CHAPTER 183: YOU DON’T BELONG HERE

"Pleroma..." Hermes muttered under his breath, as though the word carried an echo from somewhere he had heard before.

The name lingered on his tongue with a strange familiarity that made him uneasy. He jogged forward, trying to catch up to the radiant beings who had glided past them without care.

"Hey! Excuse me!"

His voice carried through the still air as he called out, but they gave no sign that they heard.

They did not walk. Hermes realized that much quickly. Their feet hovered above the ground, their wings stretched yet motionless. It seemed impossible that they were moving at all, except that the landscape blurred slowly behind them.

Or perhaps they were vibrating, each motion too quick for his eyes to register, like a string pulled taut and humming at such speed that it seemed still. The entire world shimmered like a mirage, as if heat waves distorted everything he saw.

He hated this place.

He could not explain why, only that the feeling was immediate and suffocating. The Void had been chaotic, unpredictable, and alive, with storms and rivers and shifting patterns that at least followed some hidden logic. There was a rhythm in its madness, a current in its destruction.

Here, nothing flowed. Everything shimmered but nothing moved, as though the world were caught in eternal vibration without ever changing. It was energy without life. Stasis disguised as motion.

"Stop." Hermes called again, pushing forward.

The beings ignored him. Their golden bodies gleamed, their eyes unreadable, their faces carved in static perfection.

"Please, just..." Hermes reached out, but his hand passed through one of them as though grasping smoke.

He clenched his jaw and tried again, only to feel his fingers slide through empty brilliance. Again and again he pushed, his determination rising like fire in his chest.

"LOOK AT ME!"

At last, with effort that shook him, his palm connected.

The beings halted.

They turned with a suddenness that chilled him. Their heads rotated all at once, smooth and precise, as if they had been waiting for this moment.

The motion reminded Hermes of an owl twisting its head a full one hundred eighty degrees, yet faster, instantaneous, and wrong. They faced him with expressions unchanged, yet Hermes felt the weight of disgust roll over him.

Then, to his shock, they spoke in English.

"You are a being of filth and darkness," they said, their voices clear and resonant. "You do not belong here. Return from whence you came. We have no interest in defectives."

Hermes’s lips parted in outrage. The word cut deep.

"Defective?" he repeated, his tone sharp. "What do you mean by that? What do you know of us? Do you know of Earth?"

He fired question after question, his curiosity burning stronger than his wounded pride. The beings did not answer.

Their heads rotated back in the same unnatural sweep, and...

WHOOOSH!

Without another word they glided upward into the air. Their speed was blinding, their forms dissolving into golden streaks that vanished faster than Hermes could blink.

Hermes stood frozen for a moment, his chest heaving. He had been called many things in his life, but defective was a word that stung in a way he could not explain. The insult clawed at him, and yet it was the implication that gnawed worse...

That these beings knew of Earth, and had already judged its children.

He turned and walked back to Raphael, who had not moved far. Raphael was crouched on the golden sands, his fingers brushing the grains with quiet thoughtfulness. His face was distant, as though he were listening to something Hermes could not hear.

"They’re total xenophobes." Hermes muttered as he approached. "They don’t care about anyone else’s business but their own. It’ll be nearly impossible to get a lick of information out of them, let alone find out how you came to Earth."

Raphael lifted his eyes from the sand and regarded Hermes with a calm expression. His voice was steady. "That was not our main objective anyway."

Hermes frowned. "What do you mean?"

"We came here for solinium," Raphael replied. "And I can sense it everywhere. This world is brimming with it. I only need to take a piece with me and we can leave."

Hermes studied him for a moment. There was no hesitation, no longing in Raphael’s face, only the simple statement of a fact. The resemblance unsettled Hermes. The aloof detachment in Raphael’s voice mirrored the beings of Pleroma more than he realized.

For a moment Raphael’s expression seemed to belong to this world: cold, beautiful, and utterly unreadable.

Hermes sighed. He crouched beside a flame-like plant that flickered in the sand, its roots buried in gold. He began to dig with his fingers, careful not to burn himself on the glow of its stalks.

Raphael tilted his head. "What are you doing?"

"If everything here has solinium..." Hermes explained. "Then we shouldn’t just take a rock. A rock is dead, and once you use it, it is gone. A plant is alive. If it can survive, it can reproduce. We wouldn’t need to return over and over just so you can harvest more."

Raphael considered his words and nodded. "That is logical. Though the issue is whether such a plant could live on Earth."

Hermes wiped the sweat from his brow, though he was not sure if it was the heat of the magma seas or the weight of the beings’ rejection that clung to him. "I got it."

He rose, grasping a piece of golden stone from the ground. His eyes ignited with light, beams slicing into the material. He carved carefully, shaping the glowing rock into a vessel, hollow and smooth.

It became a vase, radiant and sturdy. He filled it with soil from the Pleroman soil and planted the golden flame into it.

Hermes stepped back, exhaling. "They don’t seem to draw life from sun or water. They must be nourished by the solinium in the soil. If that is the case, then this will hold it long enough for us to study."

He handed the small, burning vase to Raphael, who accepted it with both hands. For a moment Raphael’s face softened, though only slightly, and he looked at the plant with quiet reverence.

Hermes placed his hand over his chest, checking the wheels embedded in his torso. They were slowing, their rotations no longer smooth but dragging like old gears.

His heart tightened. "We need to go. Time is returning to normal on Earth."

Raphael gave one last look across the horizon. His gaze lingered on the magma seas, the golden mountains, and the sky that shimmered with unearthly fire.

He turned reluctantly, following Hermes into the air.

As they ascended, Hermes glanced sideways at him. "What are you thinking about? I can’t read you unless I take the Mindbloom beast form, and I don’t have the strength for that now."

Raphael was silent for a long moment. Then, with a faint smile that did not reach his eyes, he spoke.

"I thought I would feel at home here. The air, the fire, the perfection of it all... It should have felt like belonging."

His voice sounded truly sad and hopeless.

"But home does not feel like home. It seems I do not belong anywhere after all."