The Verge was bleeding.
What was once a fragmented ruin of stone and steel had become a maze of shifting horrors. Walls bled black mist. Floors cracked open into pits of shadow. Adventurers scattered in chaos as monsters surged without end, birthed from rifts no one could explain.
Kael's party had pushed past three corrupted chambers already. Each one worse than the last.
Ryall had taken a gash across his ribs. Tessan was limping, one horn cracked from a brutal impact. Elira was silent now, her expression sharpened to survival.
Still, Kael pressed on.
Each step deeper into the ruin, the whispers grew louder.
"Return… fragment of what was stolen…"
The voice called to him not with malice, but with hunger. With familiarity.
Elsewhere, the Fangs of Silence fled.
Their mission was done.
The breach had been opened. The sealed being was stirring. Their pact fulfilled.
No loyalty remained. No interest in the ruin's survivors or the chaos left behind. They vanished into the wilderness, leaving death to ferment.
In their wake, the Black Union advanced.
Draped in glyph-marked cloaks, their heads bowed in reverence to the rift pulsing with corrupted life. Unlike others, they did not fear what lay within. They sought communion. They sought power.
At the lead was a man with no aura. No presence.
Yet even the ruin's monsters recoiled from him.
"The voice calls," he muttered, smiling faintly. "Let the false world end. Let the devourer rise."
Back with Kael's group, something had shifted.
The air began to fold literally, the space around them bending inwards, a corridor collapsing into itself and then reforming, now leading into a new hall none of them had seen before.
Tessan blinked. "That wasn't here before"
"It wants us to go this way," Kael said, his voice calm.
Ryall stared at him. "How would you—?"
But he already knew the answer.
Kael was changing.
Every technique shown to him, he absorbed. Every creature they fought, he dissected mentally adapting to their patterns, mimicking their movements, even without training. It was unnatural.
And the whispers… only he heard them.
Hours passed.
They fought through a cathedral of bone and flame. Through a forest grown underground its trees formed from fossilized flesh. Through halls where light bent in reverse, and time stuttered, causing past versions of themselves to flicker in and out like broken projections.
Then… silence.
They entered the final chamber.
A dome-shaped cavern, unlike anything above. The architecture was alien twisted spires stretching down from the ceiling like roots of a god. At the center floated a monolith made of obsidian glass, rotating slowly above a pit of starlight.
Kael stepped forward first.
The moment his foot touched the monolith's platform, the whispers ceased. Replaced by a voice deeper than reality.
"Fragment… returned…"
The starlight pulsed and something began to rise from beneath.
It was not a creature.
It was not even a god.
It was an echo. A concept wearing form. Its face was a mirror of void. Its body draped in forgotten runes. Eyes if they were eyes burned with a darkness older than the stars.
Kael fell to one knee, clutching his chest. His mask cracked slightly, a thread of black leaking from beneath it like smoke.
The being spoke again.
"You are the Black Sun. The seed of unmaking. You are not meant to remember me… not yet…"
Kael tried to stand, but the chamber bent around him, the air vibrating with invisible pressure.
Ryall shouted, but the sound warped.
The entity turned not toward Kael but toward the Black Union, who had just entered from the opposite side.
They knelt in reverence.
"Devourer," the leader intoned, "we offer ourselves. Feed upon our flesh, our thought, our blood grant us your gift."
Kael's breath hitched.
The entity began to descend its form unraveling into shadowed tendrils, crawling across the chamber.
And behind them… the walls screamed.