208 – The Doubt – Part I

There was no word, no concept, no fragment of language in existence that could capture the depth of my fury. It was beyond rage, beyond hatred, beyond the primal instincts of war and destruction. It was a desecration, a blasphemy carved into the fabric of reality itself, an insult so absolute that my very being recoiled against it.

Galeia had crafted me with her own will, a Halve, a being of flawless purpose, and yet here, standing before me, was a grotesque mockery of that perfection. A wretched pile of stone and shadows, daring... daring!!! To bear my image.

The sheer audacity, the unbearable arrogance of such a thing. To take my likeness and drape it over itself like a poorly stitched costume. To assume, even for a moment, that magic, that trickery, could recreate what Galeia had shaped. It was a deception so vile that my stomach churned with revulsion.

This was not mere insult. This was defiance. A challenge made not through words or action but through existence itself. A monster, a thing without purpose, standing there, wearing my face, as if it belonged in the same world as me.

It was not just wrong. It was impossible. My beauty was not something to be copied. My form was not something to be worn. My presence was not something to be imitated. This abomination was a contradiction, an impossibility, an offense against the very logic of creation. It had no right to exist, no right to stand before me, no right to take up space in a world that had crafted me to protect it.

My hands trembled, not with fear, not with hesitation, but with the sheer magnitude of my disgust.

The Flow of E’er twisted violently around me, responding to the firestorm in my chest. It knew. It understood. The very energy itself recoiled alongside me, shuddering at the presence of this thing.

A weight crushed down on my skull, not from exhaustion or strain, but from the sheer concentration of my fury, a force barely restrained by the thin veil of my self-control. It wanted release. It wanted obliteration. My every fiber screamed to act, to unmake, to tear this insult from reality with my own hands.

I could not allow this. I could not allow it to stand for even another breath, another second. I could not allow the thought, the memory, the possibility that something like this had ever been real. I would carve it from existence. I would burn it from time itself. I would make its creation an impossibility, a mistake so thoroughly undone that even E'er would forget it had ever tried to be.

The heat came first. A scorching, unbearable furnace igniting in my chest, rolling through my veins like molten gold. My skin prickled as if the very air recoiled from touching me, the space around me warping under the sheer intensity of my wrath. My breath came slow, deliberate, but with every exhale, the temperature rose. A thin haze of steam rose from my skin, from my lips, from the very edges of my armor as my body rejected the mere concept of stillness, of calm.

The Flow of E’er twisted and snapped, writhing around me like a chained beast straining against its leash. My very presence became an anomaly, something too much, too bright, too sharp for the world to contain. The ground beneath me blackened, not from fire, but from something deeper, something worse.

Reality itself recoiled.

My Solar-natured Glow pulsed, not in gentle radiance, but in erratic bursts, solar flares of golden wrath lashing at the cavern walls, casting wild shadows that stretched and trembled like frightened prey.

Then came the trembling.

Not mine—the dungeon's.

The ground beneath the corpses cracked and buckled, deep fissures webbing outward in jagged, unnatural patterns. Stones lifted into the air, pulled from their resting places as if gravity itself had become confused by my presence. The pillars, the broken remains of the platforms, the very walls of the dungeon shuddered as the weight of my rage pressed against them. My heartbeat was a war drum, slow and thunderous, and with each pulse, the tremors grew worse, as though the dungeon itself feared what would come next.

My grip on my spear was crushing, the metal groaning in protest, golden veins of E'er pulsing up its length in violent, erratic surges through [Heavenly Rebuke of the Conquering Golden Suns].

I was not in control of my power anymore—it was in control of me.

The sheer, indescribable offense of that thing’s existence twisted my stance, made my muscles coil with a strength that demanded to be spent.

I had to act.

My every movement was charged with the kind of tension that could break mountains, like a blade drawn back too far, moments from snapping under its own pressure.

And my eyes—Galeia’s own gaze through me—shone like dying stars, their golden light pulsing, flickering, twisting in ways that should not have been possible. The cavern, the corpses—none of it mattered. The only thing I saw was it. That mockery of my form, standing there, drenched in shadow, existing when it should not.

My fury was beyond fire.

Fire was mortal, fleeting, something that could be extinguished with time and reason. This was older. This was wrath etched into the marrow of the world, a force that had been honed across a million years of suffering and violence.

A million years of Hell.

A million years of the same inexorable, unending rage, layered so deep into my being that even I had forgotten its depth. But now something had pulled at that buried pool, had dragged it, unwilling, from the void where I had left it sealed. And in its arrogance, in its foolish attempt at imitation, The Doubt had undone what even time itself could not erode.

It had awakened me.

The Odyssey had spoken of the wrath of Achilles, a fury so consuming that it toppled kings and armies alike. The Mahābhārata had described Arjuna’s celestial anger, a force that scorched battlefields and turned men to ash. The Aeneid told of Juno’s divine rage, a goddess who sent storms to ruin entire nations.

None of them had ever held this.

Those were stories of anger. This was something greater. This was the return of a force that was meant to be buried. The rage of a being who had walked through a Hell beyond mortal comprehension, who had bathed in the blood of demons, who had crushed the Abyss under my heel and stood, mind broken, in its ruins.

And something had dared to imitate me.

The insult was unforgivable. The very concept of it burned in my mind like an infection, like rot spreading through something pure. That grotesque, soulless construct standing before me, that thing wearing my face, my form, trying to be me—

It was a violation.

Not merely of me, but of what I was. Of what a Halve was meant to be.

I am a child of the world. Created, shaped, and born with absolutism stitched into my very being. There was no second of my existence that was not perfect, that was not true. And this thing, this shambling facsimile, had the audacity, the sheer blasphemous gall, to pretend.

But it was wrong.

I could see the flaws instantly. The hollowness of it. The absence of me in it.

It did not have my soul.

It did not have my mind.

It did not have the weight of a million years of pain, of rage, of violence.

It did not know what it had done.

It did not know what it had touched.

And it would not live long enough to learn.

But it should.

It tried to take all of me, didn’t it? It wanted to be me. Then it should know what I have known. It should feel what I have felt. It should be buried in the memories of carnage, in the echo of every scream I have ever torn from a demon’s throat, in the endless slaughter of an entire dimension’s corruption...

I would give it to it.