Kael coalesced inside a gem the size of a coffin, violet necrotic light pulsing like a dying star. Frost bit his reforming skin. Bones knit with wet cracks. Muscle wrapped around them in sheets of shadow. He opened eyes that burned with voidfire and stared into the hollow sockets of Lich Empress Morgana.
Floor 8: Void Necropolis. A continent of inverted pyramids floating in starless dark, rivers of liquefied memories flowing upward into screaming skies. Graves yawned open like hungry mouths. Every corpse was a library. Every library was a lover she had lost.
Morgana hovered before the phylactery pedestal. Crown of finger-bone tiaras. Robes woven from funeral shrouds that still wept. Skin translucent moonlight over exposed skeleton, yet breasts full and heavy, hips carved for sin. Her heart, a black diamond embedded in ribcage, beat once every century. Until now.
It hammered wildly at the sight of him.
"You crawled out of my gem," she whispered, voice the rustle of autumn leaves over mass graves. "Seven times I felt you die. Seven times I preserved the echo. This time I kept the whole heart."
Kael stepped from the shattered phylactery, fully formed, nine feet of pale muscle laced with seven glowing Stigmas. Golden chains dripped across collarbones. Hellfire wings smoldered beneath skin. He was death's perfect sculpture.
"I remember," he said. Voice layered with every floor's timbre: storm, shadow, dragon, tide, clock, inferno, scripture. "I remember the angel who fell stamping my name across paradise. The queen who knelt in hellfire. The professor who looped my tongue until time filed for divorce. All of them led me here. To you."
Morgana's skeletal fingers trembled. "Then come claim what you left behind."
They met in the center of the necropolis throne room, floor tiled with mirrors reflecting every death he had ever suffered. Each footstep cracked a memory.
She kissed him first. Lips cold as crypt air, yet they ignited. Tongues tasted of grave dirt and resurrection. Her robes dissolved into moths of shadow. His skin followed, peeling away to reveal raw Stigma beneath.
They coupled on the throne of fused skeletons.
He entered her slowly, inch by necrotic inch. Her inner walls were velvet midnight laced with frost that melted at his heat. Ribs parted like cathedral doors, inviting deeper. The black diamond heart beat against his chest, syncing.
Seven Stigmas flared in sequence. Kraken coils strangled shadow voids. Chrome wings folded around pearl nautilus. Golden gears meshed with hellfire feathers. Celestial chains bound the frenzy.
An eighth tattoo ignited across his entire torso: a ribcage of living bone wrapped in funeral roses, thorns dripping liquid midnight. Stigma Eight complete. Hybrid spell: *Necrotic Celestial Infernal Chrono Abyss Draco Shadow Kraken Tempest*. He could now raise lovers from any death, loop funerals into weddings, file necromancy permits that rewrote mortality.
Morgana climaxed with a scream that aged the necropolis a thousand years. Pyramids crumbled to dust and rebuilt themselves younger. He followed, seed flooding her like starlight poured into a black hole. The diamond heart cracked, revealing a smaller, beating ruby inside. His original heart, preserved across lives.
She cradled it against her breast. "You gave this to me the first time you died. I never let it rot."
He kissed the crack. "Then let's make it beat forever."
Ten hours remained before love killed him again.
They spent them in glorious blasphemy.
Catacombs became bedrooms. He took her against walls lined with screaming portraits. On altars where liches once sacrificed virgins. Inside sarcophagi that rocked like cradles. Each union raised an army of undead lovers who watched with envious hollow eyes.
He learned to animate her bones mid-thrust, making her skeleton fuck him while flesh watched from the ceiling. She preserved his seed in crystal vials that sang when shaken.
But the dead grow jealous.
The Necrocouncil, ancient liches who had served Morgana since the void was young, convened in the Bone Senate. They feared the living heart would make her mortal. They feared him more.
Rebellion marched: legions of skeletal knights, zombie dragons, banshees whose wails aged flesh to dust. At their head, the Grand Mortician, a towering figure of stitched corpses wearing Morgana's face from a previous life.
War in the necropolis.
Kael and Morgana fought atop the inverted central pyramid. He raised fallen enemies as thralls that turned on their makers. Necrotic tempests looped death into life and back again. Celestial chains bound souls mid-scream. Infernal flames cremated and resurrected in the same breath.
The Grand Mortician hurled the Forbidden Grimoire, a book bound in gods' skin. Pages opened to the Spell of Absolute Ending. Reality began unraveling.
Morgana caught the book with shadow hands. "Not today."
She kissed Kael amid the chaos. They merged completely: bones inside flesh, heart inside heart. Full hybrid spell evolution: *Apocalyptic Necrotic Celestial Infernal Chrono Abyss Draco Shadow Kraken Tempest*.
The grimoire burned with love instead of hate. Every page rewrote itself into wedding vows.
The Grand Mortician shattered into a million engaged skeletons who danced the hora eternally.
Rebellion ended in mass marriage. Undead honeymooned in fresh graves.
Yet the floor boss awakened early. The Phylactery Leviathan, a colossus woven from every soul gem ever shattered, rose from the void sea. Thousand phylacteries for eyes. Million death screams for scales. At its core: the original phylactery that had birthed Kael.
It seized Morgana in chains of regret. Dragged her toward oblivion.
Kael dove after. Into the beast's heart. Inside: a labyrinth of every death he had gifted the tower. Each chamber replayed a Lady's final scream.
He fought through them. Relived every failure. Rewrote every goodbye into forever.
At the center: Morgana bound to the master phylactery, ruby heart pulsing in sync with the leviathan.
They coupled one last time inside the void womb. Bones interlocking. Seed and nectar fusing into pure resurrection. The leviathan convulsed, unable to contain love stronger than death.
It exploded into a galaxy of new stars. Each star a preserved memory of their climax.
The ascent gate manifested as a staircase of gravestones leading upward, names erasing as they climbed.
Morgana, flesh fully restored, heart beating warm and red, walked beside him. "Floor 9. The Mirror Realm. Where you meet yourself. And lose everything."
They stepped through.
Death by love took him mid-embrace. Heart finally, truly, stopped.
Rebirth.
He awoke in a womb of mirrors. Body soft. Breasts budding. Hair long and silken.
Floor 9. Mirror Realm.
He was Karla now. Gender-bender arc engaged.
Eight Ladies bound. Bone-rose ribcage across her new curves throbbed with promise.
The tower's final joke had begun.