The Great Pyramid of Mu was in my sight and I knew Dagaal was there. I merely had a short distance to cover to reach my goal, yet before I could make my way across the Aether-Gap to the central island, my feet froze against the frosted glass of the balcony I was one. The air hadn’t just cooled; it had turned brittle and the low, chaotic roar of the Dreg-riot in the far distance was suddenly snuffed out by a high-frequency, glass-shattering whistle that tried to vibrate my bones.
I looked down at the floor – the quartz was glowing, not with the warm, inviting gold of the Vril-gardens, but with a cold, blinding white in the form of a Counter-Frequency.
“Lilith’s Children weren’t hiding,” I realized. “They were waiting for the ‘Discordant Note’ to reach the heights. Well, here I am friends – come and get me!”
As if on cue, from the shadows of the Spire’s upper arches, five figures began to descend. The scientist in me found it curious that how they simply stepped onto the air, as if their weight was supported by the very hum of the building. These were not the Mylar Sky-Huntsmen I had seen earlier. They were taller, their forms draped in robes of liquid silver that flowed and rippled like mercury in a vacuum. Interestingly enough, their faces were hidden behind masks of un-shattered glass, reflecting nothing but my own flickering, violet-stained silhouette.
They were of course The High Archons and I had fully expected to encounter them at some point on my journey.
O faithless and perverse generation, how long must I be with you? I sighed at the nuisance of it all. How long must I put up with you?
Meanwhile the lead Archon lowered softly towards me, his silver robes settling with a metallic chime. He didn’t speak with a voice, but with a layered harmony that resonated directly in my skull.
“Halt, Disciple,” The Mylar boomed. The word Disciple was spat with a melodic irony. “Your frequency is a cancer. You wrap yourself in the shroud of a High-Huntsman and speak the name of A’H, yet you carry the heavy stench of the grave.”
The obsidian light from the Pyramid pulsed again, more violent this time. I felt a jolt of mild alarm as a tether of dark energy lashed out from the distant apex – it was attempting to connect with the Shard of Varysha at my hip. The Archon raised a staff of pure, singing quartz, and I realized with a snarl that the signal wasn’t just a beacon – it was a leash.
The Shard began to tug at my side, pulling me toward the edge of the balcony—not with a physical force, but with a magnetic hunger. The Archons weren’t here to kill me; they were here to act as the anchors while the Pyramid dragged me, and the Shard, into its containment maw.
“Well,” I whispered, the Shard at my hip screaming as it tried to rip itself through my shroud. “Let’s see how your ‘Alignment’ handles a little chaos.”
The High Archon moved closer towards me, his silver robes chiming like a thousand small bells. He raised his staff, and the four others followed suit, forming a semi-circle in front of me.
“The Great Alignment does not tolerate the discordant,” the lead Archon intoned, his voice a haunting, multi-tonal chord. “We shall resolve you, creature. We shall bleach the stain of your existence until only the hum of the Spire remains.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t even reach for a weapon. I simply leaned back against the railing, my skeletal arms crossed over my chest, a thin, rattling chuckle escaping my throat.
“Resolve me?” I asked, my voice a jagged tear in their perfect silence. “Little birds, you are singing to the wind that birthed the storm.”
The Symphony of Glass
The Archons began their rite. Their staves glowed with a blinding, sterile whiteness, and they began to “sing.” It wasn’t a sound you heard with ears, but a geometric pressure that began to weave a cage of Hard-Light around me. Each pulse of their staves was like a mathematical command for the air to solidify, for my atoms to cease their “errant” vibration and conform to the Mylar’s static peace.
I felt a bit of pressure mounting, the light beginning to sear my ashen bones. To any other being, this would have been a terminal “de-fragging.” But I was Azazel – I was the friction in the gears of the universe – and I wasn’t in the woods to be pushed around by Lilith’s offspring. Not then, not never.
As if in answer, I opened my silver shroud, exposing the blackened, hollow cavity of my chest as I mocked,”Is that all the volume you have?”
Instead of fighting the light the Mylars tried to use against me, I inhaled it. I pulled their high-frequency, sterile energy into the vacuum of my own necrotic essence. I felt the light burning in my ribs, clashing with the heavy, dark silt of my soul – I held it there, letting the pressure build until my very bones began to glow a sickly, bruised violet.
The Archons leaned in, their glass masks reflecting a triumph they hadn’t yet earned. They thought I was being consumed.
“My turn,” I whispered.
I didn’t use a spell – I used a Scream!
I released the gathered energy in a single, catastrophic burst of “Grey Sound”—a shockwave of raw, un-tuned entropy. It wasn’t a bang; it was the sound of a billion mirrors shattering at once.
The effect was…glorious.
The “Solidified Light” railing behind me didn’t just vanish—it exploded into a blizzard of razor-sharp crystal shards. The High Archons were thus caught in the backwash of their own power. Their masks cracked, the glass falling away to reveal faces of pale, terrified perfection. Their liquid silver robes were shredded into dull grey rags, and their bodies were whipped around like autumn leaves caught in a gale.
With a flick of the wrist I pulled them all towards me – grinding up their physical forms as if through a sieve and casting them backwards into the room behind me. I took but a moment to appreciate my work and then got back to the business at hand – Dagaal!
The Leap of Faith
I stood on the jagged, broken edge of the balcony, the freezing wind whipping my silver shroud around me. The mangled Archons lay on the frosted glass floor inside the spire, their bodies lying useless and light staffs now dark.
“Your song was always too thin, little bird,” I said, looking down at them with genuine amusement. “It needed a bass note. I was happy to oblige.”
And with that I stepped off the edge, into vertical…nothingness.
The wind, which usually obeyed a Mylar schedule, was now a screaming, chaotic gale that tore at my silver shroud. For the first few hundred feet, I was nothing but a stone of ash and bone.Then, I reached the layer of silver mist—the thick, mercury-heavy clouds that acted as the “ceiling” for the Mu commoners and the “floor” for the Mylar elite. That’s when I called forth a memory of what I once was—before the treachery, before the Shattering, before the First Fall of Deception of Lucifer and Ze.
Tattered streamers of violet smoke erupted from my back, snapping outward like whips. They were composed of jagged, ephemeral shadows, taking the haunting shape of wings that spanned twenty feet. Together with my lumenarc form, I used the magnetic “leash” of the Shard of Varysha—which was still being tugged toward the Pyramid with a violent, rhythmic suction—to guide my path.
I stopped falling and instead became a comet of shadow and silver, a predatory streak cutting through the heavy vapors of the Aether-Gap. As I screamed through the sky, the mist parted before me. I bypassed the entire exterior security perimeter of the main island – they had no chance to find a Divine ghost like me.
As I cleared the mist-line, the true face of Lemuria—the Island of Mu—revealed itself in its terrifying, cold glory. It was a continent that looked like it was designed by a old world clockmaker.
Below me lay the Cities of Chime, where the buildings were arranged in concentric circles, each district vibrating at a specific tone to keep the population in a state of permanent, mindless bliss. In the distance I saw the Aether-Docks, where massive crystal barges hovered, taking on cargoes of liquid light. Near then was the Great Canal of Mercury, a shimmering river of liquid metal that flowed uphill, defying the very laws of the world to feed the Pyramid’s cooling systems. But mostly my eyes were fixed on the center of the continent – for there sat the Great Pyramid of Mu – and my destiny!
Even from this height, the urgency hit me like a physical blow. The obsidian pulse from the apex was becoming paler, turning a sickly, washed-out grey. My connection to the Dagaal told me everything I needed to know: the Mylar High Priests were panicking – to stabilize the harmonic collapse I had triggered with the Dregs, they had opened the “Deep Siphons” – they were drinking Dagaal’s divine powers dry.
The dagger—my prize, the key to my very existence—was being bled. The ancient, concentrated essence of the void was being converted into a power source for mortals to keep the streetlights on and the gardens humming! Every second I spent in the air was a year of the dagger’s life-force evaporating into the Lemurian grid.
“Faster,” I hissed, my smoke-wings flaring with a desperate, violet heat.
The Pyramid loomed, a mountain of shifting obsidian plates. I could feel Dagaal screaming through the metal, a muffled, dying roar of a trapped beast. If I didn’t reach the Apex soon, I wouldn’t be reclaiming a weapon; I would be inheriting a corpse.
The shore of the main island rushed up to meet me—a landscape of white stone and terrifying order that was about to meet its first true disaster. My descent ended not with a landing, but with an act of calculated theater. As I neared the ground I collapsed my smoke-wings and allowed myself to hit the surface with a sickening crunch of bone against stone – allowing the momentum to tumble me across the polished floor in front of the pyramid. It was a pitiful sight – but all part of the role I was assuming.
The Performance of the Fallen
I was sprawled at the feet of a phalanx of Mylar Peace-Keepers. These were not the ethereal Archons; instead they were a more solid caste—clad in interlocking plates of white porcelain shaded armor, their faces hidden behind helms that hummed with a low-frequency protective field.
I lay there for a heartbeat, my silver shroud torn and blackened, my breathing a wet, ragged rattle. I didn’t look like a god; instead I made myself I look like a tragedy.
“Halt!” the lead Peace-Keeper barked, his voice amplified by his helmet into a metallic boom. He leveled a Resonance Lance at my throat—a weapon that could vibrate a mortal’s organs into liquid in a single pulse. “Identify yourself, wanderer. You fall from the heights in a shroud of shadow.”
I didn’t answer with strength. I reached out a trembling, skeletal hand, my fingers clawing at the air as if searching for a lifeline.
“The… the Spire,” I choked out, a thin trail of dark, iridescent bile leaking from the corner of my mouth. I made sure it sizzled slightly against the white gold floor. “Broken. The High Archons… fallen. Discordance… it has a face…”
The guards hesitated. In a society where everything was tuned to perfection, a sudden, violent variable like me was a sensory overload. I saw the lead guard’s lance waver.
“I am… Sub-Scribe Elu,” I lied as I reached into the folds of my cloak and pulled out the Shard of Varysha. I had dimmed its light until it looked like a dying, bruised ember, pulsing feebly as if on the verge of extinction. “I was tasked… to bring the Resonance Anchor. The Spire’s core. If it is not… integrated into the Pyramid… the Great Alignment will end…when next the Dark Sun passes over!”
The lead guard knelt, his sensors scanning the Shard. I could feel his internal systems struggling to categorize the necro-sludge. It wasn’t Mylar tech, but it was heavy, and in their current state of panic, “heavy” felt like “important.”
“The pulse from the Apex,” the guard muttered to his second-in-command. “It matches. The Pyramid is screaming for a stabilizer. If this is a Spire-core, it could buy us the time the Priests need.”
I watched them through the slits of my half-closed green eyes, yet all along I masked a cold stone of amusement. It was so easy. These creatures had lived so long in a world without lies that they had no immune system for deception. They saw a wounded survivor offering a relic; I saw a Trojan Horse being wheeled through the gates.
“The Priests,” I gasped, clutching the guard’s porcelain gauntlet with a grip that was just a little too strong for a dying man. “Take me to the Well of Siphons. The Dagaal… it is failing, isn’t it? I can feel the grid starving. Please… let me serve the Great Architect one last time.”
They didn’t just walk me in; they carried me. I was placed on a hovering stretch and as we glided through the Obsidian Portal of the Great Pyramid, the atmosphere changed.
If the Spire was a needle, the Pyramid was a furnace. The air was like a burning static full of ancient, weary magic. I could hear the Great Siphons now—a sound like a thousand tidal waves crashing against a wall of glass.
The guards quickly brought me to their superiors of Mylar priests. Immediately I could tell that the clerics were frantic. I saw them on the upper catwalks, their silver robes stained with the grey ash of overtaxed conduits. They were chanting, their voices thin and reedy, trying to manage the flow of the Dagaal’s energy as it was stripped away.
Every pulse of the Pyramid’s internal clock felt like a lash against my soul. Dagaal was close—so close I could taste its void-born hunger—and even though I hadn’t spied its location yet, I could tell it was fading for the obsidian light in the center of the Great Hall was no longer a beam; it was a flickering candle.
“Place him at the base of the Siphon,” a High Priest shouted from above, his voice cracking with exhaustion. “We will integrate the Anchor immediately. If it doesn’t hold the frequency, Lemuria sinks into the mercy by dawn!”
As they slid my stretcher toward the glowing, humming heart of the machine, I allowed myself a single, hidden smile.
“You want to integrate my frequency into your heart?” I thought, my fingers tightening around the Shard. “I would be delighted. But I don’t think you will get the result you’re expecting.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 