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Caelus had chosen this life, though sometimes he wondered if it had been a choice at all, perhaps it had closed before him like a door he never truly chose to open. When the Astral Express departed full of voices that spoke of journeys and wonders, he had remained behind. Not out of fear, exactly, but because a heaviness in his chest whispered to him. You are not ready to chase horizons when you still don’t know who you are.
And so he stayed, rooted to a solitary planet at the universe’s furthest fraying edge.
By night, he wandered the long corridors with silence humming a low hymn that throbbed against the glass walls, staring at the stars beyond the very windows. They looked close enough to touch, yet, they were so far, mocking him with their distance. As nothing was ever in the grasp of his palms. Always empty, and Caelus felt alone, trying to reach the stars with a futile effort. disguised as infinity.
Sometimes, he caught himself wondering if the Express had truly left him behind, or if it was him who had left it. The difference gnawed at him, though perhaps it was meaningless. It didn’t matter because even in that corner of the universe, fate enclosed everything as though the universe itself were a cage,
He settled into the archives of a forgotten institute on the nameless planet, like a nameless researcher, pouring over records of Aeons, remnants of Stellarons, and it was here that he first found the records of a hidden planet, Amphoreus. The planet stood out amongst the rest of ordinary names with no records, history or myths that held it together. As if, it was deliberately concealed from the eyes of others.
The institute dismissed it as nonsense when he asked them. Calling it an ancient allegory, a mistake in translation, with the brittle certainty of scholars who did not like what did not sit nicely their neat archives. Unwilling to bend to the consensus, Caelus was determined to look. So that's what he buried himself in. It was never out of any rebellion, but out of a quiet conviction burning in his core like a little flame. Because, Amphoreus, to him did not stand out for it's strangeness, but because it had a sense of familiarity like no other planet or star.
Soon enough, his notebook was scribbled with evidence of his obsession; history, ruins from his dreamscape, diagrams that seemed to spiral endlessly, doodles unrelated to anything, and unfamiliar languages whispered into his mind. His pen carved deeper into the paper as his research deepened, and so did his dreams. He began to feel as though Amphoreus was not merely an object of study but a presence, subtle, and formless, whispering across the veil of the universe. Where others saw Aeons as distant gods, Caelus felt there was one who existed as a listener, or a watcher, reflecting his own questions back at him each time he began to ask something. Whether it was in his mind, or out loud towards the stars.
But knowledge is never free so he waited, patient as Georios, until that Memory keeper visited the planet once. A woman who's footsteps as light as a feather and one who spoke in riddles as soft as silk. So those of the Garden of Recollection took notice of him, and she showed him that planet through the looking glass. Shapeless, yet radiant and beautiful, and so eternal in his eyes, though to them, Amphoreus was dangerous.
The Astral Express never came back to guide him away from its orbit, and so Caelus found himself pulled into its gravity with what he was unearthing.
Was Amphoreus real, or the dream of a longing to be remembered? He wondered.
He carried that notebook always, filling it with more fragments of unanswered questions, more diagrams, or more words that surfaced in his dreams. Lately, his hand betrayed him as one word kept returning, inked again and again in the margins without him even realizing what he had written.
Phainon.
He didn’t know what it meant yet. A name? A star? A fragment of some half-forgotten dream? Maybe, it was one of the many stars of Amphoreus, or the many moons of Amphoreus. Perhaps it was only him, clawing for a word to name the absence in his chest.
He wrote again, and again, and again
When the winter arrived, the institute’s halls grew colder at night, yet Caelus remained awake, and so, the texts grew less coherent. Dreams bled into waking hours. Caelus knew his life as a researcher had become inseparable from the thought of Amphoreus. By piecing together too many dreamscapes, too many lost memories, he unknowingly caused the memoria to spill, and in that overflow, his consciousness pulled in. He felt no fear, only the weightless pull of inevitability as it held him within his consciousness. His thoughts blurred into memory, and then, without a warning, he landed somewhere. but not physically.
The aerial walkway leading to the treetop stretches before him. Trees bent like solemn arches, their leaves the color of deep emerald where they swallowed the sky in their shade, and beyond which lied a courtyard hidden in The Shade of the Tree, where robed scholars walked in silence; though, they did not walk so much as drift. Their robes heavy with ink and quills, and faces veiled by masks of collectedness. They were the researchers of that strange land, scribes who wrote endlessly upon scrolls that rolled forever, stretching down with no ends. Among them, one stood apart. The frail man with mint green hair, and his eye patch that made him stand out from the rest. His face became clearer as he walked closer, and Caelus felt a tug of familiarity within him.
The scene shifted, when he blinked, and found himself in, what appeared to be, a tailor’s shop. Leaving behind the chill of the Grove, this was warm and gentle, scented with linen and fresh dyes. A woman with blond hair that curved at the ends reaching her shoulders assessed her work. Caelus thought that he somehow knew her name before she could even have said it; Aglaea, who was stitching cloth that shimmered with colors of blue and gold, found in the lemniscate form of Amphoreus. She hummed faintly with each stitch she made, as though weaving it with memory itself. She looked up once, and though she did not speak, her eyes were kind. Caelus felt that maybe, in a distant branch of reality, he knew her once.
And then came the shadow of grandeur like a tidal wave, taking over the modest tailor shop with it's overarching form. The walls of the fortress rose tall in the the city of warriors who worshipped Strife. Pillars spiraled tall, carved with gold, attempting to reach the false, blue sky. People of Castrum Kremnos wore pride crowned with fire that burned in silence like that looming sword that hung over the king's throne like it was ready to be held in the executioner's hand. Crowds gathered in the plaza below, waiting, as if they had waited for centuries, and would wait centuries more.
Each vision lasted a moment, or an eternity, he could not tell, and that soon, was followed by a complete tranquil. Serenity.
The grand ruins and halls crumbled away, and Caelus found himself standing in an endless plain of wheat, golden stalks bent in a soundless wind. The horizon stretched without an end, eternity unbroken, yet did not ache with a sense of emptiness. It felt whole. The kind of wholeness he had never known in all his wandering. A wholeness so complete it threatened to drown him.
He sank to his knees, fingers brushing the wheat, and for the first time in years, he let his notebook fall forgotten to the earth. Here, there were no questions welling up in his mind, no burdens of research.
Only the soft rhythm of stalks bending in eternal sunlight. But then, as he raised his eyes, he saw him.
His heart sped up, sensing the familiarity in that figure that stood so far yet so close. Like a star glimmering in the night sky, completely unreachable. So, Caelus ran, words lodged in his throat, he let his heart lead him but the dreamscape slipped beneath his feet, and he fell into the endless void, returning to the waking world.
When Caelus awoke, his breath stuttered, body trembling as though torn between two realities. Dizziness clung to him, dragging his pulse into chaos, and when he tried to lift his hand, it felt as if it was not his own. Phainon’s name pressed itself into his skull, and he knew, Phainon was not just a sun, or a moon, nor just a nameless star. He was a memory, a current that had drawn him since the day he turned from the Astral Express.
He shut his eyes, but closing them only birthed more visions, more questions, more spirals of confusion overwhelming his mind.
Had he turned away from his destiny?
Sooner than it should have been, he realizes he’s not dreaming of Amphoreus anymore, he’s already inside it.
Aedes Elysiae sits, tucked away in an edge of the planet itself, a village of tranquility where time does not move. Wheat fields, windmills, and the ocean watch over its serene moment. He stands at the dock, watching a lone sail sway on the distant horizon, the waves shimmering under the soft, frozen flow of time.
The girl with hair a shade of a blooming pink rose sits on a swing, swaying gently with the wind itself. "You’re quieter than a mouse, Caelus. Researchers are supposed to ask questions, aren’t they?" She hums with a gentle smile, turning to gaze at him momentarily. Like a memory rehearsed, played again and again in a place where time had long since stopped. Her tone tells him she knows of things she will not reveal to him, but that is alright. He could search on his own, after all, he had been searching this whole time.
He watches the ocean where the waves glimmer like liquid glass (almost unreal), thinking of words to form, yet his mind remains devoid of anything. To be wordless, to hold no question, felt so unlike a researcher that it frightened him. Perhaps, he was never meant to be one.
"Am I dreaming of you… or are you dreaming of me?"
Cyrene smiles, closing her eyes at his words; his strange question. "Maybe neither. Maybe Amphoreus is dreaming of us both."
"That makes… no sense."
"Dreams don’t need to make sense," she replies, swing creaking gently as it sways with her. "They only need to be remembered."
He sits there for a moment, pondering over his thoughts again after she told him that.
"Do you know," Cyrene says softly, "that in the ancient language of Aedes Elysiae, 'first encounter' is read as 'searching' or 'reunion.'"
"Hmm… Reunion?" The researcher wondered why the little girl was telling him this, but he didn't push, continuing to gaze at the crystalline waters.
"Yes, that's so romantic," she fondly smiles with her clear blue eyes shining under the hoax sunlight, "Don't you think so, too?"
Caelus later left the girl on the swing behind, his steps carrying him into the golden sea of wheat. Each stalk brushed against his fingertips like whispers, and beyond the endless fields was the shore, where the sea of blue glimmered.
And there, at the edge of eternity, he found him.
Phainon.
The name shivered through him as though it had always belonged to his tongue. Not a sun to burn, not a ravager to destroy, but just a man.
The rare fragments he unearthed through his dreams spoke of him wreathed in sunlight, neither Aeon, nor mortal. To some it was a guide through darkness, to some he was the Deliverer of destiny, leading the planet of Amphoreus to greatness. A great hero that anyone could praise, so far from what a researcher could possibly be. His research into Amphoreus drew him into the orbit of Phainon, he realized the two quests were never far from each other. Perhaps, he was being called here this whole time, or maybe Phainon had been calling him. That lone star glimmering in the distance across the vast sky before dawn.
A light that guided him away from that desolate planet, that drew him into quiet golden shores where no one else existed.
As they walked together through dreamscape of Aedes Elysiae, a kind of gravity pulled them closer. Not sudden or dramatic, but steady, like two celestial bodies finding orbit.
"You’ve made me your subject of study," Phainon teased, eyes reminiscent of the blue sky. So, he knew.
"My research began with Amphoreus. And yet… here I am, standing before you." Caelus gazes at the shore as if it was simply his hobby, "How strange is that?"
"Then maybe, they were never apart. Amphoreus is not merely a place." He speaks, voice slightly above a whisper "It is a memory. Maybe, in seeking it, you found me, and in finding me, you will find yourself." Phainon smiles, that warmth of his smile, like the first rays of light slipping through the chill of winter, reaching Caelus. It seemed he had known the lone researcher inside out with the he spoke, all smiles and ones that were so knowing. The strange man with white hair would peel him out, telling him more about himself than Caelus ever knew.
"Yeah…" He breathes a sigh, "Guess those dreams… Maybe, it wasn’t madness."
"Madness?" Phainon frowns in hurt, his expressiveness making Caelus gaze at him fondly with a smile. "Remembrance is often mistaken for delirium by those who fear memory’s weight. But you… you never turned away."
"You might be right… Phainon." Caelus says, "The name feels strange on my tongue, yet… as if—"
"As if we have met before? Because we have met before, hero of my heart." Phainon smiled with his eyes, tear-stained edges creasing in delight.
"What do you mean?"
"You came here to save me. I met you, but maybe that was in a different life, beneath another sky, yet looking the same as this one..." He continued.
Caelus was speechless. They fall into silence again. But it is not the silence of emptiness, never that. It hums with the invisible pull of two stars in a harmonic trajectory.
Their encounters grew longer, with silences more comfortable. Sometimes they did not speak at all. They would sit side by side, shoulder brushing shoulder, watching the stars scatter across Amphoreus’s sky.
Phainon sat besides him by the shore, blue eyes fond, watching how Caelus traced constellations with his finger in the air like he always had done so. The sky was false, but he still enjoyed gazing at it, sometimes its color was the lovely shade of blue like the eyes of the man besides him. The comforting kind, a blue that carried weight and warmth in equal measure. The kind that lingered even when the sky itself could not be trusted.
"Every star has been named a thousand times, in a thousand tongues. But I find myself drawn to the nameless ones."
"If you gave me a name, what would that be?" Phainon asked. Caelus hesitated, the words caught in his throat. He had no answer.
Phainon only watched him patiently, as always, the corners of his eyes crinkling with warmth. The sea shimmered in rhythm with their breath, as if even time itself waited for Caelus’s answer.
But none came.
The longer Caelus lingered in Amphoreus, the less it felt like a dream. He had stopped dreaming a long time ago, Caelus recalled. His feet pressed into the soil of the wheat fields. His hand could trail across the sunlit shore. The wind, though soundless, bent the stalks and brushed through his hair. And always—always, Phainon was there.
Each time he met the man, Caelus became a little afraid of himself as he began to confess things he had never told anyone. The loneliness of turning from the Astral Express. The fear that all he was amounted to little more than a vessel of others’ stories.
That dream, they sat by the docks again. Caelus traced constellations in the sky, his finger lingering over the blank patches where no stars had ever been named.
"I’ve always thought… the nameless stars are loneliest of all. To exist, yet not be remembered, it's all so tragic."
"And you? Would you accompany them should they ask?" The man touched by the Sun asked the researcher.
"If they asked me to, yes." He replied with honesty lacing his voice. He would, after all, was he not a nameless, lonely dimming star himself? And then, the silence stretched between them, but it was no longer heavy, yet simply humming with an unspoken gravity neither could deny.
"I wished, once, to travel with the Express. To see worlds. But I stayed. And sometimes I wonder if I stayed because I was afraid of vanishing. Afraid that if I kept moving, I would never really know who I was, but maybe I was wrong about that." Caelus confessed then, with a trembling tone. His fingers brushed the sky, as if reaching out to the stars. Phainon did not pull away.
"They look up at me, and call me hope, the deliverer. But never once have they asked… what I wish to really be." Phainon confessed, after.
The dreams grew darker.
Where once Amphoreus welcomed him with fields of gold and seas that seemed to be crafted from glass, now Caelus found himself in landscapes of eternal ruin. The wheat fields burned with black fire, leaving behind only ash and rot. The shore cracked into dust, shattered into a thousand mirrors, each with it's own story to tell. The sky itself seemed to fracture, stars falling down like tears of the sky.
Sometimes, he would enter the Grove of Epiphany, and not the shores of Aedes Elysiae he once found comfort so much in. This time, the Grove was not the chill of eternal night that was always cast over it, but the sharp silence of death and rot. Bodies of fallen scholars lay on the grass, as the abyss slowly consumed everything in it's wake. Caelus trudged through the halls, feet silent over the grass. He came across those scholars of the Grove he had come to know from his countless oneiroscopies. He sighed seeing they were safe from the incoming tide, walking closer to see what they were up to, but halted at their uncanny stillness.
One turned his, or it's face toward Caelus, and the mask of skin peeled away. Behind it was not flesh, but a void of writhing letters spilling from the hollow, and crawling across the ground to coil around his feet.
Deliverer.
Caelus tore himself free, heart hammering, and the Grove dissolved. The warmth of Aglaea’s shop should have followed. Instead, the golden loom’s threads hung all over, tangled like spilled veins. And the blond woman sat slumped at her desk with a thin needle still in hand. Her eyes that were once open and glassy, were not stitched shut by her own thread. The cloth she worked shimmered faintly in the dill light of the golden threads, blue and gold unraveling into arterial red. Caelus tore that dream apart himself, and was pulled into the place he wished to finally be, but it was not quite the same anymore.
He stood once more at the shores of Aedes Elysiae, obsidian waves lapping at his feet, but the familiar, comforting sight Phainon was nowhere. He frantically looked around, and called.
“Phainon?!”
The silence stretched for a moment.
“…Caelus.” A response so faint, as though spoken from the other side of eternity. As though spoken by a star at the other edge of the universe.
And the researcher fell to his knees, trembling, tears hot on his cheeks as the dream shattered around him (this time not by his will), and he returned to the waking world once more.
That night, the dream was vastly different.
Caelus stood on a battlefield that had no end. Corpses stretched into the horizon, nameless yet familiar, and unbearably heavy, as though each had once whispered their wish into his hands. And above the silence, a lone figure stood.
Khaslana. The Deliverer.
With a sword in hand, body trembling, and eyes hollow with grief. He could not cry, for his tears disappeared into the air, leaving no evidence. A cruel joke, the deliverer burdened with a million wishes was not allowed to show emotions. He would save the world, they said. He would carry the impossible burden, they said. But Caelus saw him for what he was in that moment: not a hero, not a memory. Just a soul who had been devoured by a promise he should never have been forced to keep.
His heart lurched in pain. Gazing once more at the corpses. Each face blurred, but every one of them had once called him their deliverer.
"Phainon…" He whispered.
Phainon’s figure wavered, drenched not in sunlight but in the weight of expectations. His shoulders sagged with the exhaustion of one who had carried too much, for too long. Seeing that, Caelus’ chest tightened, and a breath tore from him as though it were his own fate he was watching.
"No… you didn’t deserve this."
He remembered visions that were not his own. Thousands of memories pressed into him at once. Again and again, the same story of the deliverer who promised salvation, the deliverer who was left standing alone amidst the dead each cycle. A loop that never broke, and a destiny that was never his to choose.
The dream shuddered and ended. Then he heard him call his name.
Caelus fell to his knees.
"To be made a Deliverer, to be a vessel for their salvation. To stand alone… it isn’t fair." He spoke those words before he could think. "I will take this loop. I will carry this burden. You will not stand alone again. Not while I exist." Caelus continued, voice firm.
Phainon was himself, and he deserved to live.
The sight tore at Caelus, until at last he cried out, not for the corpses, not for the nameless stars, but for Phainon himself. For Khaslana could not cry.
“I will not watch you dissolve into their Deliverer. Not you. Not when you are the first to see me as more than that title of a hero.” Phainon responded.
"But, you had wishes too! If the universe demands it, then let me be the deliverer!" He declared before his mind could process any word. They rang across the field of death, and ruin. Caelus looked up with teary eyes, body trembling once more, and his throat raw.
“Caelus… you speak as though you have nothing to lose. But you are not some shard of memory. You are a man, breathing, searching, afraid, and that is what makes you real unlike me. Don't throw that away.”
His hands shook as he covered his face. "Even though, I’m afraid, Phainon, afraid they will ask the same of me. That I’ll become nothing but… a vessel, a Deliverer, and there will be nothing left that is mine."
For a moment, there was only the soundless wind across the wheat. Then Phainon reached forward, slow and deliberate, his hand brushing Caelus' face. Warmth spread through the contact, not scorching heat like Khaslana's anger, but surprisingly gentle, and so human. Caelus let himself lean into the touch. Leaning forward, his forehead rested against Phainon’s shoulder, tears now silent, the weight of the dream slowly unraveling in the presence of someone who refused to see him as anything but himself.
"But if that is what they have asked of you, to be their light, then I’ll take it instead. I’ll bear the ruins and the memories. And you…" He swallowed once, as though the next words were heavier than any memory. "…you will be free."
For a long while, Phainon only stared at the distant horizon, with an expression so unreadable.
"Do you really know what you are saying?" He asked.
"Yes. I won’t let you be conquered by a fate you never chose. I will carry it." Caelus declared, this time so sure of himself.
"…You don’t understand." His voice cracked into a whisper, raw as an exposed wound. "I have had so many make promises, but when the cycle ends, when the corpses lie at my feet, they are gone, and I am still here." Phainon continued. "…Do you know what it is to hope, only to see that hope turn to ash? Do you know what it is to be the last one left?" His voice broke akin to the fractured sky that loomed over them. "I cannot give you this burden."
The field of ruin rippled like wheat. The sky shuddered, memory and dreams bleeding together finally, and though nothing had changed, though the ruin still stretched in all directions, a single truth crystallized in Caelus’ chest.
He would save him, even if it meant rewriting the stars.