The world shuddered.
Not with sound. Not with thunder.
But with silence.
A silence so vast it swallowed breath, thought, time.
Kael stood over the god he had just broken. Ithar's body—once radiant, once invincible—lay crumpled like a discarded cloak. Blood, black as space and thick as tar, pooled around him.
It steamed.
It sang.
And Kael could feel it crawling toward his boots.
The Price of Divinity
Iris knelt beside him, gripping his arm. Her face was pale, her hands trembling, but her voice was steady.
"Kael. Don't touch it."
"He's still breathing."
"I don't care."
But Kael did.
Because every drop of that godblood whispered to him.
"You are mine."
"You are more."
"You are next."
The runes on his arms began to glow—not with fire this time, but with a cold silver light, pulsing in rhythm with Ithar's dying heart.
"It's not over," Kael muttered.
"What?" Iris asked.
"Killing him… wasn't the end. It was the key."
The Black Memory
Vaerin was silent.
He stood with his back to the chamber, staring at the symbols now glowing on the walls.
"We were wrong," he whispered.
"About Ithar?" Kael asked.
"About everything. Ithar wasn't the betrayer. He was the guardian."
Kael felt the weight of those words hit him like a blow to the chest.
"Explain."
Vaerin turned, his eyes wide with a fear Kael had never seen in him before.
"The Flameborn weren't victims. We were weapons. Designed to burn the world clean in service of something older than the gods."
"Older than the gods?" Iris asked. "What's older than gods?"
"The things they locked away."
Vaerin pointed to the sigils now crawling across the throne room—symbols of chains, doors, keys. And Kael saw it:
Ithar wasn't keeping himself alive.
He was keeping something else imprisoned.
And now… that prison was breaking.
The Voice Beneath
The chamber cracked.
Not just the stone—the air.
A sound like weeping and screaming and thunder all at once echoed from the fissures.
From beneath Ithar's body, a thin crack split the obsidian floor. Something ancient stirred beneath it.
"What did I do?" Kael whispered.
"You won," said a voice. "And in doing so, you doomed us all."
Kael turned.
Ithar was on his knees. His eyes glowed dimly now, flickering like candles in a storm.
"I held the gate. For centuries. Alone. Ashamed. Afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of what you are," Ithar said. "Of what I was. Of what lies beneath."
And then he died.
But his words didn't.
They echoed in Kael's mind, repeating like a curse.
"Of what you are…"
The ground shattered beneath them.
Kael fell.
The Descent
It wasn't like falling through air.
It was like falling through memory.
Visions flared around him—cities burning, children screaming, armies kneeling before thrones made of bone and flame. He saw himself at the center of it all, eyes black, mouth chanting words that split the sky.
He saw Iris dead.
Vaerin gone.
The world… changed.
And something watching him.
A presence.
It had no name.
It wanted one.
And it wanted his.
The Prison Below the World
Kael landed hard.
He gasped, sucking in air that wasn't air. The space was wrong. The sky was below him. The earth above. And in the center was a gate.
Huge.
Sealed with runes shaped like screaming mouths.
And it was cracking.
Behind it pulsed a heart.
A heart the size of a mountain.
A heart that had waited eons to beat again.
A voice rose from the depths, ancient and amused.
"Thank you, Flameborn."
"Who are you?" Kael asked.
"I am what they forgot. I am what gods fear."
"Ithar was trying to keep you locked away."
"And now you have unmade him. Just as it was written."
Kael's knees buckled.
"What do you want?"
"To finish the fire," the voice whispered. "And you... you are my matchstick."