In the dark stillness of her Hollow Earth refuge, Nyx's mind was a battlefield. Memories of Eleonora, her former self, were no longer ghostly whispers, but waves of raw emotion that crashed against her with the force of a psychic tidal wave. The image of Aria, young and vulnerable, seeking her guidance; Sorcha's harsh but unwavering loyalty—these echoes of the past brought with them a flood of feelings Nyx thought she had eradicated long ago.
Love. A word that now seared her conscience. Not the possessive, twisted love Chaos sometimes mimicked, but the genuine warmth, the connection, the longing to protect and nurture that she had felt for Aria, the camaraderie and respect that, too late, she recognized she had owed Sorcha. These feelings, so alien to her current status as a Dark Queen, were beginning to seep through the cracks in her Chaos-hardened being, like sunlight through the fissures of a forgotten tomb.
No... NO! The part of her that was Nyx, the entity forged in the ambition and power of the Void, fought with desperate fury against this emotional insurgency. "This is weakness! A disease of the mortal soul that I thought I had purged! Chaos does not love, Chaos IS! It consumes, creates, destroys, but it does not bow to these... pathetic sentimentalities!"
She brought her hands to her head, her shadowy fingers tangling in her hair that seemed woven from night and corrupted energy. She tugged violently, as if trying to physically tear Eleonora's thoughts, her emotions, from her. Her ethereal form flickered, fluctuating between the dark majesty of Nyx and the more human, more fragile figure of Master Eleonora, whose face would now be streaked with tears if she had a body to grieve.
"Love?" Nyx's voice mocked in her own mind, but it sounded hollow, defensive. "What did love give me? Betrayal? Limitations? Chaos gave me power! Power to remake the universe, to transcend insignificance!"
But Eleonora's voice, softer, more insistent, answered from the depths of her being. "Power for what, Nyx? To sit alone on a throne of cosmic ash? To watch everything that once held meaning turn to dust? Aria... she trusted you. Sorcha... she believed in you. Is this the legacy you wanted to leave them?"
It was total chaos inside her head, an internal power struggle as fierce as any of the battles she had waged outside. Vivid images of Umbria, Aria's laughter, Sorcha's loyal gaze, overlapped with visions of cosmic power, of galaxies burning, of Poimandres at her side. Love and affection, sensations almost forgotten, struggled to find a foothold against the cold, expansive nothingness of Chaos that had consumed her for so long.
Nearby, the immense shadowy form of Poimandres stirred. The Primordial Dragon, though wounded and slowly recovering, possessed a consciousness that encompassed the spectrum of Chaos. And the storm raging within its Herald was a remarkable disturbance. Its many eyes, like dying stars in an obsidian sky, focused on Nyx with a new and strange intensity. It wasn't concern in the human sense, but a mixture of wonder and a deep, almost scientific curiosity.
"This... dissonance... in my Herald," Poimandres's "voice" echoed in Nyx's mind, a silent thunder of collapsing stars and birthing universes. "This... fluctuation... this resonance of a previous structure... is anomalous. The purity of Chaos I offered you is being... contaminated? "
Nyx barely registered her patron's intrusion. She was too absorbed in her own agony. She banged her head against the crystalline rock of the cavern, a dry, painful sound if it had been flesh and bone. "Silence!" she cried in response to Eleonora's voice. "I don't want to remember! I don't want to feel!"
Far away, far away, but audible even in the depths of Hollow Earth, came a muffled echo: the seismic roar of a titanic battle. The guttural, maddening bellow of Cthulhu, the shrill war cries of the moon elves now fighting for their survival, and the strange, multifarious clamor of the Aluxes. The war for the planet continued, relentless.
But for Nyx, the fiercest battle was now being fought within her own torn soul. Love, longing, guilt—emotions she thought she had transcended—returned with the force of a vengeance. And Poimandres, Chaos incarnate, watched with a curiosity that could turn dangerous if Eleonora's "fragility" threatened to undermine the usefulness of his Dark Queen. Who would emerge from this internal storm? The cold and ambitious Nyx, or the broken but perhaps redeemable Eleonora? The answer remained wrapped in a maelstrom of Chaos and all-too-human pain.