Unable to see or hear anything Altair could only feel the bizarre surface of what he is standing on.
What the... where the hell even am I? And what was that voice just now saying?
Altair remained standing still for quite a while, trying to get a feel of what environment he's currently in, by now he was already so accustomed to the chilling bites of the freezing winds of Auroealis that feeling another temperature is nothing short of bizarre. This place was neither cold nor hot, it was somewhere in the middle, but not quite as well, it was such a strange phenomena that a mere slave like Altair couldn't really explain, so what was it? Well, not having the ability to see, he could not really get a grasp of what this strange and eerie place is.
But one for thing was for certain, death will be imminent if he kept on idling.
"What the hell am I supposed to do here, it's so dark." Altair spoke, his voice reverberating in the vast expanse of darkness.
Contemplating what to do, Altair could only begin taking some small steps, relying only in his other senses that did not include his sight to navigate the extremely dark room.
As he took a step, he felt a slight shift in the whole place, it was very subliminal however due to having his sight basically taken away from him the sensitivity of his other senses became more apparent.
He took another step, and he yet again felt another motion of the whole room shifting ,even if only slightly, and he then took a step again, and the whole room shifted once again.
Strange...
Altair of course had no idea if the room really shifted, or was it only his senses being heightened to such a certain extent that his very footsteps creates an illusion of the room shifting, but at this point he could not really say which of the two was true and how it is even happening in the first place.
Then, one thought came to mind, without sight how is he supposed to do something? The voice earlier said something, however he could not really understand it in the slightest, but judging from how sinister this place is it would be wise to assume that there has to be an objective of some sort to escape this place, or maybe escaping the place itself was the objective? Without the ability to see anything, how is he supposed to even know if he was supposed to accomplish a specific objective or escape? This place defies logic, hell even him being here defied logic, how did he even get here? Why was he sent here? There were so many questions that only piled up on Altair's current matters to worry about.
There's no way to really know, and even if he does, will that even change something about the current circumstance?
Wait...
Recalling Maxim's words, Altair might have picked up on something, a clue to the puzzle of where he is currently at.
He said something about an experimentation on human awakening... Something that his previous test subjects failed miserably that he ended up thinking that it might just be impossible to nurture human awakening from scratch?
Maxim talked about how it is possible to mimic human awakening with a specific method, however those methods all ended up in failure, and is thus why he abandoned the cause. He might also have lacked the proper knowledge to achieve such a ludicrous feat, after all awakenings are something that even gods themselves do not know the complete origin of, they do not even know if it came from an omniscient being or if it's a natural force bestowed by the universe, so what hope does Maxim, a bastard son of a god have?
Well, in an unfortunate turn of events when he was fighting the now frozen behemoth millions of years ago, his fight was interrupted by the divine presence of his father. The father not wanting to waste that much time on such a useless spawn of his, simply obliterated the battlefield where Maxim and the behemoth that was an apostle of his father were fighting each other, shaking the world in a calamitous magnitude. Maxim's entire body was destroyed, his putrid black blood was left scattered on the frozen ground, flowing ever so slowly like a dying river, all of it was seeking for something, perhaps his existence? Before being completely iced by the weather caused by his father's catastrophic powers.
However, his body may have been obliterated, but a tiny fragment of his existence remained, clinging on to the little life his soul had left, struggling to find a place to nurture itself back to life in. That existence had sentience, Maxim's sentience, however he was unfeeling, not able to talk nor move, and as time passed by he realized only his soul could recover itself, his physical body is not materializing from his soul, maybe this was also a curse that his father had left him, so that he can exist but without the ability to do anything. He needed a vessel, and realized that obtaining that will require patience.
And so with all the time he had while just being a conscious soul, he spent most of those years expanding his presence and influence by learning how to tear a part of his soul and letting all of it scatter in Auroealis to spread countless fragments that contained some of his power, which then led to the unstoppable corruption that is responsible for the creation of dark ice.
With all those time, he also spent some of it refining his method of human awakening while observing how the world unfolds. Throughout the millions of years that he remained dormant, he managed to improve the method, only theoretically however.
As to why Maxim chose to learn how to awaken a human, well that is because it is one of the most complex, and had the most potential, so learning how to awaken one with supreme quality might be worth investing time for, because if he managed to succeed prompting more human awakenings will be much easier, and as he create more he will be able to take all of these powerful human awakened under his wing, to create an army that can overthrow the heavens. Well for one that is wishful thinking, and even with the millions of years he had to 'perfect' this method, it still only had a slim chance of working and that is only a theoretical hypothesis, and even then in the practical application of the method Maxim had to choose the right person as a candidate, because if he didn't all of his work might all just be for naught.
Is this place perhaps my-
Altair took another step as he whispered those words in his mind, this time however the shifting wasn't subtle, and there was a violent tremor when the room started to shift again.
He struggled to maintain his balance due to the quaking, but he managed. The tremors took a while before it halted, and as the tremors stopped, Altair felt an extremely familiar sensation and his body instinctively shivered.
I am no longer alone it seems.