The crystal matrix encasing Elara burst apart violently, a chorus of cracking and snapping echoing through the previously quiet prison. Shards of frozen reality, sparkling with captive light and hues of a thousand shattered worlds, burst outward like glittering dust motes in the face of a sudden gust of wind. Raw, feral energy, a tangible force of red light and burning heat, erupted from the red rune on her hand, ripping through the icy chains that had held her in place with a ferocious, liberating force. The world, seconds from a frozen tableau, lurched back into a jolting semblance of motion, the suspended colours bleeding, the shattered landscapes beginning to unfreeze and flow under the brute force of her awakening power, a mad symphony of reanimation.
There was no time, no breath, to savour the bitter-won taste of freedom. Elara's wild, piercing stare jerked instantly to Caius, where the dark tendrils had coalesced with alarming speed and purpose into a horrid, seething vortex of pure darkness directly above his chest. The dark energy pulsed with a sickening rhythm, a palpable echo of the void's ravenous hunger, drawing his paralysed form irresistibly toward the ragged crevice in the crystal, a black, lightless abyss that offered only an enigmatic and terrible chasm. Lysander's ethereal glow, her frail lifeline of hope, had vanished, and Caius was consumed by a foreboding, suffocating blackness, a jagged silhouette against the broken crystal.
Aethel's soundless scream of sheer, atavistic terror, "The other… it's awake! And it's coming for us all!" rang with a thunderous silence in the echoing chambers of Elara's mind, a frantic, discordant obbligato to the atrocities unfolding with languid slowness before her now-unfettered vision, inducing a new, icy wave of freezing fear that knifed through her burgeoning power. The awful necessity of their situation weighed upon her, an overwhelming weight of threatened loss.
"No!" Elara shrieked, her voice raw and broken, ringing with a fierce, animal agony that echoed through the crystal prison. She hurled herself forward with reckless abandon, her hand outstretched, straining desperately toward him across the treacherous, shattered crystal, every muscle screaming in protest at the sudden liberty.
The whirlpool above Caius tightened its dark grip, the seething darkness increasing its descent, dragging him down with a terrifying and inexorable speed. His tense form rocked forebodingly, his head lolling to the side with a sickening inertia. Elara's extended hand brushed against the cold, unyielding crystal surface still enthralling him, the artificial cold seeping instantly into her skin, a freezing harbinger of loss.
Lysander, his heavenly radiance dimmed, his own power seemingly spent, was yet paralysed in his silent vigil, his eyes on Caius with a profound and sorrowful intensity, a final gesture of selfless concern and wordless farewell stamped on his woeful countenance.
Elara slammed her fist into the final crystal covering Caius, the untamed, feral chaotic energy of her activated rune impacting the frozen figure with a deafening, bone-jarring crack. Yet more cracks, like jagged lines of lightning, spiderwebbed their way along its surface, but the crystal, imbued with ancient magic, stubbornly refused to break. There was no room for subtlety, for finesse. Brute strength was all that remained.
"I will not let you have him!" she roared, her voice propelled by a desperate love and a rage on fire, placing all her growing power in another savage blow. The crystal screamed under the enormous pressure, large fragments of it crashing off with loud, ringing fractures, the air filling with the sound of shattering reality and the biting chill of liberated magic.
Finally, a large enough section broke off and fell away, creating a jagged opening through which Elara was able to reach Caius. Her trembling fingers closed over his icy hand, her own fierce, wild energy flowing into him, a desperate attempt to counteract the void's chill, life-draining power, a frail thread of warmth against encroaching nothingness.
The vortex above Caius pulsed with a sickeningly brilliant intensity, its pull constant and agonisingly strong. Elara braced herself, digging her heels into the dangerous, shattered crystal, refusing to let go, her knuckles white against his still skin. Their joined hands, moments before a frail source of shared warmth, had turned into a wild battleground between her abundant life force and the void's hungry, consuming darkness.
A new presence, grand and terrible, filled the crystal cell, a dark, ancient power that made Aethel's past arrogant dominance appear as the hum of a small insect. The guardian's weary voice was stilled, and in its place was a quiet that was far deeper and much more terrifying than any sound, a quiet that spoke of an old power awakening.
The place of absolute darkness in the emptiness, the horrendous source of the new voice and the furtive, dark tentacles seemed to visibly increase, its annihilating immobility radiating outward in suffocating waves, even through the shattered remnants of the crystalline barrier.
Elara felt a chill, gut-level sensation of being watched by something vast, unfathomable, and impossibly ancient, a cosmic entity whose power dwarfed even Aethel's. The silent shriek of Aethel, reflected back in fear, resonated with her own growing, petrifying terror, a shared awareness of a peril beyond their comprehension.
"The other," she thought, her mind reeling, desperately trying to grasp the nature of this strange, terrifying presence. "What is it? What does it want? And why is Aethel so afraid of it?"
Caius was appallingly unresponsive, his hand cold and still in hers, his life force seeming to drain away into the void's clutches. The vortex above him continued its relentless, agonised pull, and Elara could feel his physical form being drawn down, inch by painful inch, into the black chasm.
Despair, icy and clawing, threatened to rend Elara's resolve. She looked at Lysander, his statue-still form a silent witness to love lost and perhaps regained, a silent plea for rescue reflected in her own frantic eyes. Frozen in body, his eyes seemed to retain a grim awareness of their mortal danger, a silent acknowledgement of the crushing and ancient evil they now faced.
Calling upon a desperation strength and horror, powered by love pure and simple, Elara jerked Caius's hand back, her muscles screaming in protest, her body shaking beneath the monumental effort. For a single instant, she managed to halt his agonising fall, a small, desperate victory against the encroaching darkness.
But the vortex redoubled its sinister pull, its power growing geometrically, the shadows roiling with renewed violence. Elara knew with a sick certainty that she could not maintain her hold indefinitely. She needed to sever the connection between Caius and the void, to destroy somehow the horrid vortex that was consuming him.
Channelling her untamed, wild energy, she focused her will with laser-like intensity on the roiling darkness over Caius, commanding it to disperse, to unravel into nothing. Scarlet energy arced and crackled around her outstretched hand, tendrils of pure magic reaching toward the vortex.
As her untamed energy touched the roiling shadow, it reacted furiously, lashing out like a wounded, enraged beast. Searing, burning pain shot up Elara's arm, as if her own life force was being ripped out of her, and she felt a profound draining sensation, her energy being pulled away by the void's ravenous might.
The vortex twitched again with a sickening definiteness, and Caius plummeted further down, his body now more than halfway into the jagged fissure, engulfed by the closing void. Panic, cold and paralysing, threatened Elara's fragile resolve.
And then, a whisper, colder than the void itself, echoed in her mind, not Aethel's scream of fear, but something else, something ancient and utterly devoid of warmth, straight from the spreading source of complete darkness: "Mine."
The single word resonated with an absolute, freezing possessiveness beyond want, a raw claim that sent Elara's spine crawling cold with a shudder of sheer fear. It was not for Caius; she realised with a jolt of awful clarity. It was for her and her alone.
The vortex above Caius intensified to a searing, unbearable brilliance, a final, agonised crescendo of void energy, and with a final, wrenching pull that scraped at Elara's soul, he was dragged completely into the jagged rift, falling into the complete, lightless darkness below, leaving only the ringing silence of his absence behind.
Elara's hand was still reaching out, clutching at nothing but cold, empty air. The terrible whirlpool vanished as abruptly as it had formed, leaving only the open, malignant mouth in the shattered crystal, a bare and gruesome reminder of her failure.
There was silence again, more dense and stifling than before, a silence filled with an ancient, horror-filled presence. The only sounds were Elara's harsh, rasping breathing and the savage, thunderous pounding of her heart, a wild drumbeat in counterpoint to the encroaching stillness.
She stared, blind, into the empty space where Caius had been mere moments before, a cold, paralysing horror seizing hold far back in the deepest depths of her soul, a terrible omen of her own impending death. He was gone. Taken by the void. And she had not been able to save him.
And then she felt it – a chill, unseen presence drawing near, a vast, ancient power focused entirely and possessively on her, an overwhelming weight of expectation and terror. The centre of complete darkness in the emptiness seemed to pulse with a slow, rhythmic cadence, and one frozen extension of pure shadow, larger and more substantial than the extensions that had claimed Caius, reached out, not for the tattered opening, but for Elara herself, a wordless promise of an inescapable embrace.
As the vast dark tendril, cold as space and heavy as a pall, reaches out to Elara, the crystal cage around Lysander shatters completely, exploding outward in a shower of glittering fragments. With a raw shriek of tortured determination that echoes through the silent emptiness, he flings himself with frantic violence and wildness between Elara and the closing darkness, his eyes blazing with a passionate, sacrificial loyalty, his outstretched arms a weak barrier against the ancient power, even as the tendril reaches him, its freezing grip closing about him instead.