Chapter Text
Ephelios was having a day.
Sure, he had done what he had set out to do, but he had also encountered something he shouldn't have. Oh, the meetings he would have to attend after this... he was not looking forward to those. He remembered the Team Captain meetings they’d have at the end of every week back at L. Corp. He also remembered just how long those meetings could go on for, and how he just knew what was going to be said and when.
Well, now he knew why it felt absurdly repetitive.
Whatever had happened with that branch of light when it had stabbed Yi Sang had opened up a crack in some sort of mental barrier he had. His current, albeit tenuous link to their Manager, Dante, had slowed the crack’s expansion. Even with that though, he was hanging back, sorting through what felt like centuries worth of experiences that all stemmed from after he had left his home Nest of A. Corp to see what the rest of the City had to offer, away from the constant nagging from his peers for his lack of interest in becoming one of the City’s Arbiters.
How he wished he had just gone along with the planned path for him.
The past was the past, though, and he had already made his choice. He had thrown himself into a loop of time, stuck in a facility that only saw the sun on it’s final day, all to create what he now knew as the White Nights and Dark Days. It was long before that, though, that he had encountered the Well. When the wings, once singular, became plural, and affixed to his person. He had seen it by accident the first time, a crack through the door in the dead of night while he had struggled to sleep.
That cycle had ended shortly after, the Manager had let out [CENSORED], and all hell had broken loose. That shelter hadn’t proved a boon either, as it had continuously released Abnormalities until the whole facility, save the Sephira, had died.
Of course, now that he could remember some cycles, he also remembered when he had first Distorted.
It was another one of his sleepless nights, before he had begun receiving sleep aids from ‘Management’.
He had gotten curious, and the wings had helped him. Only, then there was more than the voices of three birds wanting to protect their home in his head. There was a fourth, and a fifth, and suddenly, thousands, all speaking their own truths. These voices, which he would begin to hear in subsequent cycles when near the Abnormalities, were twisted, exaggerated expressions of different desires.
None of them were his, and the strain of hearing them all at once had caused him to break, crystals encompassing his body like a cocoon, forming some twisted armor, along with a scythe.
He had roamed like that for a while, before getting pillared into unconsciousness, and waking up the next day with no recollection of what had happened.
After that, it would happen when something severe went down, when he was at his limit, so to speak.
The crack had emptied the sealed reservoir by now, his memories laid bare before him, the Lock broken, with the key, that golden branch, now primed to impale another.
He left the room. It wasn’t his place to intervene further, he had his own things to handle on his own time. That, and…
Yes, that, and a contract to fill out with this Limbus Company.
Maybe he could get rid of this hollow feeling in himself that way.