“Arylos,” Iris whispered softly, finally acknowledging what Arylos truly is.

She examined the creature standing before her, the being made of shadow, stone, and flame with black wings and wings of pure fire. She looked into his burning eyes, the face of shadows.

“Is that really you?” she asked, trying to understand.

The creature made a nodding motion and the dark speech filled her again. “This is what I really am, a form you can understand.”

Iris chuckled nervously as the creature, Arylos, moved ahead and beckoned Iris to follow him.

“The Sunless Sea is really a border between my world and yours, shown here as the ocean around us,” Arylos explained as he gestured to the endless sea that stretched beyond the horizon and beyond the sky. “As of now, no one not accompanied by a Titan has been able to cross the border.”

“So, we’re in your world?” Iris asked.

“No, you are still in Kaiyumi,” Arylos clarified. “I am showing you my world in your mind.”

“Then why drop me into the ocean?” Iris asked again.

“So you can understand what it’s like,” Arylos explained, guiding her up a hill and as the blue coloured grass burned under the heat of his footsteps but regrew as he lifted his feet. “So you can understand a world beyond the edge of your infinite reality.”

The two climbed to the top of the hill and Iris could see more black stone buildings and more tall people walking through the streets. Many of the people wore robes of similar design but varying colours and all had hoods covering their faces. As the two approached, Iris could see they were similar; various wings on their backs and tails under them.

“Who are they?” Iris asked as the two walked through the streets of people, unable to understand their whispering words.

“They are Titans, like myself,” Arylos explained. “This is my homeworld. It has been called by many names; the Edge, the Void, Beyond the Black, and some have simply called it the Beyond. One would be inclined to call it ‘heaven’ in some cultures.”

“But I take it that like the ‘Titan’ name, that’s not what you call it,” Iris cut in, observing the various people.

Arylos made a nodding motion as he explained. “We are known as the Vlajhilsen, and this world we called Mortehksun.”

“Mortehksun,” Iris whispered the name, wondering if she is the first to know what this place is called. As they walked, she saw that these Titans, these gods, lived their life in a similar fashion; many shopping for foods in the markets, small children standing at her height playing through the streets, she could even see a class difference between working class and government based on their robes, regardless of if she could see their faces.

Under the yellow and black sky, life was quiet, peaceful.

She walked past more buildings and found that the stone they were made from was really glass that was black and purple. It was beautiful to see and felt smooth to her fingertips.

“We were a people not unlike yourself,” Arylos explained as he observed the world around him. “We had our own world, our own culture and government, yet we existed as entities of the world. We lived in peace with this world because we were a part of it.”

“And yet you lived on just like the rest of us,” Iris finished, starting to put the pieces together.

Arylos nodded and took her hand. “I have tried to teach you that there is no such thing as a ‘god’. Even us, we were just a people much like yourself; we just live on a different plane of existence.”

Iris looked to the haunting sky and took in the sights and the sounds as she tried to understand. She had been treating Arylos like he was a man, like he was a human, when he was something greater. He is something greater, but he chooses to be humble. Was her treatment of him what he deserved then?

“What happened to your people?” Iris asked, looking towards Arylos.

Arylos bowed his head, as if the thought saddened him. “That is another story entirely,” he explained. He waved his hand and the air hummed. The vision suddenly changed to a dark and stormy night with fire falling from the sky like rain. The ocean above in the sky had turned blood red and the eclipsed sun looked like a broken marble; its flaming guts spilling out across the sky with its corpse floating around it in the sky.

Iris looked around and saw that the azure grass had turned black and hard like stone and the mountains in the distance erupted into volcanoes spewing fire, ice, and lightning into the sky. Corpses of the people laid about in the streets, a thick and orange glowing blood pouring from wounds. They all had weapons in their hands, coated with more orange blood.

Iris felt herself knocked backwards as she beheld the horror. She fell to the ground and realised she fell on a corpse. She looked over and her blood chilled. The corpse was that of a young creature; a child smaller than her, with a gaping hole in its chest with orange blood flowing like a river. The creature’s eyes were dark and cold but she could see the expression of fear and regret in its foreign face.

She jumped back up and ended up backing into Arylos who caught her and held her in a warm embrace.

“We killed ourselves,” Arylos told Iris in a soft voice.

Iris turned and faced Arylos, tears welling up in her eyes. “How?” she asked in a cracking voice. “How could that happen?”

Arylos let out a mournful sigh and held her close, rubbing her back. “Our world was dying. It started with our star and over time, the world began to rot and bleed. We were forced to do the impossible, the inevitable, but we could never bring ourselves to do it. And so we destroyed each other in a vain attempt to undo what was beyond our control.”

“What do you mean?” Iris asked.

Arylos let go of her but kept a hold on her hand as he led her back to the ocean. “Come with me,” he whispered in her mind.

The two walked in silence back to the water’s edge under the fiery rain. Iris could see that the water itself, while churning as if in a storm, was untouched and the worlds inside were intact.

“This is your reality,” Arylos explained. “A long time ago, we asked ourselves a question that we could never find the answer for. A question beyond our understanding but important to the world around us. We needed to know, we needed to understand.”

“What was the question?” Iris asked.

“‘What is the meaning of life?’” Arylos answered. “We were born with no ambitions to live. We had no famine, no disease, no plague. We simply existed in a perfect paradise with our world giving us everything we need. Yet we had no drive; why live day to day when you are the peak of what you could be? We struggled with our own existence.”

Arylos knelt down to the water’s edge and ran his fingers through the waters. “And so we came to the conclusion that we must observe life to understand it. We created your reality as a part of our world so we may observe that life. We could adjust the parameters, see the world through different eyes, influence it and design a place much like our own.”

“Your people created my world,” Iris summarised, trying to wrap her head around it all.

“Not just us, I was on the Covenant,” Arylos explained as he glanced towards Iris. “There were twenty five of us, but I was the one who proposed it and carried out the design.”

Iris paused for a moment as the words processed in her mind. “You did?” she clarified. “You were there? You created my world?”

Arylos let out a sound that could only be a chuckle. “I never created Kaiyumi, but I did help create the reality you live in and the conditions that would later become Kaiyumi.”

“But why?” she asked while trying to retain her strength.

“Do not ask that like your people have not done so,” Arylos explained. “Your people domesticate animals for both your own gain and to understand them. Your people of science ask questions, observe, and even influence the world around them so they can understand. We were not so different.”

Arylos rose to his feet and looked past the horizon. “The only issue was that we could only observe. We made your reality different from ours, in a way that we could never exist in it. We could only observe, always looking at your world through a pane of glass. And in that attempt to understand, we had our answer.”

Iris looked up to Arylos, processing that last statement. “What was the answer?” she asked.

Arylos turned to her and looked at her with sorrowful burning eyes. “We hoped that among the races in your world, one of them would be like us; look to the heavens and wonder what existed beyond the horizon. We wanted them to grow so they may be aware of us, maybe even speak with us. We hoped and prayed for that day.”

“Like how we look to the gods of Templarius,” Iris cut in.

“Exactly,” Arylos nodded. “And one day, we found just a species. They were intelligent, curious, and wondered what existed in the great beyond. They had colonised their system and built a prosperous civilisation and wondered what else was out there for them.”

“What happened then?” Iris asked, finding the unspoken part of the story.

Arylos clenched his fist, as if in anger. “They militarised themselves and led a campaign to destroy every world they came across. Not conquer them; they burned every planet to the ground, sterilising planets as they went. Their answer to our question was ‘life was a mistake’ and so they sought to end it.”

Arylos forced himself to contain his emotions as he continued. “We were horrified, disturbed, disgusted. Eventually, I went out and put an end to the race but by that point, the damage had already been done. We hoped that it was a one time situation; one mistake out of billions. But that was our own mistake.”

“Did they come back?” Iris asked.

“Worse,” Arylos answered. “Other races in similar circumstances asked the same question, and resulted in the same answer. No matter what, they would always lead such a campaign or contribute to the mistake.”

Iris felt a hole in her heart deepen as she heard Arylos explain this. “You’re telling me they would get bored and start killing people?”

“What about your world?” Arylos returned. “How many of your own people get bored and start wars?”

Iris felt called out but she knew why. Torasu, Khoras, Mornyr Khai, Templarius. She felt like she was exposed to a pain she didn’t know she had.

“We call the process devolution,” Arylos continued. “And when our own world started to turn against us, we devolved as well. To save our own world, we were going to destroy your reality. When many of us disagreed, a civil war erupted and we annihilated ourselves.”

Iris fell to her knees as the weight of this realisation hit her hard as she stared out across the burning sky and the churning ocean. Arylos eventually sat down on the ground next to her and watched the horizon.

“And you’re the only one left,” Iris finished, feeling the wound in her heart and soul fester. “What did you do?”

“I fought to keep your world intact,” Arylos answered. “I believed that we should let your world continue on. We were an old and dying breed and your reality has shown it does not need our assistance.”

“You fought for us?” Iris clarified.

“I did,” Arylos answered. “However after the fighting ended, the ones who wanted to destroy you survived. Just like when those races devolved, I was forced to stop them.”

“You killed your own people?” Iris asked, understanding his pain. She blinked and her vision changed. She was back at home with her forehead up against Arylos’s. He let her go and let out a deep sigh as he looked straight into her soul with his red eyes, but she still couldn’t shake the image. A land long dead, a world with an endless horizon and a blood red and set ablaze. The land littered with slaughtered corpses and sundered children. The image was seared into Iris’s mind and was beyond anything she could have imagined. She felt fear as she trembled. She knew Arylos’s past was painful, but she was not ready for this.

“Now you know the truth,” Arylos whispered in a shaking growling voice.

Iris felt as if the world was not only turned upside down, but was completely different. She felt like this truth was a burden that she could not bear. Yet, she also had to remember that Arylos had been shouldering this for much of his life. She launched herself towards him and held him in a tight hug, hoping to offer him some form of kindness and happiness to offset his experience.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You deserve to know the truth,” Arylos responded while holding her close and rubbing her back. “I’m sorry that it was too much for you.”

“That’s not why I’m sorry, you big idiot,” Iris responded, tightening her hold on the Titan. “I kept asking and pestering you, not knowing just how sad the truth is. I should have realised how painful it was for you and kept my mouth shut. You never bothered me about my family or my village and I should have respected your privacy.”

“I will never fault your curiosity,” Arylos responded softly. “If anything, you show the same promise we were looking for.”

Iris let go of Iris and looked to him. “But what if I make the same mistakes?”

“I highly doubt you will go around and kill everyone you see,” Arylos teased with a laugh while brushing away a stray hair from her face. “But your drive to understand, your curiosity, that’s what I love. There is no problem with asking questions. If anything, the shock you’re feeling now is the same shock we felt when we witnessed devolution for the first time.”

“And your people ultimately made the same mistake,” Iris whispered.

“I told you; there is no such thing as a ‘god’ because we all live and die the same,” Arylos told her while holding her hand. “And that includes making the same mistakes.”

Iris nodded and Arylos rubbed her scalp in an attempt to calm her. “So, there is nothing wrong with us being friends?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Is there a law saying we can’t?” Arylos asked rhetorically with a big smile.

For a moment, Iris felt the festering wound in her heart feel warm; a feeling of belonging that she had not experienced before. She realised this was how she makes Arylos, the last Titan, feel deep inside.