Rhaezkar felt it before the scream reached him.
It was not sound. It was distortion—like heat bending air, but deeper, closer to the marrow of existence. The Obsidian Depths had always been loud in their own way: molten rivers roaring beneath cracked stone, shadow-currents whispering through cavernous halls, the constant pressure of a world that still remembered its violent birth. In that moment, all of it stilled.
Fire dimmed, as if uncertain of its purpose.
Shadow recoiled, thinning at the edges.
The earth itself seemed to pause, holding a breath it had never learned to release.
Rhaezkar stood alone on a basalt terrace overlooking the fissure-city of Khar'zul. Demon-forged towers clawed upward from the stone below, jagged silhouettes driven skyward by will and necessity. He had been sharpening his weapons—not from habit, but because his hands had needed something to do. For days now, a tension had been tightening in his chest, coiling in a way no battle-hunger explained. It had kept him awake through cycles when even the Depths slept.
Then it snapped.
Pain tore through him, absolute and alien. Not physical. Not magical. It felt as though the idea of him was being pulled apart, thread by thread, by hands that did not need to touch. His vision blurred. His knees hit the stone hard enough to crack it, and fire burst from his body in a wild surge, splitting basalt and fusing nearby structures into glass.
Demons staggered back, snarling, weapons half-raised, instincts screaming that something far worse than invasion had arrived.
Rhaezkar knew.
"The child," he growled, clutching his chest. "They've found him."
The certainty came without thought. Not hope. Not fear. Knowledge—clean and terrible. He did not question it. He did not need to.
The gods had moved.
Demons did not bond as elves did. They did not build lineage on memory or legacy. Demon bloodlines were shaped by survival, by conflict, by pressure that forged strength or crushed the weak. Yet something ancient stirred within Rhaezkar now, something older than demon law and older than gods.
Creation.
He felt it like an echo—small, steady, impossibly anchored—somewhere far beyond the Depths. It did not call to him. It did not ask for protection. It simply existed.
That existence terrified the gods.
Rhaezkar pushed himself upright and roared. The sound tore through Khar'zul like a shockwave, rattling towers and sending sparks cascading from fissures. Demons turned toward him fully now, eyes glowing, bodies braced, waiting for command.
"They're coming," he said. His voice was steady. "Not armies. Not heralds."
Understanding rippled through them like a shared wound.
When gods confronted demons directly, it was never war.
It was correction.
The world above the terrace peeled open without warning. No thunder announced it. No light descended. Reality thinned, as if scorched fabric were being torn aside, and a vast, empty white bled through—blinding, depthless, painful to look upon. Shadow screamed as it warped. Fire raged, then faltered. The laws of the Depths bent and buckled under the intrusion.
Demons fell to their knees—not in worship, but in resistance. Shadow magic flared violently. Earth groaned. Fire lashed outward in defiance.
Then the gods spoke.
Not with voices.
With finality.
Rhaezkar of the Obsidian Depths,
you have trespassed beyond tolerance.
The words did not echo. They replaced sound.
Rhaezkar straightened, flames coiling around his arms, shadow hardening along his silhouette like armor.
"I did not kneel," he said. "I did not worship. I did not ask."
You created an instability.
"I created life."
The white void pulsed.
You created choice.
That was the true crime.
The gods did not kill him.
Killing implied acknowledgment.
They erased him.
It began with pain so complete it stripped meaning from sensation. Rhaezkar screamed—but the sound did not exist long enough to be heard. The gods reached into the structure of Aerthyra and began to unwind him.
Fire dimmed first—not extinguished, but denied context, as if flame forgot why it burned. Shadow flattened, losing depth, becoming absence rather than darkness. His bond with earth fractured; the stone beneath his feet forgot the weight of his stance.
Demons watched in horror as their general blurred—not fading, but losing definition. His outline wavered, edges dissolving into uncertainty.
Names went next.
Every demon who had ever spoken Rhaezkar's name felt a sudden blankness, a disorienting slide where a word should have been. Inscriptions cracked. Records melted into meaningless lines. Memory-stones dulled.
History rewrote itself.
Battles he had led dissolved into confusion, victories reassigned, losses blamed on chance and chaos. The past reorganized around his absence.
The present followed.
Demons could still see something where he stood, still feel heat and pressure—but recognition slipped away. Minds struggled to hold the shape. Understanding slid like oil through fingers.
The future vanished last.
No prophecy. No echo. No lingering thread allowed to remain.
Rhaezkar staggered forward, teeth bared, defiance carved into what remained of him.
"You can't—" he tried to say.
But can't was not a concept gods acknowledged.
He felt himself coming apart—not dying, but unbecoming.
And yet—
The pulse endured.
The child lived.
As his essence unraveled, Rhaezkar focused on that pulse with everything he had left. He did not pray. He did not beg. He anchored himself to the choice he and Saelith had made—unblessed, unpermitted, real.
The gods sensed it.
For the first time, hesitation rippled through the white void.
You are removed, they declared. Completely.
Rhaezkar laughed.
Even as shadow peeled away. Even as fire forgot his name. Even as the world unlearned him.
"I know," he said—or meant, or became. "But he is not."
With the last fragment of his will, Rhaezkar did something no demon—or god—had ever done.
He let go.
He released every claim to power, to memory, to self, compressing what remained into a single impulse. Not a blessing. Not protection.
Resistance.
Small. Unremarkable. Easy to overlook.
It slipped free of divine grasp not because it was hidden, but because it was insignificant by their measure. It flowed along ley lines, riding the pull of twelve moons, seeking the one existence the gods had failed to erase.
The white void sealed.
Reality snapped back.
Fire roared back into the Depths. Shadow deepened. Earth ground and settled beneath renewed weight. The city breathed again, scarred but intact.
Demons stood in stunned silence.
Where Rhaezkar had been, there was nothing.
No ash.
No crater.
No absence that could be named.
A demon captain frowned, unease prickling his skin. "Who was…?" he began.
The thought slid away before it could finish.
Only one demon remained staring at the empty terrace—a young warrior whose mind had not fully yielded to divine revision. He pressed a hand to his chest, confused by the ache there.
"We lost something," he murmured.
The words echoed briefly.
Then they, too, were gone.
Far away, beyond forests and faultlines, beyond elven lies and divine certainty, a newborn stirred beneath unfamiliar stars.
For the first time since his birth, the air around him resisted being shaped by magic.
Not violently.
Quietly.
As if something unseen had wrapped itself around his existence and whispered—not as command, not as fate, but as permission:
You are allowed to choose.