"But anyway, how come I can still hear you? Haven't you told me that your voice would not reach beyond the stars?"
Mordret sighed.
"That was what I thought. Luckily, I seem to have been wrong."
After a short pause, he said in a strange tone:
"The Ebony Tower… so it does exist."
Sunny blinked.
'I guess it's one way to call it?'
Then, however, a complicated expression appeared on his face:
"Wait... you knew about it?"
The mysterious prince remained silent for a bit, then answered:
"That is what I had been trying to find before… before I couldn't search anymore. There were some hints that a duplicate of the Ivory Tower exists somewhere in the Sky Below. I hoped to reach it."
Sunny chose his next words cautiously:
"Oh, really? What else do you know about that place?"
Mordret thought for a few moments, then answered wistfully:
"It is said that a very powerful being came to this shattered land after it had been destroyed by the Lord of Light. Back then, the Sky Below was not as boundless, and there were much more fragments of divine flame still burning in its empty darkness. That being… wanted to harvest those flames."
Suddenly, a lot of small details about the dark island and the Obsidian Tower became much clearer. Sunny already had suspicions about the true purpose of this place, but now, they were confirmed. The ruined machines outside the pagoda, the blackened worktable, the massive glass vessels covered with soot from the inside, the silver brazier…
The Prince of the Underworld had not truly lived in the magnificent pagoda. It was not his home, just a station he had built in the ocean of flame — which had been much larger back then — to harvest some of the divine fire. Why he had need of it, Sunny did not know.
But he suspected that the prideful demon had either succeeded in his purpose or failed, and that was why he eventually left and sealed the Obsidian Tower, which then stood abandoned for thousands of years.
…And at some point during that time, another child of the -unknown- had come here for a short while, although their purpose was very different.
This revelation came and went. There was a question burning in his mind that had nothing to do with such distant past, instead.
It was much more pressing.
Sunny swallowed another piece of meat and asked casually:
"Harvest divine flames? Very interesting. Was that why you wanted to come here, too?"
Or had Mordret been after something else?
…Was after something else?
The lost prince laughed.
"No, not really. In fact, I wasn't that interested in the Obsidian Tower itself, to begin with."
Sunny frowned:
"Why did you want to find it if you weren't interested in it?"
Mordret sighed.
After a long pause, he answered, his voice dark and full of suppressed emotion:
"What I was interested in was not the copy, but the original. The Ivory Tower. The two are supposed to be connected somehow. If one finds that connection… they might just be able to reach past the Crushing and step foot on the heavenly isle…"