After a long time, that obsessive hunger slowly gathered again.
The fragments were pulled back one by one, and the points of light lit up again one by one.
They crowded together and became that thin wisp of black smoke once more.
But Kelsos felt that something was missing.
It did not remember what it had lost. It only felt empty.
Emptier than before.
It did not know how many times it had scattered like this.
Ten thousand times? A hundred thousand?
It could no longer count.
It only knew that every time it gathered itself again, it became a little emptier than before. One day, it would be so empty that it could no longer even feel hunger.
That was not liberation. That was a place deeper than hell.
The demon Lesara was in an even deeper place.
Its phantom was more solid than those of the other demons, not because it was stronger, but because it had been frozen.
The dead-silent ice at the deepest part of hell coiled around its soul-body like vines, freezing every trace of thought and every fragment of soul solid from the inside out.
Its phantom glimmered with a faint blue chill. That was not its own light, but the light of ice.
That ice had not wrapped around it from the outside. It had grown from within its soul, like ice crystals suddenly forming in supercooled water, spreading outward from a single point, piercing every inch of its soul-body and pinning it there.
Its outline could barely be made out as a hunched human shape, like an old man frozen stiff, shoulders drawn in, back bent, arms clasped before his chest.
But those were not hands. They were two phantom masses frozen into lumps of ice.
It could not move.
It was