Chapter 303: Destroying The Darkness, Drifting In A Sea Of Forgotten Memories

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"Enough!"

Anger rose in him. He manifested a gleaming sword of white light. The blade glimmered with his memories, and with clear images of Elisa. His eyes widened as those memories filled the weapon. Her face, her voice, the quiet moments they had shared, all of it poured into the light.

If this was a space within his soul and spirit, then memories themselves, the things that made up a person’s mind, were the strongest weapons available here.

Whatever this dark nightmare was, he had to break through it no matter what and return to the world of the living.

"You won’t claim me, darkness!"

With that anger still burning, he swung the blade that overflowed with his beloved’s memories. A gleaming explosion of white light surged outward and cut cleanly through the surrounding darkness.

SLAAAASH!

"G-GAAAAAHHHHH!"

As the light revealed the true form of the darkness, he saw a monstrous being shaped roughly like himself. It looked like a twisted clone of Riven, but it was built from countless horrible creatures. These were not the monsters he had consumed before. They were aliens in shape and form, things he had never seen, their limbs and eyes and mouths all fused together into a single moving mass that wore his outline.

"Y-YOU...! CANNOT KEEP RUNNING... AWAY FOREVER...! YOU ARE... MY MISSING... PIECE...!"

A beam of psionic energy shot out from the monstrous clone. Riven roared and swung the gleaming Sword of Memories, cutting straight through the darkness once more.

SLAAASH!

BOOOOOMMM!!!

The beam could no longer stop him. It exploded on contact, shattering the ceiling above. The ground under his feet cracked open, and endless streams of light poured in from below and above, spreading in every direction.

The darkness faded under the light. A wide landscape of memories opened up around him. He saw pieces of what he had been, who he had become, and everything he had built over time.

Even so, a portion of the darkness remained. The silhouette of that aberrant being still watched him from a distance.

"No matter how much you deny yourself, you cannot keep running away from who you are..."

"I am not like you. I’ll never be..."

"Oh... but you are. I am merely you, after all."

"?!"

The gigantic form slowly broke apart into particles of pink light. Those particles drifted into Riven’s soul and fused with him, granting a surge of power. With that power came the ability to finally wake up.

However, a question still lingered within him.

"Who I am...?"

Riven looked down at his own hands. They would not stay in one shape. They shifted constantly, reforming into the shapes of countless different lifeforms that seemed to come from across the stars themselves.

A flood of emotions hit him all at once, anger, sorrow, frustration, pity, happiness, sadness, and tears started running down his face as he tried to digest the truth.. He was starting to understand what he really was.

The loss of his own humanity hurt more than any physical wound. It felt worse than being stabbed through the heart. At the same time he could see the strange beauty in his origins, yet that only made the pain sharper when he accepted that he might never have been fully human to begin with.

Was he still deserving of her love if he was no longer a human being?

Would she still care for him if the day came when he had to leave for the stars?

A being like him would eventually grow so hungry that it risked consuming everything in its path.

"No..." he kept crying. "I cannot consume it all...! I won’t do it...! I am not like her..."

He continued struggling against those thoughts and emotions when a small white light appeared in front of him. Riven froze in place as the light drifted closer, showing him the full picture of what he had always been.

The Blade of Memories grew longer, wrapping around him completely until it became part of him. In that moment, memories he thought he would never remember again appeared before his eyes with sudden clarity.

Memories of his mother.

A beautiful young woman with pale white skin, long black hair, and gentle blue eyes held him close ever since he was a small child. She looked at him with pure affection every time.

"Riven, my beautiful baby... Mommy loves you so much," she said, her voice warm as she caressed his little face and kissed his small nose. "Mommy loves you more than anything in this world... hehe."

She chuckled softly and booped his tiny nose with one finger. Riven responded with baby noises. "Wawah..." His tiny hand reached up and touched hers. Watching the scene now, Riven’s eyes widened. The simple contact felt real again, as if no time had passed at all.

Humanity.

Of course.

He would never lose it.

It could never leave him.

Riven was a human through and through, no matter what else he had become.

The memories continued without pause, showing him growing up from the time he was only a toddler. His mother was there for every step of his early years. She watched him take his first steps, clapped when he said his first words, and stayed by his side through ordinary days that now felt precious. She packed his lunch for school, helped him with small problems, and always found time to play with him even when she looked tired.

His mother died when he was only ten. By then her hair had turned completely white, and she seemed to slowly wither away. She could no longer walk and spent her final months in a wheelchair. In the end she died from what people called "old age," even though she was not older than thirty when it happened.

Some said she had cancer, but Riven knew better now. He had already learned the truth from Willheim. His mother had suffered a terrible fate that he would never wish on anyone. She had been one of Willheim’s experiments, a living guinea pig injected with Genesis cells taken from a child. Because her body could not hold onto those cells, she slowly wasted away and died at a young age.

She still managed to give birth to her son and raise him for those short years. After she was gone, Riven continued living alone. His family bullied him constantly. No one truly loved him. Only a few butlers and maids took care of his basic needs, treating him more like a duty than a child.

He loved animals because he had always felt lonely. Pets made the empty house feel less empty. They gave him simple affection without conditions and never turned against him. He had a dog named Timmy who followed him everywhere, a white kitten named Snow who slept on his bed, and a rabbit called Hops who liked to sit in his lap. He cared for them deeply. Two of them were killed, and Hops died of natural causes while resting in his arms.

Death had been part of Riven’s life for longer than he could clearly remember. It filled him with sorrow and frustration to see how everything he cared about kept slipping away. No matter how tightly he tried to hold on, things always faded from his hands before he could keep them.

As Riven saw his mother’s deathbed again, the memories returned with the same painful clarity as the first time. She looked back at him with a warm smile even while he cried and held her hand tightly.

"Mom..." he cried. "Don’t die...! I don’t want to be alone... my siblings... they’re mean... dad doesn’t love me because I’m weak..." He kept crying without stopping. "Please don’t leave me... mom!"

His mother knew it was her time. She still held his hand with that same warm smile and looked into her beloved son’s eyes one last time. "I’ll never leave you... your mother... belongs to something beautiful... one day you’ll find out what it is... but let me tell you that we, our people... never fade away truly..."

"Eh?" Riven did not know what she meant back then. At the time he even thought she might be delirious and talking nonsense from the pain and the medicine.

"I’ll never leave your side..." she said, tapping his chest gently with her index finger. "I will always stay with you, Riven... mommy will always... be within your very heart... within... even your cells..."

Something he could not see with his eyes back then had happened at that moment. Now that he could finally see it clearly, Riven stirred in disbelief. Tears continued streaming down his face.

It was pink light.

Psionic Energy.

"?!"

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