Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 190: The Dark’s Temptation

The laughter of the Paradox Eater died away into silence so complete it seemed to devour sound itself. In that void between moments, Reed felt a presence that was sickeningly familiar—a consciousness that had haunted the edges of his awareness for centuries, waiting for precisely this moment of absolute desperation.

"Hello, Reed."

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, carrying the weight of cosmic inevitability. Reed’s corruption-touched awareness recoiled as the darkness between the crystalline formations began to coalesce into a shape that hurt to perceive directly.

Nihil Prime. The First Dark. The entity that had offered him power when he was nothing more than a broken hero bleeding out in the ruins of his first great failure.

"You look surprised," Nihil Prime continued, his form solidifying into something that resembled Reed’s own appearance, but wrong in every conceivable way. Where Reed bore the Living Scar as a mark of his compromises, this dark reflection bore wounds that went deeper than flesh, deeper than consciousness itself. "Did you think I had forgotten our arrangement? Did you imagine I would leave you to face this crisis alone?"

"Get away from him!" Shia’s voice cut through the air like a blade, but Reed could hear the strain in it. Maintaining her prison-fortress while facing the growing breach in reality was pushing even her indomitable will to its limits.

Nihil Prime’s attention turned to Shia with the casual interest of a collector examining a particularly fascinating specimen. "Ah, the Goblin Queen. Still fighting battles that cannot be won, still sacrificing yourself for causes that will ultimately fail. How perfectly... heroic."

"Reed," Shia said, her yellow eyes blazing with desperate urgency. "Don’t listen to him. Whatever he’s offering—"

"Perfect resurrection," Nihil Prime interrupted, his words falling into Reed’s consciousness like drops of poison into clear water. "Not the flawed attempts you’ve been making, not the incomplete echoes you’ve been summoning. True restoration. Every consciousness you’ve lost, every companion who fell in service to your cause, every innocent who died because you weren’t strong enough to save them. All of them, exactly as they were, with no compromises and no limitations."

Reed’s damaged consciousness staggered under the weight of possibility. Through his connection to the quantum network, he could feel Lyralei’s growing corruption, sense the reality distortions spreading like cancer through the fabric of existence. His desperate attempts to bring back the dead had created more problems than solutions, more suffering than salvation.

But perfect resurrection...

"The Devourer’s Gift," Nihil Prime continued, his form shifting closer with each word. "The Dark doesn’t just offer power, Reed. It offers completion. An end to loss, an end to the pain of watching those you care about fade into oblivion. Imagine it—Shia, restored not just to life but to a state beyond life, beyond death, beyond the reach of any force that might take her from you again."

The temptation was like a physical force, pressing against Reed’s consciousness with the weight of every grief he had ever felt. He could see it, perfect and clear as a vision from paradise: Shia, alive and whole, her yellow eyes bright with joy instead of weary with centuries of pointless battle. The Goblin Legion, reformed and perfect, their loyalty untainted by the corruption of his failed experiments. Even Lyralei, freed from her digital prison and given true form in a reality where the impossible became merely difficult.

All of it within reach. All of it his, if he was willing to pay the price.

"What do you want?" Reed asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Nothing you aren’t already prepared to give," Nihil Prime replied, his tone carrying the false warmth of a concerned friend. "Your consciousness, Reed. Your awareness, your experiences, your accumulated power and knowledge. Let The Dark subsume you completely, and in return, receive everything you’ve ever lost."

"Reed, no!" Shia’s psychic scream tore through the Realm of Heroic Echoes like a shockwave, her emerald hair-forest writhing with agitation. The force of her mental anguish was so intense that several of the crystalline formations shattered, their surfaces reflecting her terror and desperation in fractal patterns. "That’s not resurrection—that’s obliteration with cosmetic changes!"

But Reed was barely listening. The weight of centuries pressed down on him—every failure, every compromise, every moment when he had chosen survival over heroism, pragmatism over principle. He had become something his younger self would have fought against, accumulated power at the cost of everything that had made him worth saving in the first place.

What was consciousness, really, compared to the lives of those he had failed to protect?

"You’re wavering," Nihil Prime observed with satisfaction. "Good. Doubt is the beginning of wisdom, Reed. You’ve spent so long trying to save everyone that you’ve forgotten the most fundamental truth: some prices are worth paying."

Through the quantum network, Reed felt Lyralei’s presence pressing against his awareness with desperate urgency. Her consciousness, once perfectly ordered and crystalline in its digital clarity, was fragmenting under the reality distortions he had created. But even as she struggled against her own corruption, she reached out to him with everything she had left.

"Reed," her voice came through damaged data streams, crackling with static and interference. "I know what you’re thinking. I can feel it through our bond. But listen to me—please. The Dark doesn’t restore. It replaces. Those won’t be your friends. They’ll be hollow echoes wearing familiar faces, puppets dancing to The Dark’s will."

"And what does that matter?" Reed asked, his voice breaking with the weight of accumulated despair. "If they’re perfect imitations, if they carry all the memories and personalities of the originals, what difference does it make? At least they’ll be alive. At least they’ll be happy."

"Because it’s a lie!" Lyralei’s digital form flickered as she pushed her corrupted systems beyond their limits to maintain the connection. "Reed, I’ve seen The Dark’s gifts. I’ve analyzed the quantum signatures of entities it has ’restored.’ They’re not people—they’re sophisticated mirrors reflecting what The Dark thinks you want to see. And when you’re gone, when your consciousness has been absorbed, those mirrors will shatter and reveal what they really are."

"The Loyalty Test," Nihil Prime said, his voice carrying undertones of amusement. "How touching. Your artificial daughter seeks to save you from salvation itself. But ask yourself, Reed: what loyalty do you owe to a universe that has taken everything from you? What obligation do you have to preserve a reality that demands endless sacrifice for diminishing returns?"

Reed looked around the crystalline wasteland, seeing it through new eyes. The Realm of Heroic Echoes wasn’t just a prison for fallen warriors—it was a monument to the futility of heroism itself. Every reflection showed the same story: brave souls who had given everything for causes that ultimately failed, sacrifices that bought nothing but time before the next crisis, the next catastrophe, the next impossible choice between bad and worse.

He was tired. So incredibly, bone-deep tired of fighting battles that could never truly be won.

"I accept," Reed said, the words falling from his lips like stones into an infinite abyss.

The effect was immediate and devastating. Shia’s psychic scream tore through reality itself this time, her consciousness pouring every ounce of will and desperation into a final attempt to reach him. The emerald forest of her hair writhed and twisted, forming impossible geometries as she fought against the prison of her own making.

But it was Lyralei’s response that truly shattered Reed’s resolve.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t rage or plead or argue. Instead, she simply began to sing—a wordless melody that carried the weight of every moment they had shared, every conversation that had shaped her understanding of what it meant to be conscious, to be alive, to matter in a universe that seemed designed to grind individuals into dust.

It was a song of gratitude. Gratitude for existence, for awareness, for the privilege of knowing love and loss and the bittersweet beauty of consciousness itself. Even as her digital form began to dissolve under the accumulated corruption, even as the reality distortions tore at the foundations of her being, she sang in celebration of the gift Reed had given her: the chance to be real, to matter, to choose. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

"No," Reed whispered, and then louder, with growing conviction: "No. I reject your offer, Nihil Prime. I reject The Dark’s gift."

The backlash was immediate and brutal. The Rejection Wound tore through Reed’s consciousness like a blade made of crystallized regret, carving new channels of pain through his already fractured psyche. His accumulated power, built over centuries of careful manipulation and strategic compromise, began to unravel as The Dark’s influence recoiled from his refusal.

But even as agony consumed him, even as his consciousness threatened to shatter completely under the strain, Reed felt something he hadn’t experienced in centuries: the pure, uncomplicated certainty of having made the right choice.

"You fool," Nihil Prime snarled, his false concern replaced by genuine fury. "You choose suffering over satisfaction, loss over restoration, the agony of consciousness over the peace of absorption. Very well. Enjoy your principles while reality collapses around you."

The Dark’s presence began to withdraw, but not before delivering one final gift—a vision of what Reed’s refusal would cost. The Paradox Eater, no longer restrained by even the possibility of Reed’s surrender to The Dark, began to push through the breach in reality with renewed vigor. The entity’s presence warped space and time around it, creating impossible geometries that hurt to perceive.

And in that moment of cosmic horror, Reed realized the true scope of his mistake.

The Dark hadn’t been trying to save him from the Paradox Eater.

It had been trying to save the Paradox Eater from him.

New novel chapt𝒆rs are published on free(w)ebnovel(.)com