Chapter Text
Phainon drifted between sleep and wakefulness. His thoughts were sluggish, like trying to wade through molasses. An aching weariness weighed on his bones. A foreign weight pressed at the man's slowly-stirring consciousness, pleading with him to sleep, rest, heal.
A sleep enchantment…? It felt stronger than anything the healers of Okhema had ever used. His eyes flickered open, only for a wave of fatigue to fall upon him and press them closed.
Sleep, the enchantment whispered.
A sense of urgency nagged at the back of his mind, and he tried to move his leaden limbs. There was something he still needed to do.
He has to wake up.
Phainon's rage sparks to life through him, giving him the strength to burn away the magic trying to coax him back to sleep. He awakens with a gasp and opened his eyes, finding himself seated on a white throne stained in golden blood. His own? He is unwounded and unharmed, yet his chest aches with a lingering pain that is quickly fading. Several colored thrones and a towering double-door lie in front of him. He ignored them for now. The embers of his rage were swiftly doused by confusion.
He felt the weight of his mis-matched gold and midnight purple wings at his back and his halo in the shape of the Worldbearing sigil behind his head, though it seemed he was not fully transformed into his other state. He is still clad in the clothes Aglaea had given him and he is missing the cracked-marble wound across his chest that appears whenever he transforms. Partially manifesting his divine form wasn't exactly unusual, but it also was not something he did regularly. He stood up from the throne and stretched his arms and wings out to dispel the lingering tiredness from his limbs.
Running a hand through his hair, Phainon tried to recall the last thing he did. At first, the memories are slow to return. Though as soon as he grasps a solid thread, the rest of the memory sharpens into stark clarity.
He had confronted the Aeon of Destruction, Nanook. After defeating hordes of monsters from that army beyond the sky and losing an arm and wing to a swordsman veiled in white, he had managed to draw blood from that towering god peering through the crack in Amphoreus's false sky.
He remembered falling.
He remembered the flames finally being snuffed out as even his rage could not overcome his exhaustion. Everything faded into darkness and he remembered nothing after that.
'All that wrath, all those coreflames, and yet I only managed a scratch,' he thought bitterly, 'But that memory still does not answer the question of how I got here, how my wounds healed, or where here is.' Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Phainon looked more carefully at his surroundings and took in details he had missed when he was still shedding the remnants of sleep.
He turns his attention back to the colored thrones: a vibrant teal, amber yellow, bright violet, a forest green, oceanic blue, burning orange, and icy cyan. A different symbol is carved at the head of each of them, none of which he recognized. However, the symbols on the orange and cyan thrones resembled a flame and a snowflake. Stepping down the two steps from the dais, he examined the two lesser thrones more closely.
Now that he was fully awake, he could feel the thrum of power coming from them, tightly bound and contained. The orange and cyan felt like fire and ice, and his intuition told him that the others will correspond to other elements. This was quickly confirmed when he felt auras of wind, earth, lightning, plant life, and water. He felt… connected to the energies somehow and they seem to resonate in some way with several of the types of coreflames he possesses, but it was an imperfect fit.
Looking back towards the throne he woke up on, Phainon noticed three smaller thrones sat off to the side on a level of the dais just below the main throne. These appeared to be carved from pale moonstone - yellow, red, and blue. Very faint — so faint that he almost missed it entirely — traces of power lingered in them. Higher in rank than the seven others, but just below the main one? With all the thrones arranged together into a circle, it gave the impression of a council meeting room with a sovereign at the head.
Dismissing the matter of the thrones for now — and his growing unease at the unfamiliar artistic motifs — he shifted his attention to the walls.
Golden triquetras featured prominently against a backdrop of white stone walls, contrasting the monochrome sun, moon, and stars imagery carved into them. One radiant sun with four smaller stars in its orbit, and three moons in a crescent phase to distinguish themselves from the sun. He noted the lack of eye imagery associated with the sun on these walls. In all his journeying across Amphoreus, the vast majority of murals used Aquila's eyes to represent the sun, for it was their opening and closing that determined when night and day fell before the Titan condemned the world to an eternal night. At least, according to the rules set by the simulation. Such artworks excluding the eye imagery existed — his own armor's and sword's sun imagery lacked the eye motifs, after all — but it was not common.
Columns supported the edges of the domed ceiling. At first glance, the columns resembled those of the various fluted styles seen across the city-states of Amphoreus. Though rather than the smooth, continuous grooves carved along the shaft to give the illusion of a singular piece rather than cylinders stacked on top of eachother, stone or golden rings partition the shaft into several layers. Grooves resembling archways and columns were carved into each layer. The caps of some of the columns did not match any style he knew, either: a central golden piece embellished with what appeared to be a stylized wing sprouting from it on one side. The massive pillars of Aquila's sky fortress-city resemble the ones in this hall most closely, but their carvings had simpler geometry and the winged embellishments were more angular with straight lines rather than the swooping curves seen here.
Phainon's unease only grew the longer he looked around the room. Some motifs were almost Okheman, almost Kremnoan, almost Styxian, almost Skyfolk, almost Aidonian. Almost Amphorean. Yet, he was no closer to identifying where in Amphoreus he ended up than when he started. With a resigned sigh, he headed towards the double doors. He wouldn't be able to glean any more useful information from this room for now.
The palace was defeaningly silent and Phainon could not find a single other soul. Wandering through the spacious halls did nothing to soothe his unease, but focusing on the objective of finding clues at least slowed down its growth. The style of architecture remained consistent with what he saw in the throne room. His exploration eventually led him to the palace exterior, wherupon he found a vast courtyard bordered by tall columns and arches. The stonework of the exterior structures were noticeably more weathered than those that had been in interior sections of the palace. Off in the distance, he could see the outlines of floating islands linked together by bridges in varying states of disrepair. He made his way to the edge of the courtyard and looked out over the edge of the floating island towards the land below.
Although night shrouded the world in darkness, the skies were clear and the light from the stars and moon were bright enough to make out some details. Weren't there three moons on the murals…?
As he looks out in each direction, his heart sinks in his chest. The views are beautiful — a lush rainforest with a massive tree, a vast desert, frozen tundras, a great volcano spewing ash, a great plateau spilling water into the surrounding sea like an overflowing chalice, an archipelago off in the distance, mountain ranges and gorges that seemed to cut into the earth itself, and windswept rolling hills — but he recognizes none of it. After over thirty million recurrences, Phainon knew the lands of Amphoreus like the back of his hand a million times over. The views before him now did not match anything in his memories. And yet, there was a highly peculiar sense of familiarity akin to knowing that he'd seen it before but was utterly unable to recall any specific memory of it.
What happened when Stelle was sent back to the beginning of time to start a new recurrence? Was this some unforeseen consequence of stopping the completion of Irontomb? 'Or,' a more chilling possibility crept into his thoughts, 'had that loathsome Lygus simply created a new simulated setting to get his experiment back on track?' It would be ironic if true, given when last he saw the Theoros, he had claimed that he could be endlessly patient if it meant completing his experiments.
Phainon thought of another possibility, but it seemed even more absurd and brought its own confounding questions. Was he still in a simulation within the Scepter delta-me13, or had he woken up on some other planet? If so, how? He — all of the native beings of Amphoreus — had never been real. As lines of code, he had no physical body to exist in in the real universe. And yet he could not completely dismiss the possibility. After all, he had briefly managed to enter a place Stelle had once described as the Path Space and wounded Nanook directly.
A light at the corner of his eye distracted him from his musings. At the edge of the horizon, the sky was just starting to brighten as the sun began to make its morning ascent. The world came to life in vibrant color under the pale dawn light. For a moment, the sight stilled the storm in his heart.
"A dawn," he whispered, breathless and wide-eyed. Such a simple thing, and yet it left Phainon breathless. Whatever world he ended up on — for it was surely not Amphoreus, and whether or not this was also a simulation — had a functioning day-night cycle. This world was not veiled in an eternal Evernight. Phainon sat down and continued gazing at the world below for a few moments, one leg dangling from the ledge while his other knee was drawn up close to his chest for his elbow to rest on. In the calm of the early dawn, he considered the next steps he could take to gather information.
At the moment, returning to the palace to look for a library or archive seemed the most likely to yield results. Phainon stood up and turned to head back. From this distance, he could see that the structure of the palace was more akin to a tower. As he made his way across the courtyard, a statue in the center that he had ignored earlier pulsed with light, distracting him. The pulses came with greater frequency the closer he approached. It appeared to be of a woman holding a lyre, delicate wings sprouting from her back. Much like the ruins around her, time had worn away at the stone and pieces that had broken off littered ground around her.
Almost on instinct, Phainon reached out and touched the statue, feeding it a drop of his golden divinity. Before his eyes, the broken pieces slotted themselves back into place and the statue was restored as if a prayer for Oronyx's Miracle had been made. To his astonishment, the palace exterior and the ruined courtyard were restored as well, golden divinity glittering through them as the restorative magic coursed through them. An awareness of the island — of Celestia — bloomed in his mind like a rediscovered seed of memory. Before he could ponder his connection to the place any further, he felt a presence appear in the throne room, followed by two more. Clearly, his restoration of the place had not gone unnoticed.
At the prospect of talking to someone and finally getting answers, Phainon swiftly made his way back to the palace and towards the throne room. The anticipation sat tightly in his chest, hurrying his steps.
When he arrived back at the throne room, three women he didn't recognize were waiting. A blonde woman with mismatched silver-blue and gold eyes and a golden helical halo was smiling in amusement at the other two women: one dressed in white with a halo adorned in hanging ornaments who seemed almost bored, and another dressed in mournful black and red who was nervously wringing her hands. She lacked a halo, but wine-red wings sprouting from her back mimicked the shape of one. With his keen eyes, he noted that the dress of the lady in black was adorned with the same triquetras he'd seen scattered across the architecture of this space, albeit in silver rather than gold. The two had hair as snowy white as his own, and eyes the same shade of gold. Sisters, perhaps? Something about that shade of gold stirred something in the back of his mind, but what…? Until introductions could be made, he internally named the three Gold, White, and Ruby.
As Phainon stepped through the threshold of the open double-doors, White and Ruby straightened up as they noticed him. The two knelt reverently before him as he approached, much to his confusion. Gold remained standing. Her helical halo briefly flashed blue and her expression tightened as if trying to suppress a wince, then she inclined her head slightly in a bow. Phainon's lips tipped into a concerned frown at the attempted concealment of pain.
Phainon felt a growing sense of awkwardness as the silence stretched on. Were they… waiting for him to address them first? Looking back to the throne he'd woken up on and its position above the others, his suspicions of his connection to this place grew deeper. He noticed Ruby grip the ruffles of her dress tighter. It seemed he wasn't the only one growing uncomfortable with the ongoing silence. Taking pity on her and himself, he cleared his throat and addressed them, "Please, rise and be at ease."
The two white-haired women rose to their feet and the blonde woman raised her head. Even at their full height, they stood a head shorter than him. Their continued silence gave Phainon the distinct impression of subordinates awaiting direct orders or an indication of what he wanted from them. Phainon looked between the three of them and pondered what to say. Dozens of questions jumped to the forefront of his mind, but as the silence dragged on and he struggled to decide what to ask first, he settled on a simple, "What happened?"
White bowed her head, the ornaments hanging from her halo softly creating the sound of windchimes with the movement. "Five-hundred years ago, the Heavenly Principles was gravely wounded during the Cataclysm. Although the crisis was resolved, several functions of Celestia were ruined and an enchanted healing sleep was deemed the quickest available option of recovery. It seems that a full recovery was made ahead of the most optimistic projections."
"In our capacity as the Heavenly Principles' Shining Shades, we have maintained the order of Teyvat in the Heavenly Principles' stead," Ruby continued.
Phainon blinked. For such a concise report, there were so many things to unpack. Shades? Teyvat? Heavenly Principles? If their behavior hadn't suggested that they clearly recognized him, he might have wondered if this were a case of mistaken identity. He mustered up what steadiness he could to calm the storm of thoughts and responded, "My apologies, Lady Shades. I do not know of what you speak and everything I've seen upon awakening is entirely unfamiliar to me."
White hummed thoughtfully, her expression carefully blank while her maybe-sister's eyes widened with horror. Gold's smile widened and her eyes glinted with a mad scholar's curiosity.
"Oh?" Gold crooned, unable to or uncaring of hiding her amusement and curiosity, "This is a fascinating turn of events."
Phainon… did not like the sound of that.