CHAPTER 182: LAND OF GOLD AND FIRE

The silence between them stretched as if it wanted to become a wall.

The air was heavy with what Hermes had just witnessed, and the ice cream they had bought earlier was dripping between their fingers without either of them noticing.

Raphael was staring at nothing in particular, his eyes distant, as if he wanted to be somewhere Hermes could not follow. Hermes shifted slightly, his own hand wet with sweetness...

And only then did he notice the quiet drip of ice cream against his skin.

The world around them was moving again, not in its usual rhythm, but in a slow drag, as though time itself had thickened and refused to flow. Every bird in the distance, every flicker of light in the city, every passing breeze seemed suspended in syrup.

It was the first sign that the Rewind was losing its hold.

Hermes cleared his throat, the sound startling in the stillness.

"We need to go back," he said softly. "If time returns to normal and we are still here, everything will collapse into chaos. We should leave for space before the freeze ends."

Raphael looked at him, his expression unreadable, but he nodded. There was no protest, no hesitation. He simply rose with Hermes and together they lifted into the air, their bodies cutting through the slowed fabric of the world.

The city fell away beneath them, and soon the sky opened up into a canvas of stars.

Hermes kept close to Raphael as they broke through the atmosphere and emerged into the vastness of space.

He asked, "Do you have any idea where your home might be?"

Raphael’s answer came after a pause. "Not exactly. I will be relying on feeling."

"Feeling?" Hermes frowned. "In a universe this wide?"

Raphael’s face remained calm, almost serene. "There is no other way. It will come to me."

Hermes was uneasy. He pointed to the turning wheels embedded in his torso, the strange cosmic clockwork that dictated his presence in time.

"If these ever stop turning, it means Earth’s time is returning to normal. If that happens, we must turn back. Understood?"

Raphael nodded once, without any sign of anxiety. His body moved like an arrow released from a bow, streaking past the drifting ruins of asteroids and the swirling mouths of black holes, even near the radiant deaths of stars that exploded with terrifying beauty.

Hermes was supersonic fast, but he found himself straining to keep Raphael in view. The younger man did not waver or falter. His movements carried the certainty of someone who had no map but still trusted his destination.

Hermes tried to match him, but the vastness of space mocked his efforts. He was used to the orderly maps of galaxies and the measured charts of the cosmos, studied carefully during his years in the university.

Out here, none of that mattered. Space was as chaotic and unpredictable as the Void itself.

Hours or days seemed to pass.... Hermes could no longer tell. At last he realized with awe that they had left the Milky Way behind.

The familiar spiral, once home, now hung whole before them like a piece of art pinned in the void. And then it too grew smaller as they escaped the boundaries of the Local Group, then slipped past the Virgo Supercluster, then even beyond the grand expanse of the Laniakea Supercluster.

Hermes had read of such things, seen simulations, marveled at theories, but to be here, moving past them with his own body, was a vision no classroom had ever prepared him for. He began to wonder whether they had left the observable universe entirely.

The wheels on his chest continued to spin, though their motion seemed to grind ever so slightly, a warning that time’s fragile hold on Earth might not last.

Finally Raphael stopped. He stood still, as if rooted in the void, his gaze fixed on something Hermes had not yet noticed. Hermes followed his eyes, and there it was: a radiant body glimmering in the distance.

At first Hermes thought it a star, then perhaps a planet burning at an impossible temperature. Its glow was steady and commanding, drawing them closer without force, only by the strange authority of presence.

They approached, and Hermes’s mind reeled at the sight. The planetary system aligned itself in a way eerily familiar, as though it were a mirror of their own solar system.

Yet something was profoundly wrong. The gaseous giants were small, crowded close to the sun, while the terrestrial worlds lay enormous at the outskirts. The order of everything he knew was reversed.

Raphael pointed silently toward the third planet from the sun.

It bore resemblance to Earth, yet its seas burned red with magma and its continents shone with metal instead of stone. As they drew closer, Hermes saw that the lands glittered, not in dull gray and brown....

But in gleaming gold.

"This is it?" Hermes asked, uncertain.

Raphael did not answer. He simply descended into the blazing atmosphere. Hermes followed, though unease pressed against his chest.

The world was bizarre beyond description. Seas of magma stretched endlessly, their waves roaring with heat.

The continents were solid sheets of metal, their mountains sculpted from the element aurum. Hermes almost could not believe it, yet the reflection of fiery light on Raphael’s skin told him this was no illusion.

They searched. Strange creatures roamed the surface... beasts with familiar forms but bodies remade.

A serpent of flame coiled around itself before vanishing into molten seas. A bird made of gold flapped wings that glittered with sharp brilliance. Even the plants stood tall as tongues of fire or twisting branches of metal, nourished not by water or sun, but by some principle entirely alien.

Hermes muttered to himself. "This is like Magnarok’s underworld... yet stranger still."

Raphael did not respond.

His eyes were fixed ahead, his movements purposeful.

Then they saw them.

Figures appeared, and both Hermes and Raphael slowed. They were beings shaped like humans, but more than humans... composed entirely of burning gold, their bodies shining with perfect symmetry.

They were winged, radiant, their faces too flawless to be human. Naked, yet unashamed, without gender or blemish, they looked like the angels of religious paintings brought into terrifying reality.

They carried no weapons, yet their presence alone carried a weight that forced Hermes to hold his breath.

Raphael stared. Words rose in his throat without intention, flowing in a language Hermes did not recognize. The syllables burned with sound that was neither entirely vocal nor entirely mental, a resonance that seemed to belong to this place alone.

Raphael looked startled, as though he too was hearing himself for the first time.

The beings responded, their voices detached, neither warm nor hostile. They walked past Raphael and Hermes, their bodies phasing through them as though Hermes and Raphael were ghosts. The sensation was chilling, like air passing through a hollow body.

"What did you say to them?" Hermes asked when Raphael finally turned back to him.

"I asked the name of this world." Raphael’s voice was low.

"And?"

"They said... It is called Pleroma."