Some beings pass through history, leaving behind deeds, ruins, and names destined to be remembered. Others were already there before history began. They watched it come into being.
Long before the first empires rose, before humans learned to carve their names into stone and look to the sky for answers, the universe was already alive.
Countless worlds revolved through the vastness of the cosmos. Ancient civilizations flourished, fought, and vanished without humanity ever suspecting their existence. Distant peoples entrusted their fate to rulers, deities, and creatures that no earthly legend could ever have described.
Peace took many forms. War had even more. And beyond the boundaries of every known civilization remained forgotten truths, unexplored places, and mysteries so ancient that they predated even the memory of those who had created them.
Among all the beings who inhabited that vastness, one had lived through more ages than most worlds would ever know.
His name was Abyss. He was a Sovereign. His power extended beyond the borders of a single realm, and the weight of his name was known among distant civilizations. He had witnessed the rise and fall of entire peoples, watched stars fade, and seen realities change with the passage of time. He possessed knowledge that many species could not have understood even after millennia of evolution.
And yet, for Abyss, knowledge was never enough. He had no desire to conquer every world he encountered, nor to impose his will upon every living being. What drove him beyond the boundaries of his civilization was something simpler and, perhaps, more difficult to satisfy.
Curiosity.
He wanted to discover what existed beyond his own domain. To observe more fragile peoples, short-lived creatures, and civilizations that, primitive as they might seem to him, continued to create, fight, love, and search for answers.
He wanted to understand how they lived, how they thought, what truths they had discovered without possessing his power, and what mysteries they guarded without even realizing it. Because even the wisest of beings can encounter something they never anticipated.
And sometimes, the most valuable knowledge is not found among the oldest stars or within the mightiest realms. It can lie hidden in a fragile world, in a seemingly insignificant civilization, or in the life of someone who, in the eyes of the universe, should not matter at all.
This is the story of Abyss’s journey through worlds, peoples, and mysteries that reach beyond everything humanity knows.
A journey into the unknown, beyond the boundaries of his realm. Beyond all knowledge already acquired.
Beyond destiny.

The sky did not open. It bent.
The distortion passed through the air without making a sound. For an instant, the outlines of the buildings seemed to lose their solidity, and the artificial light trembled across the surfaces of the street. There was no explosion, no clearly visible rift, only a sudden pressure that altered what those present had always considered normal.
When reality became stable again, Abyss was there. He had not fallen from the sky, and no one had seen him emerge from any specific point. He simply occupied a space that, until a moment earlier, had been empty.
He stood motionless in the middle of the street, surrounded by lights, noise, and lives moving with a haste that was difficult to justify. Vehicles and people followed orderly paths, confined within boundaries marked on the ground and rules that seemed to govern every movement.
Abyss tilted his head slightly.
“This is one of the lower worlds.” It was not a question, but an assessment.
He took a step, and the world seemed to notice him a moment too late. A woman slowed down without understanding why. A man stopped talking and stared in his direction. Others changed course almost instinctively, while those close enough felt an unease they could not connect to anything visible.
Abyss belonged to no category they knew.
Despite looking like a young man, there was nothing ordinary about his stillness. He watched the crowd without surprise, letting his gaze move across faces, reactions, and the way human curiosity quickly gave way to caution.
“Fragile,” he murmured. “But numerous.”
A metallic sound rose above the noise of the street.
A group of men was approaching with coordinated steps. They were not civilians, and they were not moving out of curiosity. Their formation, the distance they maintained between one another, and the attention with which they monitored the area revealed training.
Abyss waited for them.
The man leading the group stopped a few yards away from him.
“Stop. You’re not registered.”
Abyss regarded him calmly. The man before him had not yet understood his own position.
“Registered…”
He repeated the word slowly, dwelling on its meaning rather than its sound.
“An interesting concept for a world that claims to be free.”
The man did not respond. He made a brief gesture, and the others immediately shifted their positions. The procedure had already begun.
Abyss let out a quiet sigh. He was not worried. He had already understood where that conversation was going.
“You have already decided what I am without knowing what I might be.”
The attack came an instant later. It never reached its target. The movement stopped before it could reach Abyss, as though its force and direction had suddenly been stripped away. The man involved lost his balance, while the others reacted with a delay so slight, yet enough to break the group’s precision.
Abyss had not moved.
The air around him grew denser. The men’s movements became uncertain, and the control they had shown until that moment began to crack. One of them dropped to his knees, crushed by a pressure that left no visible wounds.
The leader clenched his teeth.
“That’s impossible.”
“Possible is a word you use when you do not possess enough information,” Abyss said. “And you keep saying it as though it defined a real limit.”
No one immediately attempted a second attack. Hesitation spread through the group. Abyss recognized it in held breaths, hands that failed to complete their movements, and glances turned toward the leader as they waited for an order.
That reaction, at least, managed to intrigue him. He stepped forward.
The distance between him and the men seemed to shrink unnaturally. No one could tell whether Abyss had moved too quickly or whether space itself had simply obeyed his will.
The leader raised a hand, but the command remained unfinished.
“Identify yourself.”
Abyss tilted his head again.
“Identify myself…”
For a moment, his gaze left the street. Something was watching him. It did not come from the men before him or from the surrounding buildings. It was a distant, ancient pressure, sensed at the edges of consciousness. It formed no words, but conveyed intentions clear enough to recognize.
Behavior. Control. Deviation.
Abyss narrowed his eyes.
“You again…”
The leader heard him without understanding what he meant.
“What did you say?”
Abyss looked back at him. The boredom that had accompanied the confrontation gave way to sharper irritation.
“You watch me as though I were an error to be corrected. It is an interesting form of arrogance.”
The pressure over the street intensified. The people farther away hurried off. The trained men remained where they were, but each breath required more effort than the last. Abyss had not yet attacked anyone, and the knowledge that he could do so at any moment rendered every preparation useless.
He could have ended the confrontation without difficulty. They were incapable of stopping him and did not possess sufficient means even to understand what stood before them.
Abyss lowered his gaze. If he continued responding to their expectations, he would eventually become exactly what they had decided he was.
A threat. An error. Something to fight.
That conclusion irritated him more than the men themselves. He raised his gaze again.
“You are not a problem. You are merely a first contact handled poorly.”
He turned away. The gesture unsettled the group more than any display of power. Abyss was turning his back on them with the absolute certainty that none of them could take advantage of it.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the leader shouted.
Abyss stopped without turning around.
“Somewhere you haven’t already decided what I must be.”
He resumed walking. No one tried to strike him again. The men remained in the street, their procedures now useless and with no way to name what they had encountered. Abyss, meanwhile, walked away without hurry. The world had not yet offered him anything truly interesting. But he had only just begun to observe it.

Abyss had been walking for nearly an hour, at least according to the way the inhabitants of that world measured the passage of time.
To him, such a brief interval mattered little. He had seen civilizations rise, expand, and disappear; he had watched peoples convinced they would endure forever be reduced to ruins and forgotten names. An hour represented nothing more than an insignificant fraction of his existence.
The city, on the other hand, seemed to place value on every instant.
People hurried along the sidewalks, avoiding obstacles, checking small glowing objects, and speaking to individuals who were nowhere near them. Some carried food sealed inside containers without stopping to eat it. Others crossed the street only when a colored light gave them permission.
Abyss watched those movements carefully.
“Curious.”
To his right, invisible to everyone else, his father’s spiritual presence accompanied him without interfering with the world around them. The old Sovereign of Darkness observed the city with far less interest.
Abyss continued, “They all seem eager to reach somewhere, but no one seems happy once they get there.”
None of the passersby paid him any attention. It annoyed him. In his realm, his mere presence was enough to interrupt conversations and activities. Entire armies knelt upon his arrival, counselors waited for permission to speak, and even those who had never met him immediately recognized the presence of the Sovereign.
Here, however, a little girl walked right past him while eating an ice cream. She did not even look up at him. Abyss stopped and followed her with his eyes until she disappeared into the crowd.
“She ignored me.”
His father’s voice reached him calmly, perceptible only to him.
“To her, you’re a stranger.”
“That’s rude.”
“That’s normal.”
Abyss considered the answer as he resumed walking.
“A decidedly rude kind of normal.”
A little farther ahead, a shop window caught his attention. Behind the glass, desserts of different shapes and sizes were displayed, arranged with a precision that contrasted with the confusion of the street. Some were covered with fruit, others with colored creams or sugar decorations. At the center of the display sat a cake larger than the others, made up of several layers and finished with obvious care.
Abyss stopped.
He remained in front of the window long enough to force several people to move around him.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about going inside,” his father said.
“I’m studying.”
“You’re staring at a cake.”
Abyss did not bother contradicting him. He went inside.
The scent of sugar, butter, and vanilla filled the shop. Behind the counter, an elderly woman was arranging several packages. When she saw him, she gave him a professional smile.
“Good morning. Can I help you?”
Abyss examined the contents of the display case, then pointed to the cake he had been watching from the street.
“I want that.”
The woman approached the display.
“Certainly. How much would you like?”
Abyss looked at her.
“All of it.”
The woman laughed, convinced he was joking.
“Then that’ll be forty-two euros.”
Abyss remained still. The amount meant nothing to him. Even the word used to define it had no useful meaning within the system by which he was accustomed to evaluating goods and resources. He turned his gaze toward the point where he sensed his father.
“What is a euro?”
The woman followed the direction of his gaze, but saw no one.
The old Sovereign of Darkness answered patiently, “It’s a currency.”
Abyss looked back at the cake.
“So I have to conquer the kingdom before I can obtain it?”
“No.”
“Then why won’t they give it to me?”
Behind the counter, the woman’s expression grew more uncertain. From her perspective, the elegant young man standing before her had started talking to himself about conquests and kingdoms over a cake.
“Because here, things have to be bought,” his father explained.
Abyss studied the woman, the counter, and the cake again.
“It’s an inefficient system.”
He moved one hand toward the dessert.
“Don’t you dare,” his father said immediately.
Abyss stopped before reaching it. He had no need to obey. He could have taken the cake, the shop, and anything else he desired without anyone on that planet being able to stop him. The problem was not whether he could do it, but how predictable the consequences would be.
An amused smile crossed his face.
“I only wanted to see how long it would take them to try to stop me.”
“Too little time for the situation to become interesting.”
Abyss laughed.
The woman watched him with growing bewilderment, but he offered her no explanation. He simply looked at the cake one more time, then left the shop without taking it.
Once back on the sidewalk, he turned toward the window. The dessert was still there, perfectly displayed and protected by a rule that, to humans, seemed to hold more power than the right of anyone strong enough to ignore it.
Abyss did not yet understand that system. For precisely that reason, the matter had begun to interest him. He continued observing the city for some time, then decided to return to his own realm.
The distance between worlds meant nothing to him. Crossing it required less effort than it took a human being to close their eyes.
He left Earth without a sound.
When the landscape changed, the towers of his realm rose before him, immense beneath a starless sky. Their peaks disappeared into the darkness, while the palace stretched beyond what a human gaze could encompass.
The soldiers present knelt in unison. No one spoke his name. No one dared meet his gaze directly. Abyss continued without stopping. That form of reverence had been familiar to him for so long that it no longer held any interest.
“Welcome back, Your Majesty,” a guard said as he passed.
The Sovereign did not answer.
He crossed corridors of black and white marble, halls decorated with ancient symbols, and doors whose dimensions were disproportionate to those of any human dwelling. He knew every part of that place, and it was precisely that familiarity that made it seem increasingly limited.
He needed to see what lay beyond. At last, he reached a room unlike the others. There were no thrones, weapons, or counselors. A large window dominated the wall, while the scent of tea filled the room.
His mother sat beside the window with an open book in her hands. When she heard the door, she looked up.
“You’re back.”
“Yes.”
She closed the book and set it beside her.
“How did it go?”
Abyss remained still for a few seconds, then dropped into the nearby armchair without any concern for the elegance he displayed before the court.
“Humans have invented an absurd system.”
His mother tilted her head.
“Which one?”
“You need euros to get a cake.”
The woman burst out laughing.
Abyss looked at her, unable to understand what she found so amusing.
“And you didn’t have any?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“Did you try to take it?”
Abyss did not answer immediately. His mother knew him well enough to interpret that silence.
“You thought about it.”
“Yes.”
She laughed again, even harder.
In that room, Abyss did not need to be only the Sovereign before whom armies and counselors lowered their eyes. He was her son, returned from a journey with a story she found irresistibly amusing.
When her laughter subsided, the woman studied him carefully. She knew that expression. She had seen it many times while he was growing up, whenever something truly managed to capture his curiosity.
“Are they still following you?”
The amusement disappeared from Abyss’s face.
“Always.”
“And your father?”
“He still insists that I behave inappropriately.”
His mother sighed.
“He has always been afraid of what he cannot control.”
“He thinks I’ll end up destroying everything.”
“Will you?”
Abyss turned his eyes toward the window.
“No.”
He did not hesitate for even an instant.
“If I destroyed everything, there would be nothing left to observe.”
His mother nodded, as though she had expected no other answer.
“Then keep traveling. Explore what you don’t know.”
Abyss looked back at her.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
She stood and adjusted a lock of his hair with the same natural ease she had when he was a child. No one else would have dared address him with such familiarity, but his mother did not see only the Sovereign.
“Promise me one thing,” she said.
“What?”
“Next time, find a way to buy that cake.”
Abyss smiled.
“I’ll take that as an order.”
The woman slowly shook her head.
“No. Take it as advice.”