Hearing Mordred's pleas and cries, the last fragment of Amon's mind seemed to freeze over.
Her voice, as young and childish as a little girl's, seemed to reach the very core of his soul as her cries endlessly echoed within his mind.
So much so that for the first time in perhaps eons, his mind regained clarity, filled with something other than a terrifying sense of helplessness.
'Mordred.'
[FATHER!]
Her voice boomed across the black void as suddenly, a gigantic serpent made out of flames of emerald and amethyst manifested, slowly slithering around Amon's tiny body.
Despite its terrifying presence and gigantic body, it slithered around Amon's body with affection and care.
Slowly, Amon opened his eyes, their depths unreadable. He looked around the black void before eventually, he looked at the huge world-sized serpent that was around him.
'So this is my daughter's true form…how cute.' He remarked with a dry chuckle though his expression didn't fluctuate in the least.
[Dad! Please! Live! Please-]
'Shhhh…' He gently shushed her, caressing her diagonal scales of fire. 'Enjoy this moment.'
He felt a shiver run up Mordred's spine but his face remained the same as they both stood there in the void, silent and unmoving.
Amon observed the void around him with a steady gaze. Normally, the place he was in was called the mental space and it was the place where one's origin aether gathered.
Since he'd never formed his aether marks, he'd never had access to it but now, for some unknown reasons, he could. But even then, he knew it wasn't supposed to be like this.
It was supposed to be a colorful world full of one's memories and manifestations of their being but for some reason, his mental space was an endless void.
He obviously knew why it was so empty and lifeless. After his mind had crumbled, his body had followed suit.
He was dying, merely an inch away from True Death.
And yet, he sat cross-legged, caressing Mordred's scales, trying to appease her cries and pleas as he patiently waited for death to embrace him.
To say Amon had gone beyond and well past the state of madness would be an understatement.
'Death…'
Amon looked at the void around him once again and he smiled, his life flashing before his eyes for the billionth time.
And as he did so, his father's words seemed to echo within his mind.
---
[Hope, determination, and pride are useless emotions and are even more useless when used as the foundation of one's moral compass.]
[All that matters is persistence and authenticity. Persistence because you must curse the world and the fate imposed upon you. Not because you think you deserve more but purely to spite the world.]
[If I am fated to die then I will work for my entire life to be eternal, and if I am fated to burn then I will become one with the flames themselves, evolving past it and breaking the chains fate cursed me with.]
[And authenticity because the True Self is all you'll truly ever have, the rest will always be an add-on that tempers and refines your True Self. You must be as unapologetically you as you can be at all times.]
[Why? Because why would you not? How pathetic is it to shun your true nature to fit into a system that does not want you?! If the system does not want you, then spit back at it and make your own.]
[We are not beggars. What we do not have, we take. What we want, we make, and what we hate, we overcome.]
[Remember, this is the foundation of a true man. Persistence and authenticity. Only when you grasp this will you truly bloom.]
---
'To live…just to spite fate and the world itself.' Amon chuckled. 'Maybe dad was just as insane as me, if not more.'
'I miss him.'
The void around him began to shake, tremble, and crumble apart as his time was near.
'To live, just to spite fate.' He repeated those words, endlessly.
BANG!
Explosions began to occur all around the black void as Amon felt his senses waver, a sign of the flickering candle that his mind had become.
'Through death, be reborn and live, just to spite fate.'
BOOOM!
The void crumbled.
'Then I shall live, I suppose.'
---
In a grand and gigantic underground cavern, up near the ceiling, a black sun could be seen.
Menacingly, it rotated on its own axis and devoured a near endless amount of aether.
Looking closer, one would be able to see a mega planet-sized ball of wiggling flesh and teeth, covered in a near endless amount of aether marks as by the seconds, millions of marks formed, one after the other.
The ball of flesh was grotesque, the flesh rotten and green, the bones burnt and black and the smell foul beyond belief.
It looked like a Lovecraftian entity as the aether pressure it emitted bent and twisted space and time without any care for the natural laws of the world.
Like a heart, it pulsed and with each inward pulse, a terrifying amount of pure atmospheric aether would be devoured and with an outward pulse, foul black aether would be expelled as its size grew.
By the second, it grew. It was already the size of a mega planet and yet, every second, it seemed to double and triple in size.
This went on for a long time, or perhaps a short amount of time. No one would be able to tell.
Suddenly, the sun of flesh froze and so did all the atmospheric aether within the solar system-sized cave.
The sun of flesh began to compress and as it did so, the aether within also compressed and thickened.
In a few minutes, from the size of thousands of mega-sized planets, it had shrunk to the size of a single grain of sand but even then, it continued to compress until eventually, it became as small as an atom.
The sun of flesh's appearance had changed, becoming a simple and sleek sphere of pure white.
Instantly, the sphere of pure white trembled before from it, another sphere appeared and branched off.
More and more spheres manifested and eventually they interlinked.
They formed a cell.