Location: Temple of the Fourteen Flames → Valyrian Harbor → The Doom's Threshold
Time: Hour of the Oracle → Hour of the Sundering → The Last Hour
I. The Dagger's Edge
The void-blade burned in Lysander's grip, its edge drinking the light around it.
Maelora's breath came in ragged gasps as the temple trembled. "The shadowkin is the key," she hissed. "Cut its throat, and the Drowned King loses his anchor to this world."
Above them, Hah'dra's shadowkin had grown larger, its form now a grotesque fusion of dragon and deep-sea horror—bat-like wings fused with fin, a serpentine body studded with bioluminescent eyes. It perched on the spire like a living nightmare, crooning in a voice that was half hatchling's cry, half leviathan's song.
System Alert:
"Shadowkin Status: Maturing (98%)"
"Recommendation: Immediate Termination"
*"Alternative Option: [REDACTED] - Access Cost: 1 Memory (Permanent)"*
Lysander's gaze flicked to the harbor.
The Drowned King's wave had frozen mid-crash, seawater hanging in the air like shattered glass. The king himself stood atop the tidal crest, his crown of dragon skulls dripping with phosphorescent algae. Behind him, the drowned dragonlords waited in perfect silence.
Aelar's corpse-herald turned its head toward the temple.
"Little brother," it rasped with Aelar's voice but the king's inflection. "You have one last choice to make."
II. The Fourth Option
Lysander closed his eyes and paid the System's price.
The memory it took was his first kill—not as a soldier, but as a child in Rome, shoving a bully into the Tiber and watching the current take him. The guilt that had shaped him... gone.
In its place, the System unveiled:
[REDACTED]: SOULBIND THE SHADOWKIN (REQUIRES MÆLORA'S BLOOD)
Maelora recoiled as the words appeared in the air between them, written in flaming glyphs.
"No," she whispered. "That's not—"
Lysander moved.
The void-dagger flashed—not toward the shadowkin, but across Maelora's palm. Her blood, thick with priestly magic, splashed onto the temple stones.
The System screamed in triumph:
"BLOOD SACRIFICE ACCEPTED"
"INITIATING SOULBIND RITUAL"
The shadowkin shrieked as invisible chains yanked it from the spire, dragging it toward Lysander. Hah'dra leaped after it, his form melting like wax—revealing the crustacean horror beneath his human skin.
Too late.
The shadowkin slammed into Lysander's chest, its body merging with the kraken tattoo. Agony blossomed through his ribs as the two marks fought for dominance—until:
Fusion.
The tattoo reformed—a dragon coiled around a kraken, their forms intertwined.
"SYMBIOSIS ACHIEVED"
"NEW STATUS: SHADOWLORD (PRIMUS)"
III. The King's Wrath
The Drowned King roared, and the frozen wave crashed down.
Valyria's harbor disintegrated beneath the deluge, ships and docks and fleeing citizens swept away in an instant. The drowned dragonlords marched through the devastation, their pearl-black eyes fixed on the temple.
Lysander rose on wings of living shadow, the newly bound creature singing in his veins. His voice, when he spoke, was his own and not his own:
"You forget, old king. These are my flames."
He clapped his hands.
The Fourteen Flames erupted in unison, not with lava—but with liquid shadow, geysers of darkness that speared the tidal wave, boiled the harbor, and engulfed the drowned legion.
The Drowned King staggered, his crown cracking as the shadowflames licked at his form.
"This changes nothing," he hissed. "My hunger is eternal."
Lysander smiled. "Then starve."
He slammed his fist into the temple floor.
The earth split open—not a crack, but a maw, a gate, a threshold. The Drowned King howled as the abyss yawned beneath him, dragging him and his forces down into the dark.
Aelar's corpse-herald was the last to fall.
"Finish it," it begged with Aelar's true voice. "Before he remakes me again."
Lysander obliged, severing the herald's head with Daekar's dagger.
IV. The Doom's Dawn
The silence that followed was worse than the battle.
Valyria smoldered, half-drowned, half-burned. The shadowflames had spared the temple, but the city beyond was ruin.
Maelora stared at Lysander with new eyes.
"What have you done?"
The System's final message flared:
"DOOM DIVERTED (TEMPORARY)"
"NEW TIMELINE ESTABLISHED"
"WARNING: THE DROWNED KING WILL RETURN"
Lysander flexed his shadow-wreathed hands.
"Bought us time."
High above, Vhagar circled, her golden eyes reflecting the new mark on Lysander's chest—a hybrid sigil of dragon and deep, fire and flood.
Somewhere in the ruins, a single shadowkin egg pulsed with latent power
Location: Temple of the Fourteen Flames → Valyrian Ruins → The Shadowed Spire
Time: The Silent Hour → The Hour of Reckoning → The Forgotten Hour
I. The Weight of Shadows
The air tasted of charred salt and dying embers.
Lysander stood at the temple's shattered threshold, his boots sinking into wet ash that clung like a beggar's fingers. The shadowflames had spared the holy site, but the city beyond was a graveyard of blackened spires and glass-smooth craters, where the earth itself had been melted and remade by his power.
The mark on his chest thrummed, a living thing beneath his skin—dragon and kraken intertwined, their forms shifting whenever he drew breath. It was more than a tattoo now. It was a covenant.
"System Reconfiguration:"
"Host Designation: Shadowlord Primus"
"New Abilities Unlocked:"
Shadowstep (Phase through solid matter for 3.7 seconds)
Abyssal Voice (Command sea-drakes and lesser shadowkin)
Doomsight (Glimpse fragments of potential futures)
The cost?
He could feel it already—the hunger. Not for food, but for more. More power. More control. The shadowkin coiled around his soul whispered promises of dominion, if only he would let it feed.
A sound broke the silence—the crunch of broken glass underfoot.
Maelora approached, her silver hair now streaked with ash and something darker, her mercury eyes reflecting the new sigil burning on his chest.
"You should have killed it," she said, her voice hoarse. "Now it lives inside you."
Lysander flexed his fingers, watching tendrils of living darkness curl between them. "We live inside each other."
II. The Ruins Remember
They walked the corpse of Valyria together, though neither trusted the other.
The streets were rivers of fused stone, their surfaces swirled with the echoes of the shadowflames' passage. Here and there, statues of dragonlords had been half-melted, their faces stretched in silent screams.
The dead were few.
That was the strange thing. The shadowflames had consumed more than burned. Where people had stood, there were only outlines in ash, their final moments frozen in the soot like grotesque murals.
"It didn't just kill them," Maelora murmured, kneeling beside one such silhouette. "It unmade them."
Lysander's shadowmark pulsed in agreement.
A sound echoed from a nearby alley—a wet, clicking noise, like crab claws on stone.
Maelora was on her feet in an instant, her hands wreathed in bloodfire. Lysander moved faster, his body dissolving into smoke as he shadowstepped across the distance.
What he found was not a survivor.
The creature crouched in the ruins was something new—a fusion of man and crustacean, its back studded with bioluminescent barnacles, its mouth a circular maw of rotating teeth. It clutched a half-eaten shadowkin eggshell in its pincers.
"Hah'dra's get," Lysander realized.
The creature hissed, its pearl-black eyes reflecting the Drowned King's malice. Then it scuttled backward, vanishing into a fissure that hadn't been there a moment before.
The shadows laughed in Lysander's mind.
III. The Spire's Secret
The Shadowed Spire stood apart from the ruins, untouched by flame or flood.
Its obsidian surface drank the light, giving back only distorted reflections. The door was a single slab of dragonbone, carved with runes that squirmed when stared at too long.
Maelora would not approach it.
"This place is older than the Freehold," she whispered. "Even the Fourteen Flames fear it."
Lysander's shadowmark burned hotter as he pressed his palm to the door.
"It remembers me."
The slab dissolved, revealing a circular chamber where the air itself was thick and syrupy, resistant to movement. At its center floated three things:
A crown of black coral, identical to the Drowned King's but smaller.
A dagger made from a leviathan's tooth, its edge serrated with tiny runes.
A map of the abyss, tattooed on stretched merling skin.
System Alert:
"Artifacts Detected: Shadowlord Regalia"
"Purpose: To Rule or To Destroy"
"Warning: Choosing One Locks the Others"
Lysander reached for the crown—
—and the shadows screamed a warning.
Behind him, Maelora gasped.
The map on the wall was changing, its inks rewriting themselves to show a new location:
Valyria's Heart.
Where the last egg waited.
IV. The Forgotten Hour
They found Vhagar perched atop the spire, her wings healed but altered—the membranes now veined with shadow, their edges flickering like smoke.
She regarded Lysander with new eyes.
"You smell like them now," the dragon rumbled. "Like the things that came before."
Maelora kept her distance, her bloodfire dimmer in the spire's presence. "We need to destroy the last egg. Before he finds it."
Lysander stared at the horizon, where the sea met the sky in a line of perfect black.
"He already has."
The System's final message burned itself into his vision:
"THE DROWNED KING'S RETURN: 13 DAYS"
"PREPARE OR PERISH"
"SHADOWLORD'S CHOICE AWAITS"
And beneath it, in pulsing crimson letters:
"THE EGG IS NOT THE LAST. YOU ARE."