SHUFFLE for @flowerwept || fandaniel
PERMIAN: THE GREAT DYING ☼
"Oh dear..."
It makes no difference where Hythlodaeus 'walks' here, however souls can walk. Distance contracts, becomes instant and clear as water. As glass. The Aetherial Sea is rarely fickle, it ebbs to allow some souls in, some out, it freezes others, like himself, when they so wish to hold on. Finally being funneled back into its stream let him breathe again, millennia upon millennia of prayers heard to their end at last. The fear of it left so many others as bare traces of themselves and let them become one with the flow upon entry. Hythlodaeus could only watch and walk on, search for what few he knew, and hold the remains to his chest.
This is different. Unlike the peace and tepidity of the place he found Hades, the place he was called from to the end of the universe, the souls here dim and wither to nothing. For the first time in twelve-thousand years, Hythlodaeus can feel night fall, its pace unnatural, and he breathes air that should not exist, burning and dry as leaning over a mage's fire. He feels both, but they do not touch him; Perhaps following the trail of a phantom has led him further than his bounds, and yet he remains. His aether does not dissipate and his conjured form stays tangible. An aetherial storm hot as the sun within the vast ocean, that soul at its center— That they should be two of the ones who have not been reborn is ever so curious.
The figure is wrong, but he knows, sees:
"I fear it's been too long since I last stood next to you, Fandaniel." He tilts his head to the side, eyes aglow in the inky deluge. It's simple enough to will away the space between them once he's sure. Even here the Sea seems agreeable to his whims, though it does not offer the same courtesy to the soul in front of him. "I hardly thought you'd avoid me so long, even if you don't remember. Forcing me to traipse through oblivion, are we, my ghostly friend?"
Not his friend, not really. He smiles all the same.












