ground, playing a joyful and shrill melody to the rhythm of its little plastic steps.
Ryussei burst into a crystalline laugh, a laugh that had nothing human about it, and pushed open the doors of the castle.
Inside, the splendor was total. A huge orb of water, the size of a miniature moon, floated in the center of the throne room, casting azure reflections on the walls. The old King, the last vestige of a lineage that had once consorted with the **King of Time**, stood there, protected by his personal guard.
— "Where is the Dimensional Torch?" asked Ryussei in an almost polite tone.
The guards let out a war cry and charged. Ryussei sighed. He took a step forward, and the temperature of the room seemed to rise a thousand degrees in an instant, while remaining freezing cold. The guards could not even land a blow. Like ice sculptures thrown into a forge, they literally melted, their armor and flesh flowing onto the floor like lost wax, leaving behind only steaming puddles.
Ryussei ignored the King, whose eyes were now nothing more than two wells of empty terror, and plunged into the depths of the ancestral cellar.
There, placed on a chronite altar, it awaited him. **The Dimensional Torch**. A scepter of black metal topped with a flame that did not burn, but vibrated between the past and the future. A relic capable of bending dimensions and rewriting seconds.
In his mind, Error's voice crackled:
— "Did you find it?"
— "Yes," replied Ryussei as he seized the artifact.
A few hours later, the capital of Nyx was nothing more than a smoking scar on the face of the planet. Silence had returned, a heavy silence, interrupted only by the crackling of the fires.
In the middle of a street strewn with debris, Error held a survivor by the throat. With a sharp movement, he bit into the innocent's head with brutal indifference.
Ryussei, sitting not far away on a still-burning stone wall, observed the scene with a grimace of disgust.
— "You really eat anything, Error. It's disgusting."
Error dropped the corpse, which fell like a rag doll. He wiped a trickle of purple blood from his chin.
— "It is indeed disgusting," he admitted in his monotone voice. "These creatures taste of bitterness and regret."
He approached the fire that Ryussei had lit — a small brazier fed by the remains of the royal banners. Suddenly, Error's monstrous and unstable form began to stabilize. The red pixels calmed, the abyssal black receded, giving way to an almost ordinary human silhouette, if not for those scarlet red eyes that seemed to contain dying galaxies.
— "Well," said Error as he sat down across from his partner. "Who destroys this planet? You or me?"
Ryussei, staring at the Dimensional Torch resting on his knees, sighed deeply.
— "Do we really have to eat alien?" he asked, a bit melancholic. "I miss Earth's food."
The man with red eyes stared into the flames. For a moment, the threat emanating from him seemed to fade behind an eternal weariness.
— "I don't know, Ryussei," he replied softly. "I no longer know what is necessary and what is simply… a monster's habit."
Around them, Nyx continued to burn under its purple stars, unaware that its agony was only a footnote in the story of those who traveled between worlds.