I buried my parents at the back of the house, and it took most of the night to finish this task, since I used my hands. After I buried them, I turned around and buried everyone else that I could find.
The ground was hard, but it was nothing to the strength I had in my fingers, and it took me the entire night to bury everyone. When I was done, I returned to the graves of my parents, and I stood over the two of them with my hands filthy and my back slightly aching.
I had unconsciously stopped the flow of Anima in my body, but despite the work, the only thing I felt was a slight ache, and even this pain was going... and I made them a promise that I am not going to repeat here, because it was theirs and not yours.
But I knew that I would always remember this moment I knelt before my parents’ grave. Anytime I thought the wall in front of me was too high or the enemy was too powerful, I will remember this moment and know that this was the only outcome I had left.
The sun was beginning to rise, but the day was clouded, and the constant booming of battle I had been filtering out returned to me. I thought of heading towards the heavens, but then I remembered my first dream/vision.
I thought about the mysterious thirty-second Caelith that should be behind my home, in a mountain that I could see from here, and I decided to see if what I had seen was the truth.
∞
I looked at the graves of my parents one last time, cementing this place in my mind forever. In this timeline where all of this happened, I refuse ever to witness it again.
I made no promises, nor did I cry in front of them. I did not want them to see me like this, let them see my strength and know that I would change the world for them.
Stepping away from the grave, I walked towards the mountain looming ahead of me, familiar and yet utterly changed. I had climbed its slopes as a child, chasing the older boys who dared each other to reach the cave entrance. I had never gone inside.
Even though I did not remember the dreams that terrified me every month, a part of me must have feared that cave; now I walked toward it with the weight of everything that I knew, and I discovered that in the presence of loss, fear did not hold much sway over me anymore.
The path was overgrown; the fires that had consumed my village did not reach this place, as if it had been turned away by something that did not want to be disturbed.
It did not take long before I reached the cave entrance, and it was smaller than I remembered. Perhaps I had grown, perhaps the mountain had shrunk. Either way, I had to duck to enter.
The fox on my shoulder suddenly bounced off my body, as if there was a field that prevented her from following me into the cave.
"Elric, I don’t like this place... it feels wrong. Do you really need to go in there?"
For a moment, I hesitated; the fact that a Heavenly Beast like the Moon Fox was pushed away from the entrance of the cave meant that there was something powerful here, so powerful that it was able to cut through the bond I had with the Moon Fox, and I was not able to even recall it back into my body.
"I need the truth, no matter what I find inside this place; the truth is what matters."
"Okay, don’t do anything I would not do," the fox said, "Um, no, do the opposite of what I would do, okay?"
I saluted her with a smile, and I turned around, leaving her behind. The darkness inside was absolute, the kind of darkness that pressed against your eyes and made you question whether they were still open. I let my lightning rise to my skin, just enough to see, and I walked in.
∞
The passage was narrow, and the walls rough and uneven; I could feel the weight of the mountain above me, and it was a rather peculiar sensation, because I could not tell if this weight was real or not.
But there was something else, too... a pressure, faint at first, that grew with every step I took. At first it was barely noticeable, but it was growing.
I had felt the pressure from the law of darkness, and gained a resonance for my troubles, and I knew that this was not it. This pressure was strange, and it was pressing against my soul rather than my body.
The pressure grew stronger as I went deeper, and I began to feel it in my channels, and then in the very core of my crystallized soul. If I was still an Adept, I doubted that I would have been able to take a few steps into this cave.
Was this pressure always here, or was it different because I had changed and was no longer a normal human by any measurement?
I closed my eyes for a moment and analyzed the pressure; it was not hostile, not exactly, but it was... what was the term I was looking for... absolute, yes, it was absolute. And it had no tolerance for my intrusion.
I pushed forward anyway, fighting against this pressure, and soon the passage opened into a wider chamber, and I could see a faint glow ahead, pale and silver, like moonlight trapped in stone... was that Celestial Essence?
The pressure suddenly intensified, pressing against me like a physical weight, and I felt my knees begin to buckle. I forced myself to keep moving. Step by step. One foot in front of the other.
The glow grew brighter, and I could see the source of it now: it was a crystal, embedded in the far wall, pulsing with silver light, but even from this place, I could not fully tell that I was looking at Celestial Essence, or something else.
The pressure became unbearable, and my channels screamed. I felt my body begin to rebel against the weight of whatever was in this place. My domain flared, trying to push back, but the pressure brushed it aside like it was nothing.
I took one more step, and the world pushed.