Smoke still clung to the ruins of Vel'Tharon like a dying breath, rising in pale ribbons toward a dawn that felt too calm — too quiet — after a war that had nearly broken the world. The Flameheart banners burned in silent heaps. The scorched stone underfoot still radiated heat. But the fighting had stopped.
For now.
Raizen stood at the edge of the collapsed tower, overlooking a battlefield now strewn with broken weapons and broken dreams. The ash swirled around him like ghosts of the fallen — rebels, zealots, innocents caught between. The victory over Flameheart Drax had come at a staggering cost. Whole cities were gone. Armies were shattered. The world had changed — but not in the way they had hoped.
"Is it ever really over?" Zuri asked beside him, her cloak torn and singed, eyes heavy with the weight of survival.
Raizen didn't answer at first. He looked down at the cracked earth below, at the medics hauling survivors from the wreckage, at the flames finally dying in the distance. The war had ended, but what remained felt hollow.
"No," he said at last. "Not when we still don't know who lit the first fire."
The truth of Drax's final words haunted him: "I was the fuse."
In the days that followed, the rebellion held fragile peace talks. Leaders of liberated territories gathered in hastily built council tents. Some hailed Raizen as a savior, others feared him as a conqueror. Offers of allegiance mixed with whispers of distrust. The dream of a united free world seemed already to be fraying.
Even within his own crew, fractures appeared.
Juno argued for dismantling all old systems — governments, empires, courts — "Burn it all and start over," she said. Varro wanted stability and diplomacy. Zuri remained quiet, haunted by the duel she had fought and the ones yet to come. Every night, Raizen walked the perimeter alone, listening for voices in the wind. For warnings. For ghosts.
But it wasn't just memory that stalked him.
Hidden in the vaults beneath Drax's throne, Raizen had found the Obsidian Map — a relic not of this age, but one etched in a cipher older than the World Government itself. It depicted a constellation that did not match any sky. A throne not made of gold, but of absence — a seat carved from the void between stars.
The Hollow Throne.
A myth. A warning. A power beyond comprehension.
And someone — or something — had been guarding it long before Drax took his first breath.
Raizen traced the map's lines late into the night, the cold glow of the symbols crawling beneath his skin like frost. There were coordinates hidden in the stars, a spiral of locations. He recognized none of them.
But one word burned at the center.
"Nullmare."
The name pulled at him — like gravity. A place. A presence. A prophecy.
They had won a war.
But the war was never the true enemy.
The world had not seen peace. It had simply traded one tyrant for a silence filled with deeper monsters. And somewhere, in the space between empires, the true architects of the Crown of Shadows were stirring.
Raizen folded the map, his jaw set. The fire may have ended — but the embers whispered a new path.
This was no longer a fight for survival.
It was a quest for truth. For legacy. For the throne that ruled history itself.
And if he had to walk through the void to find it — then so be it.
END OF THE CHAPTER1