In the depths of a lightless, dank, disgusting cell, sat a single bed. Atop that bed was the sleeping form of a lone figure. The lone figure was an incredibly tall, grey-skinned woman. She gasped in her sleep, as she sensed something she couldn't quite understand occurring to her captor, the dreaded archdemoness Noshtex, even as her body warmed and reacted to the power of her prison's new lord, the potent archdemon Raul.

For several minutes she stirred restlessly, gasping and almost but not quite speaking in her ensorcelled sleep. The rags she was dressed in began to dissipate, fading into nothing as her sudden fit of sleeping activity caused them to finally finish the ages-long process of decomposition rather unexpectedly, due in part to the slow-acting consumptive atmosphere that pervaded even the depths of the fiendish lair of Noshtex. As she stirred, a quiet voice whispered into her mind, the first voice to reach her in quite literally centuries. 

"Open your eyes." The quiet, eerily beautiful voice whispered into the mind of the woman. That said, she didn't open her eyes. Instead, she continued to stir restlessly. For several minutes her mind was not contacted by the alien presence who sought to wake her up. But after ten minutes the voice reached out across an unfathomably vast distance once more, and this time when it spoke it added a wave of power to its voice. 

"Awaken Nocturne, goddess of the dark." The voice commanded, speaking authoritatively. This time the figure in the dark cell physically stirred, her body actually moving for the first time in countless eons. And a moment later her eyes flitted open. She glanced around the cell she was in and quickly sat up. 

"What... Where am I?" She asked no one in particular, as her mind took a second to fully recover from her forced slumber. She studied her cell and waited a moment to see if the voice that had awoken her would speak again. She was met with silence and sighed in annoyance. 

She got up off of the table-like bed she had spent eons on and as she stood up she was grateful that she was a goddess and not a mortal. She didn't need to deal with muscular atrophy or anything like that, due exclusively to her divinity. At the beginning of her life, before she became a divinity, she would have had to deal with such things if she had been in a coma for even weeks, much less literal millennia. 

She was inside of a small cell, a rather pathetic square room perhaps a few meters wide and only a bit longer than that. The cell's ceiling was only a bit higher than she was tall, and for not the first time in her life, she wished that she was shorter. That said, as a giantess, even a diminutive one, she had little control over her height. In the distant past, at the apex of her power, even her particular brand of divinity wouldn't allow her to become smaller unless she wished to become insubstantial. And now as a largely depowered being, she had far less means at her disposal to modify her body than she once had.

The cell in front of her was not closed, and as she walked out of the cell and into a long, dark hallway lined with similar but empty cells, she wondered why that was. She paused as she exited the cell and waited for a single second, listening intently to her surroundings. She could hear the distant sound of footsteps but none of which were approaching her. She silently gathered her courage and began to walk towards a distant door, perhaps an entire kilometer away from her. 

As she began to walk she felt something strange cause the hair on the back of her neck to stand up. She wasn't sure how or what it was, but she was almost certain that someone was somehow watching her. As she walked she quietly chalked this up to some strange sort of cosmic awareness, perhaps a remnant of one of the domains, such as knowledge or power, that had been taken from her in the centuries before she was captured by Noshtex's forces. 

"Damn... Void-lurkers. I'll find a way to kill them someday." The goddess whispered, unaware of the fact that her presence in the newest portion of the fierce sanguinarch Raul's dominion was one of the reasons why she was known to him and the fact that he, one of the so-called "Void-Lurkers" she hated so fiercely, was the one who had awoken her. Raul, distantly, kept his eyes on her as she made her way down the hallway towards the beginning of her journey towards freedom. 

It took her a few minutes of slow but steady walking to reach the door at the end of the cell-lined hallway. When she approached it and placed her hand on it she was shocked to see the middle of the door spontaneously grow a single crimson eyeball that gazed at her appraisingly.

The instant she saw the eye form she had been tempted to gasp and leap back but as a deity, even a depowered one, she had the strength of will and the reaction speed needed to temper herself and not visibly react to the jump scare she had just seen. The eyeball studied her for a moment, and the intuitive goddess managed to piece together that whatever creature or force was responsible for her waking up, the source of the voice she heard coaxing her out of her enchanted slumber, was likely able to see her through the eye.

"An... eldritch god?" She questioned out loud, as she gazed at the eye. It blinked at her and kept gazing at her. If it had the ability to speak it did not do so, refusing to humor or answer her questions. Instead, it solely kept looking at her, emotionlessly. After a few moments of silence, the goddess huffed and pushed the door open. On the other side of the door, she was surprised to see someone waiting for her.

The figure before her was a black-scaled creature that had the basic features and figure of a humanoid: two arms, two legs, one head, but also had a tail and was covered from head to toe in onyx colored scales. It had piercing purple eyes and stood over two meters tall but was still over an entire meter and a half shorter than Nocturne was. 

It was dressed in dragonscale armor that was a much lighter color than its scales were. The creature also cooly and impassively gazed at Nocturne in much the same way as the eerie eye had. That annoyed her, but she didn't say anything since the creature hadn't made any moves to report her newfound freedom to any enemies who may have been lurking nearby or to detain her. She considered striding past it for a moment, ignoring the dragonkin as readily as it had ignored her. But when she actually made the decision to stride past the creature, the thing's mouth began to move and a sickly voice poured out of it. 

"Nocturne, goddess of primordial darkness, Raul, the future emperor of all, welcomes you back to the waking world." The creature proclaimed. The delivery of its message was apathetic at first, but when it uttered the name and title of this "Raul" person there was an undeniable, audible amount of passion in its voice. This caused Nocturne to pause and decide to speak to it.

"'Raul, the future emperor of all'?" She asked, unfamiliar with that name or that title, despite her tremendous mental stores of knowledge. The dragonkin looked up at her, since it was much shorter than she was, and nodded fervently. 

"Raul is the manifold ascendant who rules over the Raulian Empire. He is the warrior who defeated and tamed Noshtex, and upon learning of you he awoke you with his cosmic powers over freedom and chaos. You have heard his resplendent voice! It was he who awoke you." The creature explained, passion slipping into its sickly voice as it imagined its master. Upon learning that Raul was a manifold ascendant, a term that Nocturne knew only applied to creatures who were either four types of ascendant-beings or, somehow, all five, she stepped back almost fearful of the truly titanic power such a being must possess, especially in comparison to her in her depowered state. 

"Someone defeated Noshtex... That's certainly the most reasonable explanation for my freedom..." Nocturne exclaimed, stunned to learn that the fiercely powerful archdemoness of gluttony had been defeated. She couldn't even begin to wrap her mind around the idea that someone could have tamed that monster, so she didn't quite respond to that particular revelation. 

"Raul sent me to find you and to fetch the other, truly astounding bit of treasure locked away in this fiendish lair; the 'Cyberauric Augmentator'." The dragonkin explained, stating the name of the strange object with a bit of hunger. The name of that thing confused her as well, as it was something else that she had never heard of. Yet, somehow, as she thought about it she found her mind being artificially filled with knowledge.

In her mind's eye, she suddenly got a vision of a powerful machine, one that was large enough to fill even an opulent throne room. It was a vast thing of brass that was surprisingly ornate in design, featuring motifs of spirits and souls. And somehow, the goddess knew that she was gazing at the device the strange dragonkin had come to fetch. 

As she gazed at the thing in her mind's eye she felt her mind filling with potent knowledge. Knowledge regarding the quasi-mythical "Omega Lords", their "Sparks", and even various examples of "Omegatech". And at last, she felt her mind filling with the knowledge that Noshtex herself possessed; knowledge regarding the potent "Cyberauric Augmentator". 

The room-sized omegatech device was a potent enhancer of mortals and their souls. The device, through a process that takes about a year to complete, was able to enhance the souls of mortals, which provided them with a boost to all of their abilities and traits, as well as made souls far more delicious and potent to dine on for creatures like sanguinarchs and their vampiric spawn. 

Apparently, it had been designed, originally, to could create the infamous "Sparks" that Omega Lords themselves possessed in any and all beings enhanced by it, but it had never once been able to successfully do that. At some point in the distant past a sanguinarch who would later be devoured by Noshtex acquired the device. When the sanguinarch was devoured she also took the potent device for herself and used it on rare occasions to give herself a truly delicious meal, since she also fed on the souls of lesser beings.

"How..." Nocturne muttered as she felt the strange presence of what she now knew to be Raul, in the back of her mind. She was dimly aware that Raul was the one feeding her information, but not to what end or what else he could do. Upon hearing her question the dragonkin who had been sent to retrieve her chuckled lightly.

"It's Raul. He is the one who sees with a million eyes and the one who whispers with a million voices. He is connected to every one of his vampires, myself included." The dragonkin revealed lightly, smiling as it spoke. Nocturne turned to it and studied it with a renewed interest. 

"So... You're a vampire? And your emperor is a sanguinarch?" Nocturne asked. The first question was rhetorical but the second was not. The creature gazed at her passively, silently for a moment, and even in her depowered state, the goddess recognized what was going on. The creature was communicating with its sire!

Nocturne looked into its eyes and saw, much to her surprise, that she was being looked at in turn. She wasn't being watched by the dragonkin, or at least not just by it, but by something ancient and powerful, something that would have been able to defeat her back when she was not depowered, and thus something that was leagues ahead of her in power in her current state.

The gaze that looked back at her was not the passive, appraising gaze of the vampiric dragonkin or the eldritch eye, but the strange, and joyful being responsible for both of them. The potent emperor who had defeated and "Tamed" Noshtex. A being that was both older and younger than she was, and also both darker, and lighter than she could even fathom being. 

"I am indeed a sanguinarch, Nocturne. One that is simultaneously incredibly young, and also truly, unbelievably ancient. I am Raul. I am Il'Noth'Rey. The eldest. And the youngest." The dragonkin suddenly uttered, speaking in a voice that was very decisively not its own. Nocturne felt her blood chill in her veins as she found herself facing the one who defeated the being who defeated her, eons ago. 

"I am your savior. And your route back to your former power. I am a cosmic god of knowledge. I know what happened to you, eons ago. How the eldritch entities known collectively as 'Those Who Name The Void' captured, experimented on you, and depowered you. How they kept you as their prisoner for countless eons. And then released you. Only for you to fall when you faced Noshtex. And now I have freed you." The voice explained, powerfully. It was an incredibly beautiful, yet incredibly frightening voice, and each uttered word reverberated through Nocturne's very body, humming in her mind and making her skull throb. 

"I sense your former power Nocturne. I know you were once a primordial goddess of darkness. And I know that in the wake of your defeat by the creatures who hide in the cracks between universes you spent eons searching for ways back to them and on their weaknesses. And I know you failed, without exception, every time you managed to find your way back to them. But your soul still hums with power. And I have come to restore you to your former power." Raul uttered, his voice speaking to the very deepest desire Nocturne possessed. 

"All you have to do is agree to join my empire, to join me, and to become a vampire in my service. And then you must wish for it, for your power to be restored. With all of your heart." The dragonkin revealed before its eyes went from being piercing purple orbs to becoming pure blue spheres in its head. Nocturne paused and was taken aback by this. She had no way of knowing that Raul was a Zaar and thus could grant wishes. Nor did she know of the incredibly potent wishmagic that Raul's allies were capable of. But that changed when her mind was again filled with knowledge concerning Raul himself. 

In the span of a second Nocturne's mind was filled with an unbelievable amount of knowledge about Raul. She learned of his victories, of his desires, of his power, and of his ambitions. And she was filled with an unshakable certainty that he was telling the truth, mostly because he was. And Raul, desiring to see the true, universe-shaking power of Nocturne at her height, opted to allow her to process the knowledge she had just gained over the course of a single second, her eyes widening in shock as she took in the unbelievable successes the young manifold ascendant had earned over the course of the short life of his empire.

Once she was armed with knowledge, it wasn't hard for her to make up her mind. She gazed down at the dragonkin and nodded.

"I, Nocturne Annu Alvaros, agree to join your empire, Raul. I agree to become one of your vampires. Now, please... I wish to be restored to my prime. To regain the power that Those Who Name The Void stole from me. I wish to become myself again." She uttered before both she and the dragonkin Raul spoke through both began to glow.

Raul, at the very moment that Nocturne and the dragonkin began to glow, was still speaking to the gathered court in the depths of one of his palaces. And yet for a single moment, as he utilized his potent powers as a cosmic deity of power, healing, and knowledge, as a zaar, and as a sanguinarch, to restore Nocturne to her former height, he visibly radiated rainbow-colored light even as he thrust into the tight asshole of the thronemaiden named Thevah. And for a moment no one in the court thought much of that, as Raul was known to be a deity of light. But a second later the ascendants in the room felt something strange disturb the cosmos itself.

Ascendants had a very limited sort of cosmic awareness. They could, at the very least, sense cosmic changes that had vast, sweeping potential. For example, every ascended being in the throne room that had been an ascended being when Raul first awoke as a grand adonis had felt it. And now they sensed something much darker, and despite that knew that whatever was occurring was of some benefit to themselves. But they still felt it in their very bones, even as Nocturne regained access to her true, full portfolio.

In the depths of the most ancient prison that Noshtex had control over, dark power was spilling out of Nocturne. She was radiating darkness, ancient, supernatural darkness that she had long been denied control over. And even as she was restored to her former glory, Raul's metaphysical hand reached out and touched her heart, transforming her into one of his unbelievably potent "Alpha Vampires". 

The ancient goddess howled as she felt the first touch of the god of joy, power, love, and divinity, transform her. It touched even the deepest portions of her soul, filling her with a sort of supreme darkness that was greater than her own had been, despite hers being the darkness found at the beginning of multiversal time. It was the darkness of a creature so powerful that it defied death itself. 

Her body felt the chilling, and yet loving touch of the sanguinarch she had given herself to. And it warmed as it felt that touch. The potent form of vampirism that was slowly claiming Nocturne's mighty form felt energizing, pleasant even, to the goddess herself who quickly and quietly embraced it. 

Her body became more voluptuous as she felt her soul itself be touched, be gripped by vampirism. Her face became more beautiful, and her presence more alluring to the senses, as she grew far, far stronger than she had been before and as her mind sharpened and became honed. She even felt the potency of her connection to her domains sharpen and intensify, thus pushing even her form of divinity far beyond her old limits. 

She also began to hear other voices, faint ones, in her mind and realized, shockingly, that she was becoming as tethered to Raul and to his vampires as the dragonkin who had appeared before her was. And in that moment she knew that she'd surely never be alone again, now forever connected to the one who sees through a million eyes and speaks through a million voices.