With the death of Sevirax, the Blessed of the Sun, another Chain of Hope shattered — splintering with a soundless finality that echoed through the ley-lines of fate. Only two remained now, strained and trembling, desperately clinging to the burden of restraining a power no mortal tongue could name, no mind could fathom.
Klaus felt it — deep in his bones, in the recesses of his spirit. The unraveling had begun.
And so, he acted.
His essence surged, a tide rising against a dam, and he cast another silent command across the fabric of their shared link — not to Hassan, but to one who lay hidden beneath the earth.
Far below the Isle, in the silent crypt beneath the island's roots, Lich raised his skull to the darkness. His hollow sockets gleamed with pale awareness.
"So… it begins," he murmured without a voice, ancient sockets flaring with pale azure light.
He turned toward the array of runes that encircled the colossal ritualistic diagram — a diagram drawn with precision beyond comprehension, housing the distilled spirit essence of tens of thousands of beings. These runes had kept the diagram sealed, isolated from the world, suppressing its cataclysmic power like a dam holding back a storm.
But that was only half of their purpose.
The runes did not merely contain the spirit essence — they severed the diagram's link to its architect.
Klaus.
A single misstep, one premature connection, and the diagram would consume him. Months of tireless work would be reduced to ash. Klaus's spirit — his very core — would rupture, and he would perish not with a blaze of glory, but as a failure.
That was why the Lich, in his meticulous caution, had suspended the connection.
Until now.
Raising his skeletal hand, he whispered a silent invocation. The first rune flickered — then exploded in a burst of white-gold light. And like a cascade of falling stars, the rest followed. the runes began to collapse one by one, disintegrating in bursts of brilliant, radiant light. The darkness beneath the world bloomed into illumination.
And then — the connection reformed.
The reservoir stirred.
The Ritual Diagram recognized its creator. A luminous thread, thin as a spider's silk yet infinite in depth, linked the vast reservoir of spirit essence to Klaus. It traveled the ley-lines like electrons through sacred circuitry, flowing with divine purpose into its vessel.
Into him.
He felt it immediately — a wave of unbearable heat, as though molten fire had replaced the blood in his veins. His bones vibrated with resonance, his breath caught between agony and ecstasy. His body, powerful as it was, began to strain. His mind flared in defiance. But it was the spirit — the spirit — that trembled.
It was too much.
Not even the soul was as sacred as the spirit. The soul was memory, thought, emotion.
But the spirit was the seed of existence itself.
The origin.
And if that was destroyed… there would be nothing left.
Nothing.
Everything else would fade — flesh would rot, blood would dry, bone would crumble, mind would fracture or dissolve into the collective subconsciousness, shadow would slink away into the Shadow Realm and either be devoured or transmuted into drifting essence…
But spirit essence… it returns.
It always returns.
It was the breath between creation and oblivion. The cycle eternal — the hidden truth of all life.
And now, Klaus risked it all.
To damage the spirit was to court annihilation in its purest sense — not death, not oblivion, but erasure from all cycles of existence. But Klaus had always walked where others feared to step. He had studied spirits, communed with them, fought them, killed them. And so, he understood the cost.
Klaus's teeth ground against the oncoming flood of spirit essence, the torrent crashing into his demon core like a tidal wave of molten starlight. The intensity was suffocating, pressing against him with the force of a thousand storms, threatening to consume him from within.
Through the haze of agony, he heard the voice of the Spell—its tone as cold and indifferent as ever, devoid of mercy, as if it reveled in his torment.
Spirit Fragments: [3000/3000]
[Your Spirit Is Overflowing With Power.]
[Void Within You Is Expanding.]
A guttural, animalistic scream tore from Klaus's throat as he felt the formation of a new core deep within him. The process was agonizing—too fast, too excruciating. His body buckled under the pressure, each wave of spirit essence that coursed through him only amplifying the pain.
The Devil Core began to crystallize, but the process was far from complete. The spirit essence continued its relentless flow, an unyielding current, now filling his empty core with crushing, overwhelming intensity.
Spirit Fragments: [4000/4000]
[Your Spirit Is Overflowing With Power.]
[Void Within You Is Expanding.]
It never stopped. The suffering stretched endlessly, as if time itself had turned against him. Klaus's mind began to fray at the edges. His will wavered, threatening to shatter under the immense weight. Rest, his mind screamed, rest... just give in...
But Klaus knew there could be no rest. No reprieve.
Only Conquest remained. It was the fire that anchored his fractured mind, the singular drive that kept him tethered to this relentless task.
Spirit Fragments: [5297/7000]
Spirit Fragments: [6107/7000]
Spirit Fragments: [6819/7000]
His mind reeled, but Klaus pressed on. His spirit, now a storm of essence, raged within him as the seventh core was saturating. He he was now the Awakened Titan. But the pressure was far from over. The seventh core was continuing to fill, but Klaus could not allow it to reach its limit, for to do so would be to overflow his spirit beyond the capacity of his body and mind. He would die, consumed by the very power he sought to harness.
Instead, Klaus did the unthinkable.
He turned his back on creation.
Where others might have sought to form, he chose to destroy.
With a grim resolve, the intricate, ritualistic diagrams encircling his spirit cores activated. Thousands of geometric lines—some beautiful, some terrifying—lit up with an almost divine radiance. They rippled across his inner cosmos, each line resonating with an sinister power that vibrated through the very fabric of his being.
Then came the soundless shatter — like glass breaking in the vacuum between stars. One by one, the cores shattered, breaking into countless shards, each one carrying with it a sacrifice. Klaus, his body akin to a lifeless husk, lay there on the precipice of oblivion. He could no longer laugh. He could no longer move. His body was a prison. His will, fraying.
But there was still one thing he could do.
With a voice weak, strained, and hoarse, he whispered the true names—the True Names of Opening and Destruction—binding them together in a verse that only he could utter. Those words were anchors—fragments of reality itself. He poured every shred of his existence into them, into the verse.
As the final utterance left his lips, the hall of the Ivory Tower exploded in blinding amethyst light. The brilliance stretched beyond the tower's confines, spilling out over the city like a cosmic sunrise crashing down upon the earth. It was a vision both breathtaking and terrifying.
But Klaus had no time to appreciate the spectacle. Not when the storm of spirit essence was still tearing at him, tearing at his very spirit.
With every passing moment, the cores continued to shatter, the essence flowing, surging, but never stopping. Klaus was a mere conduit, the only thing standing between the raw power of the essence and the breaking of the chains that held Hope captive. The spirit essence poured through him, a vast, endless river—beyond anything he had ever known. But it wasn't enough.
It's not enough…
What can I do…
Klaus's bloodshot eyes widened, his breath ragged, as the realization hit him with a sickening clarity. And then, a hollow, breathless laugh escaped his lips, frail and weak.
The ring on his finger—the Devourer—shifted, twisting, unraveling into a pulsating amalgamation of darkness. In a brilliant flash, it solidified into a cube of pure light, radiant and locked with unearthly power.
The box, once cold and dim, now blazed with a brilliance that outshone the stars. The light that emanated from it was terrifying in its magnificence. It was as though the very heart of the universe had been unlocked.
"Wolves... Are meant to be free..."
"My wish is—"
The Box opened.
And the island was swallowed in a storm of violet light — not a light that shone, but one that devoured. As if a galaxy had collapsed and re-formed within the sky, pulling all of existence toward its singular will.
The Chains of Hope — eternal, divine, indomitable — trembled.
They cracked.
But they did not shatter.
Klaus's chest seized with frustration, his body trembling in blind fury.
Bloody hell...
For a moment, Klaus thought he had failed. But then, he saw it.
The cracks deepened, widening, spreading across the chains like a spider's web.
And Hope—the silhouette of her, breathtaking and radiant—stirred.
The chains, once unyielding, finally shattered, exploding into a cataclysmic shockwave. All the suppressed power that Hope had held in reserve was unleashed in a single, blistering moment. The light consumed everything in its wake, and Klaus was caught in the periphery of the explosion.
He was hurled across the chamber like a broken doll, colliding with the Tower's pristine white wall. Bones cracked. Vision blurred. Breath fled his lungs in a choked gasp.
"Ggk—!"
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. His body convulsed under the toll. And worse, his spirit — already battered and hollowed — was under siege once more.
Spirit essence… It poured back into him, reforming his shattered cores, dragging him back into the eternal cycle of suffering. Klaus had no peace, no pause, no end to the torment.
He was dying.
Again.
And yet…
In the final, fleeting moment before his mind was consumed by darkness, he released the amalgamation of blackness—a horrifying and ancient—toward the now-shattered chains, and with that final act, his vision blurred completely.
And then… everything went dark.
Now that all seven chains had shattered, severing the last tethers that bound the Ivory Tower to the Kingdom of Hope, the ascent began. At first, it was a slow, almost reluctant rise—like a breath held in anticipation. But soon, the very island on which the Tower stood surged upward with mounting momentum, abandoning the broken land below.
The once-beautiful architecture, hewn from radiant white stone, began to melt and weep under the mounting heat. Aerial bridges cracked and collapsed, elegant aqueducts crumbled into ruin, and streams of crystalline water hissed into scalding vapor. A hellish ocean of fire engulfed everything that had once been serene.
The wind howled like a mournful dirge, carrying with it the distant cries of the dying, the acrid smoke of immolation, and the sickening stench of burning flesh.
Thousands—those unfortunate enough to still cling to life—were consumed by the inferno, reduced to charred husks and smoldering ash.
The Ivory City… was dying.
At first, the change was almost imperceptible—a whisper of imbalance. But as the Tower ascended ever higher, the shift in power became undeniable.
The vast, invisible force that had long held the floating isles aloft over the yawning abyss of the Sky Below began to falter. The great enchantment that kept the Chained Isles suspended in defiance of gravity strained under the shifting center of mass, its intricate harmony unraveling thread by thread.
And then, it came.
The Crushing.
For the first time in eons, it descended upon the Chained Isles with merciless wrath.
Across the fractured remnants of the Kingdom of Hope, dust surged upward in violent columns. Primeval forests were flattened in an instant. Mountains cracked like glass. Rivers turned to steam and carved new paths in molten fury. Whole settlements were obliterated in the blink of an eye.
Beasts, humans, Nightmare Creatures—none were spared. They perished in silence, never knowing what calamity had devoured them.
The skyships, proud and many, bore the worst of it. In a heartbeat, every last one disintegrated—reduced to splinters, flame, and falling corpses. An entire army vanished without a scream.
The scale of the devastation defied imagination.
Above it all, Hope—the Demon of Desire—rose, her prison shattered.
She rose in silence, ascending ever higher, leaving behind only death and ruin. She did not look at Klaus, did not acknowledge the one who had bled and burned to set her free. As though his agony, his triumph, and his sacrifice meant nothing at all.
But then… she paused.
She moved—without motion, without sound—and suddenly stood beside him.
Her face, woven of both searing light and abyssal darkness, eclipsed the world. Her luminous eyes pierced the veil of his soul, searching through the deepest, most fractured recesses of his being.
And then came her voice.
It was not spoken—it was breathed into existence. It sounded like the rustle of a thousand leaves, like the echo of prayers whispered into dying flames, like the hush of wind drifting through the bones of dead stars.
"I wonder… do you still dream of endless chaos, Loved One Of The Void?"
...The Nightmare was over.
***
Hey everyone!
Guess what? The second nightmare is finally over—phew! This chapter gave me a headache... I actually deleted and rewrote it twice because my brain went, "Nah, this ain't it." But hey, third time's the charm, right?
So… what do you think? Is it good? Mid? Peak? I honestly can't tell anymore—I've stared at it so long I might be hallucinating. My expectations were sky-high, so maybe I overhyped it to myself. Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts (gently, please—my writer soul is fragile).
Big thanks to everyone who's stuck with me through all this madness. You guys keep me going.
Enjoy the chapter—and get some rest. We survived the nightmare!
***