The first thing Qaritas noticed was the absence of pain.
Not numbness.
Not shock.
Absence—as if the concept had been plucked out of him and thrown into the lava trenches to hiss and evaporate.
His lungs drew breath without resistance. His ribs did not grind. His arms—moments ago blue and dead—hung at his sides like they belonged there, whole and obedient.
He lifted one hand.
The air around his fingers warped.
Not heat.
Not pressure.
A bend, subtle and wrong, like reality had to decide whether it was allowed to exist close to him.
Qaritas looked down at himself.
His skin was void-black. Not dark brown, not shadowed flesh—starless space, absolute and lightless, swallowing the glow of lava and torch and lantern with no reflection. The rainforest canopy above him looked dimmer where his presence reached, as if green forgot how to be green in his orbit.
His veins glowed beneath that blackness like galaxies caught under ice. Thin constellations of violet and pale gold threaded along his forearms, pulsing in slow, tidal rhythms. Not blood.
Something older.
His hair had turned silver, falling in jagged strands across his brow like moonlight trapped in a storm. It moved faintly though there was no wind, as if the void itself breathed through it.
And his eyes—
Purple.
Not bruised-purple.
Not human.
A deep, luminous violet with a hard, ancient light at its center. They did not shine.
They watched.
Qaritas raised his gaze.
The battlefield had changed.
The circle of erased forest around him remained—a clean radius of nothing where trees had been and were now simply not. Beyond that boundary the rainforest kingdom still thrashed and steamed, rivers black with churned mud and spattered blood, lava pits bursting like artillery.
Thousands of Griefspawn ringed him.
Hunched giants of fermented grief with iron-hard claws and red eyes that hated the fact of being alive. Some had been torn apart by Nez's fangs. Some had been flattened beneath her bulk.
They were reforming.
Bodies collapsing into clotted shadow and broken bone—
then stitching back together.
Limbs regrew with wet snaps. Skulls re-formed with grinding clicks. Iron crowns fused again as if welded by a memory of rage.
They didn't fear death.
They didn't understand it.
Qaritas looked down at Nez.
She was still massive—dragon-sized shadow-cat with ribs like black stone beneath fur that drank the light. Her eyes burned pale and hungry. Blood—if it could be called that—spilled from gouges in her flank, but the wounds were already knitting with writhing darkness.
Nez stared at him as if waiting for the command that had never existed before.
Qaritas's mouth opened.
His voice came out calm.
"Up."
Nez lowered herself without hesitation.
Qaritas stepped onto her back as if he'd done it his whole life.
The Griefspawn surged.
Not in ordered ranks.
They gathered like a landslide deciding it wanted to be a wave.
Nez roared—a sound that dragged shadow behind it like a cape—and launched forward.
The ground shook.
Trees snapped as her shoulders drove through trunks. Lava hissed where her paws struck damp earth. Rivers splashed black water as she leapt a channel in one bound.
Qaritas leaned low, fingers sinking into shadow-fur, and drew Rivax's weapon.
It didn't gleam.
It didn't glint.
It simply existed in his hand like a missing tooth in reality.
The first Griefspawn reached for him—tusked mouth splitting wide, claws rising to tear him off Nez's spine.
Qaritas swung.
The weapon did not slice.
It removed.
The Griefspawn's arm vanished mid-motion, not severed, not bleeding—gone. The creature stumbled, confused, as if it had forgotten it was supposed to have a limb.
Then its head disappeared.
Then its torso.
Not in pieces.
In absence.
Its roar cut off like a voice erased from a story.
The air where it had been felt colder for a second, like the universe was embarrassed it had allowed it to exist at all.
Two more leapt.
Qaritas flicked the spear once.
They vanished in a blink. No gore. No bone. No collapse.
Just an empty gap in the oncoming crowd.
The Griefspawn behind them did not stop.
They trampled into the gap as if trying to fill it with more anger.
Nez hit them like a siege engine.
Her claws tore through one Griefspawn's chest, shadow shredding rotten flesh. Her jaws clamped down on another's shoulder and ripped it sideways, snapping spine and crown.
They fell—
and began reforming even before they hit the mud.
Qaritas stabbed downward.
The spear touched the re-forming shadow.
The Griefspawn did not scream.
It ceased.
Not dead.
Not even erased in a dramatic way.
Simply unmade.
As if grief had tried to become flesh and the void had said:
No.
Qaritas moved with brutal economy.
He didn't swing wide.
He didn't flourish.
Each strike was a decision.
Presence removed.
A Griefspawn climbed Nez's side. Qaritas turned and jabbed without looking.
Gone.
A pair tried to hook Nez's legs with crude iron chains. Qaritas swept low.
Chains vanished.
Hands vanished.
The Griefspawn stared down at empty wrists, mouths open in offended disbelief.
Qaritas erased them mid-thought.
He felt no strain.
No pain.
Only power—smooth and vast, a quiet ocean he could drown the world in if he chose.
Nez barreled forward, clearing space. Qaritas carved absence into it.
Dozens vanished.
Then hundreds.
The rainforest kingdom became a slaughter map: broken trunks, steaming mud, lava splashes cooling into black glass, rivers running thick with ruined soil.
The Griefspawn kept coming.
Their numbers did not thin.
Because every time he erased one, two more climbed out of ruptured ground behind him.
Because the earth itself was a mouth now, vomiting grief into the arena.
Because Hrolyn stood at the center of it all, unmoving, staff planted like an anchor, threads in his body tightening and loosening with invisible intent.
The Old God did not raise a hand.
He did not command aloud.
But the Griefspawn gathered around his stillness like insects around a dead star.
Qaritas watched one reform after being torn in half by Nez. It stitched itself back together from fragments of blackened essence, crown fusing, eyes burning red again.
It raised its cleaver and charged.
Qaritas erased its head.
Its body kept running for two more steps.
Then collapsed.
Then began reforming again—head rebuilding like a memory forced back into shape.
Qaritas's jaw tightened.
He stabbed the reforming head.
Erased it again.
The Griefspawn's essence writhed, trying to reassemble.
Qaritas stabbed again.
Again.
Again.
Each touch removed more.
But the ground under it pulsed with Hrolyn's curse, dragging fragments back into existence like a hook yanking fish from deep water.
Qaritas realized something cold:
They weren't dying.
They were being insisted upon.
He looked up.
The ring of Griefspawn had thickened.
Not a thousand.
More.
Their howls layered into a grinding choir. Trees fell as they shoved through. The river turned sluggish with bodies and mud. Lava pits erupted, splashing red across grey-green flesh.
They didn't care.
They were tantrums given muscle, and the world was their wall to punch until it broke.
Nez snarled and surged again, but claws raked her flank and shoulders, grabbing hold, dragging her weight down.
Qaritas erased hands. Arms. Heads.
More replaced them.
A Griefspawn leapt high, cleaver raised, aiming to bury it into Qaritas's spine.
Qaritas turned and erased the cleaver.
The Griefspawn's arms continued the swing anyway, as if the weapon still existed. It stared at its empty hands in a moment of genuine confusion.
Qaritas erased it mid-confusion.
He breathed in.
The air shuddered.
His veins pulsed like galaxies brightening.
Power pooled in his chest.
Not pain.
Not strain.
Hunger.
He looked at the battlefield and felt it—an urge to stop picking them off one by one.
An urge to become what he had been before people gave him a name.
A pressure behind the eyes, like something inside him leaning toward totality.
Nez roared as another wave hit her.
Qaritas closed his eyes.
And let go.
The world fell away.
His body dissolved—not into smoke or shadow, but into absence wearing motion.
The shape of him lost edges. Skin became void. Bone became irrelevant.
He merged with the darkness spilling from him—not the shadows cast by lava and trees, but the deeper void that existed behind light.
The battlefield dimmed.
Not because night fell.
Because presence was being eaten.
Griefspawn charged into it and slowed, limbs lagging as if their bodies couldn't remember how to be physical.
Then they vanished.
Not individually.
In clusters.
In swaths.
A wave of erasure rolled outward from Qaritas's spreading void, swallowing tusked faces, iron crowns, antlered skulls.
They blinked out like bad thoughts.
The rainforest canopy shivered as a black hole bloomed between two towering trunks.
It was small at first—no bigger than a shield—an ink-dark sphere that made the air around it bend. Leaves spiraled toward it. Mud lifted in little tendrils. Lava at a nearby pit pulled inward, glowing red thread stretched toward the sphere.
Then the sphere opened wider.
A whole tree leaned sideways as if drunk and was pulled in root-first.
It didn't splinter.
It disappeared.
Another black hole formed near the river. Water surged toward it, the surface flattening into a smooth, terrible curve. The river screamed in foam and was devoured, leaving a gouged channel of wet earth that steamed in confusion.
Griefspawn ran toward Qaritas's void and were erased mid-stride.
One Griefspawn ran headlong into the spreading void.
Its lower half vanished mid-stride.
It kept clawing forward with its hands, dragging ribs and spine through mud, roaring in confusion.
Its scream cut off when its shadow disappeared first.
Some tried to howl.
Their mouths vanished first.
A Griefspawn swung a cleaver toward the spreading darkness.
The cleaver vanished.
Then its arms.
Then its name.
Because the void did not only remove bodies.
It removed the idea of them being there.
Memory collapsed.
The battlefield forgot what it had just held.
The Griefspawn's curse fought back. Their essence writhed and tried to stitch itself together—
but where the void touched, there was nothing left to stitch.
No fragment.
No smear.
No trace.
Erasure.
Absolute.
The crowd in the stands—Fragments and gods and dead things—felt it like pressure behind their eyes.
A Lovecraftian wrongness.
A cosmic denial.
The air itself trembled as if afraid to carry sound.
Even the volcano's rumble faltered again, uncertain.
Qaritas—spread into formless void—expanded.
Black holes bloomed like flowers of annihilation across the battlefield.
Griefspawn vanished by the hundreds.
Then thousands.
The rainforest kingdom was being punctured, gutted, forgotten.
And with each swell of power, Qaritas felt himself thinning.
Not weakening.
Becoming.
His thoughts stretched into wide, cold distances. His identity loosened like a knot untying.
He could feel the old Qaritas—the one who had been forgotten, overlooked, treated like an inconvenience—
slipping away.
Because nothingness was easy.
Nothingness was quiet.
Nothingness didn't have to endure.
His name slipped.
Not forgotten.
Loosened.
Q—
The rest refused to form.
He tried to remember who he had been before the arena.
Before the chains.
Before the rage.
There was only distance.
He felt himself wanting to stop being a person.
Stop being a boy with broken arms and fear and anger.
Stop being a body.
Stop being someone.
Become absence.
Become the answer that erased the question.
He felt the void inside him smile.
A fist hit his face.
Not outside.
Inside.
A punch that did not belong to physics.
Qaritas snapped back into a mindscape of black glass and starless sky.
He staggered.
Eon stood in front of him, eyes blazing, knuckles dark with ancient force.
He hit Qaritas again.
"You are not nothing," Eon snarled.
Qaritas's head whipped sideways. He tasted void.
"I am," Qaritas hissed, voice layered with the formlessness still clinging to him. "I was never—"
Eon grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against an invisible wall.
"You were underestimated," Eon said, teeth bared. "That is different."
Qaritas's vision flickered—battlefield flashes, Nez struggling, Griefspawn closing, Hrolyn still as a dead god.
Eon leaned closer.
"A nobody can conquer worlds," he said, voice dropping into something sharper than fury. "Do you understand that? The best part of being born as nothing is the advantage."
He shook Qaritas once, hard enough to crack the air.
"They will underestimate you," Eon growled. "They will laugh. They will call you weak. They will think you are a mistake."
His eyes burned with a terrible, proud certainty.
"That is what makes you dangerous."
Qaritas's breath hitched.
Eon released him with a shove.
"Be a nobody," Eon said. "And take empires anyway."
Eon smiled.
Qaritas did not.
The difference mattered.
The words hit like a hook in his ribs.
Not pain.
Anchor.
Qaritas felt his identity knot back together.
His name returned.
His body returned.
His eyes opened.
He snapped back into the arena behind a shattered tree trunk, half the rainforest around him reduced to an impossible circle of absence and warped space.
He was kneeling in mud.
Breathing.
His silver hair fell into his eyes. His void-black skin drank the lava glow. His veins pulsed too fast, galaxies flickering beneath the surface like something unstable.
The void around him was still moving.
Black holes still trembled at the edges, hungry spheres wobbling like they didn't want to close.
He lifted a hand and forced the nearest one to collapse.
It winked out with a soft, sickening pop, leaving air that felt bruised.
Qaritas swallowed.
His throat was dry though he didn't understand how a void could have dryness.
Eon's voice brushed his mind, calmer now but edged with warning.
Breathe.
Qaritas inhaled slowly.
The void shivered but held.
You're losing control, Eon added. If you become absence, you don't come back.
Qaritas pressed his forehead to the broken tree trunk for half a heartbeat, grounding himself in splintered bark and heat and mud. Outside the circle, Griefspawn still gathered, confused, angry, reforming where they could.
Nez's roar cut through the chaos—deep and furious.
Qaritas lifted his head.
He was about to move—
when a soft voice spoke from his right.
"Are you okay?"
Qaritas turned.
Her eyes flicked past him—to Hrolyn standing at the center of ruin.
For a fraction of a second, something raw flashed there.
Not fear.
Rage
Old and personal.
A woman crouched beside him as if she belonged there, as if lava and Griefspawn and gods were just weather.
Her eyes were pink and red, bright and strange, like sunset caught in blood. Black wavy hair framed her face, and her armor was red and black—warrior-made, fitted for motion, marked with scars that looked earned rather than decorative.
He recognized her.
He'd only seen her asleep.
Only seen her as a myth in stillness.
Xheavend.
Ascendant of the Apocalypse.
Hero of the 1990 universe.
She smiled at him like she'd known him longer than he'd known himself.
Qaritas's mouth opened.
No sound came out.
She didn't wait for permission.
She leaned forward and kissed his forehead once.
The world sharpened.
Time stretched thin.
Suddenly Qaritas could see—
Not visions in poetic haze.
Moves.
Trajectories.
The twitch of a Griefspawn's shoulder before it lunged.
The angle of a cleaver swing before it happened.
The path of lava spray before the pit erupted.
Everything in front of him unfolded like a map.
Xheavend pulled back, eyes steady.
"Thirty minutes," she said quietly.
Qaritas stared.
She kissed his forehead again.
This one felt different.
A key sliding into a lock.
A door left ajar inside his skull.
Her voice dropped even softer, almost apologetic.
"That one is for Eon," she murmured. "He can activate it whenever he wants."
Qaritas's throat finally worked.
"Why—"
She cut him off with a small shake of her head.
"I didn't want to," she said. "But your grandmother begged me."
Ayla.
The name hit like a ghost-hand on his spine.
"She asked me to help her beloved," Xheavend continued, eyes flicking briefly toward the stands. "The fragments won't notice. Not if we do it like this."
Qaritas choked on a laugh that wasn't amusement.
"She did," he rasped.
Xheavend's smile turned sharper.
"I made a vow," she said simply. "To protect you until you understand your power."
Behind them, Griefspawn howled as they pushed inward again, testing the edge of Qaritas's erased circle like insects prodding glass.
Xheavend stood.
No flourish.
No announcement.
Just motion.
She glanced at the battlefield, then looked back at Qaritas.
"Ready?" she asked.
Qaritas didn't answer fast enough.
Xheavend's eyes glinted.
"Doesn't matter."
She sprinted toward the nearest lava trench.
Her boots hit mud and rock like drumbeats.
A Griefspawn swung a cleaver at her head.
She ducked under it, spun, and drove a short stick—just a stick—into its knee. The creature staggered.
Then she leapt.
Straight into lava.
The fragments in the stands erupted in laughter, delighted, thinking they'd just witnessed suicide. Thinking they'd watched Qaritas's ally—if they even understood who she was—get devoured.
The lava roared.
Then it bulged upward.
And Xheavend rose out of it.
Skin melted off her arms in steaming sheets—only to re-form in the same breath. Her hair clung wetly to her face, then dried instantly. She looked like war crawling out of a furnace.
For an instant, the stick in her hand became a sword.
Not metal.
A black hole shaped into an edge.
She swung it once.
A cluster of Griefspawn vanished into a tight spiral of annihilation.
Then the sword snapped back into a stick.
She grinned.
"Let's make this unfair."