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It had been a long while since Amphoreus was preserved here on this eternal page where the undying sun high above shone its brilliant light upon every human face.
The people had since settled into their new lives as the living, breathing memories of people both dead and yet unborn. It was a strange existence, being cradled by memoria, guided right into the cosmos' eyes and having shed the cold code that once defined their very beings.
And it was only natural for Phainon to feel this transformation the most, even after everyone else had already adapted.
After all, when he first awoke here, he was unsure of what form he'd take. Having shattered from the inside out, been stripped of his humanity and used as a vessel for the Destruction to fester, to grow and claw its way out of his ashen corpse—honestly, he was lucky to have even made it to the Era Nova alongside everyone else.
He was surprised, or perhaps not at all, to find his body—the complete memory of his mortal form, that is—perfectly intact. Despite the damage inflicted upon his mind and soul, Phainon looked no different from his days spent chasing flames and fleeting stars to the end of each world.
Right now, he was an ordinary human again. Just, one with phantom pains and night terrors and a past so heavy he didn't quite know what to do with it yet.
And that was all well and good, nothing he couldn't handle. As Phainon's supervised recovery period gradually came to an end and he was permitted to roam these lands as he pleased, the light of day that finally warmed his skin gave him the peace of mind he'd been seeking for so long.
He was reminded then that he could in fact pursue all he missed out on in his countless lives, and enjoy his days to the fullest without fearing the arrival of nightfall.
And things were, for the most part, better than ever. Reuniting with friends and family, letting go of old grudges and discovering his own dreams for the future—everything was looking up.
So much so, that Phainon had entirely forgotten one crucial part of what it meant to be a regular person in this world.
There he was, nestled into a comfortable corner in the Library of Garbaniphoro, parsing through faded appraisal documents and completely neglecting his assigned reading material for today—How to Read the Air in Castrum Kremnos, a rather weighty tome Mydei had suddenly dumped on him before skulking off to browse historical records.
It wasn't that the cultural heritage of Kremnos was dull by any means; Phainon had once aspired to train in the glorious city of warriors, after all. But this book was not at all to his tastes. He'd rather get his hands on Mydei's ancient drafts of the Kremnoan Dictionary instead of wasting his time on social etiquette.
Phainon hid a yawn behind his palm—lest his cruel warden discover he was slacking off—when he suddenly felt a tiny pinprick against his neck. While it wasn't enough to draw blood, he still felt around for a sting or bite mark. Fingers trailed across his flesh, searching, even unfastening his choker to expose the pale area underneath—when he chanced upon a sweltering, unbearably sensitive spot hidden between his neck and clavicle.
The slightest scrape of his nail upon that spot left him frozen in place. Phainon's pupils grew wide and round with a primal terror, and a sudden dizziness washed over him. All at once, he was suddenly overwhelmed by sensations he'd never known before.
The familiar scent of the library was no longer welcoming—it surged into something uncomfortable all at once, suffocating him entirely. Aged parchment and dust became wheat and ash, like a memory of bygone days that remained forever imprinted upon his soul.
Phainon cried out, reeling as his senses concentrated into an all-consuming mass. Every scent, taste, and sound warped together, just as his head began to swim. He felt itchy all over, like his nerves were on fire, and just wrong—
Right then, a strange, new scent flooded through the stacks, surging in a tidal wave. It was something heavy, bitter and primal in its unrest.
Smoke. Bloodshed. The undying embers of war.
Unbridled fear was all he could feel. It was an emotion he had long abandoned, one he hadn't truly known since his days charging at gods far larger than his insignificant existence, barely preserving his dignity as he struggled onward towards the end of the world.
All Phainon could hear was the frantic beating of his heart, and the premonition of destruction.
This is it, he thought, I'm finally being forgotten. I'm going to disappear forever.
With hands grasping at his shattered skull, bloodied claws clinging to the cliff's edge, crumbling, spiraling, facing the ceaseless reprise of his fall from grace—he wondered faintly if he should just let go.
Embrace his destiny. Burn and fade away into oblivion so the new world no longer lived under the shadow of all his rage and guilt.
All those distant voices, resounding screams, the ballad drifting on the wind, flickering flames and dark waves and golden viscera and the shadows clenching around his throat and—
"Can you hear me?"
—a steady pair of hands upon his shoulders. Perhaps the very last sensation he would ever know. An undeserved embrace amidst the fires of retribution.
"Phainon? What's wrong?"
Those words echoed in the miasma, circling his fractured being. They sought after some unknown guidance—or an answer that he no longer had. He didn't know what this tide was, but the outcome would nevertheless remain the same as always: the end of the world, or the end of him.
"I'm dying…" he choked through the boiling sea of blood churning thick in his mouth.
A sharp inhale rose beside his ear. Another surge of those rusty tides, and a touch brushing over his pulse—followed by a searing pain erupting in his flesh, in his very veins.
He shrieked, grappling, ripping through the air, attempting to dislodge himself. The hold on his skin slipped away, replaced by another kind of panic—of letting go, of being alone in his final moments, sinking into the void as his traces disintegrated.
"No, don't—" he whispered, only to be silenced by a commanding, shh, quiet. And, as if driven by some long-dormant instinct, he instantly fell silent.
The shadow pulled him near, and he was met with a true, solid body. There, a heart beat steadily for him, and the skin upon where his nose settled was warm and soothing.
All the festering wounds of battle eroded away, mellowing into gentler notes of tangy citrus on a summer's eve, the fragrance of ancient tomes and a rich, musky spice his soul so yearned to slumber within.
It smelled like home.
Mydei—it was Mydei, it truly was him— finally released his breath. He soothed Phainon's nape carefully, mumbling, "You aren't dying. Those are your hormones. They suddenly spiked, like you're…"
He swallowed harshly, resolve faltering when confronted with such unforeseen events.
So Phainon finished for him. "…Like I'm going into heat?"
It emerged as a pathetic whine—far too pitiful for a man of his nature. Yet, his fears weren't exactly unfounded; after all, he'd never truly experienced a successful heat cycle before
In days long past, Phainon was always overly-cautious of how he presented himself to the world. Aside from donning the armor of the Deliverer and wielding his sword for the inhabitants of Amphoreus, one other facet was the masking—or rather, near-erasure—of his secondary gender.
To appear impervious to all distractions and focus solely on his mission of the Flame-Chase, he couldn't just act the part, he had to physically transform into someone else. Someone resistant to all the whims of humanity, including the glaring flaws of his own biology.
A steep combination of hormone suppressants and scent-blockers laid among the pieces of his armor, and Phainon painstakingly wore them each day from the Entry Hour to the Curtain Fall Hour.
The prescription was something of a panacea, mimicking the most impregnable components of a beta's biology: decreased hormone secretion, hardly any pheromones, and absolutely no heat cycles whatsoever.
It was developed with the Grove's ingenuity; the Lotophagists' techniques were nearly flawless, and Phainon was stripped of his lowly status to wear the shining face of a leader the people desired. Perhaps their Deliverer would not appear in the form of a strong, indomitable alpha—but he was formidable in his own right.
Yet, when retreating to his own quarters at night and recalling the invisible patch upon his flesh, he would ache in private for just a moment before continuing down this path carved out for him.
Being impervious to all distractions came at a cost, of course. And with his absolute control over his secondary gender came a depletion of all his unnecessary senses.
In becoming something greater, Phainon lacked the natural capabilities of even a beta. Not a single trace of pheromones graced his being—including that of those closest to him.
With the way he was back then—so utterly flawless, and yet so alone—Phainon could never breach the final divide between his nearest and dearest.
Aglaea and Tribbie, the fuzzy childhood memories of cries and whimpers quieted with their long-dulled scents, never to cast their serene blanket across his shoulders again.
Castorice, who he could never touch nor embrace even the fragrant petals of her Antila blooms, remained forever five paces away.
And Mydei, the steady weight at his side, the one he should have shared his entire being with, lacked all but the distant remains of mild soap bubbles boiling away in the bath.
Truthfully, while his make and the details of his existence so often slipped Phainon's mind, this separation within himself was marked by deep, incurable gashes upon his frail heart.
He dearly wanted to feel them, all of them, more than anything. To just be with them always.
But he couldn't. He never could be. Because Amphoreus couldn't afford a Deliverer that was weak to his own instincts.
So he hid away all those unnecessary faults of his, all those indulgent fragments of his heart that were destined to never be whole again. And Phainon bid farewell to each of them—whether as a comrade or as their executioner.
And upon the end of the world, when he rose into the scorched, crimson skies and bore the weight of millions of coreflames within his hollowed chest, he truly became nothingness—the flawless, distant god that he emulated all those long years.
The Destruction's wrath immolated his entire being, burning away all that once made him the mortal called 'Phainon.'
His scent glands, his internal organs, his very heart and mind—they all melted away as no more than paltry wax. It was an unparalleled power that left not a trace of the human—of the omega—he once was.
When the world was eventually reborn under the true starry skies, Phainon had not felt, nor smelled, anything at all. No pheromones, nor the lingering traces left by the black tide; just the afterimages of divine war, and the scars seared upon his soul.
It was only logical to assume that aside from his state of being reverting to its original form, the was simply nothing else left to preserve.
Perhaps all the world forgot his status as an omega, and thus that memory ceased to exist at all. As if it was never tethered to Phainon's identity in the first place. A difficult trial at the end of his path, but nonetheless a condition of his survival; he'd set it aside, accepted it and tried to move on.
Just for fate to throw its latest stone, aiming right for the throat and nearly knocking him to his knees all over again.
Now, that assumption had been thoroughly disproved. Even if Phainon's traits only reemerged countless days later, he was still very much an omega at his core. One that was naturally sensitive to pheromones, and would endure heat cycles all the same as the rest.
Now, with his body deciding to reset itself all at once, he was overstimulated by the strange, foreign scents he'd never once basked in before.
That was to say, Phainon's very own scent: the golden wheat fields of paradise, and the bitter ashes of fear that sent him into a deep spiral.
And there was Mydei. His alpha. The man he was bound to not by any formal means, but through an indelible display of devotion.
It wasn't a mating mark, or even a true bond of any kind. Yet Mydei too made peace with their reality, and staked his claim so that the world would know exactly who Phainon belonged to—and who he belonged to in turn.
That claim that Phainon hadn't even known about until his senses awakened and he was suddenly drowning in his alpha's scent—the scent that had long cradled his form, and he could now embrace in return.
"Are…you alright?" Phainon murmured against his scent gland, breathing in his essence.
Mydei's pulse stuttered, throat bobbing along with the emotion he barely managed to swallow down. "Can you…can you actually pick up on my scent now?"
"Mhm. It's so strong. Just like you always are." With a steadying breath, Phainon nuzzled against his warm skin, soaking in all that he can. "Thought I was back on the battlefield, with how badly your emotions bled through. But now—"
That intense scent of rust, Mydei's distress at seeing him in such a vulnerable state, was no more. All that remained was the intermingling of two distinct and contented fragrances—wheat and citrus became something new, something gentler.
These waves rippled against Phainon's deepest doubts, becoming his peace and comfort. When he pulled Mydei into his arms, wrapped himself around around a strong back, let fingers stroke over inked skin while the curve of his nose settled back against Phainon's pulse—he felt it, so deep and true, ingrained upon his heart.
Mydei nosed and kissed over his glands, licking up every shiver and sigh of delight, until there was no longer any doubt in his mind about who his omega so yearned for.
In truth, Phainon never needed more than this. He already had everything he dared to dream of.
Yet, if his soul still desired more, something more tangible that he could cling to in his darkest moments of terror and repentance, well… that longing for something he could never have in the past could finally be sated. Regardless of what the future held...
Here and now, this life was his. Theirs.
And he knew that the fear of what was to come paled in comparison to the faith he held in Mydei. He would guide him through these strange shores, hold him tightly as the looming tides of his heat approached, and never let go until all they had lost and been denied was finally reclaimed.
"—Now, I know that my mate cares for me very much. Just as I care for him."