The snow falling over Vermillion Gate was wrong.
Kazimir Ahn-Ra noticed it as he stood before the obsidian doors of the Grand Celestial Hall, watching flakes drift past his face like dying moths. Snow was supposed to be white—pure, clean, the color of fresh beginnings. That's what the poets wrote in their verses, what children sang about during winter festivals.
This snow was grey.
Not a soft grey, either. It was the bruised, heavy grey of old corpses, thick with industrial soot from the Eisenherz foundries to the west and the necrotic dust that sometimes blew in from the Al-Shams desert tombs to the south. Each flake fell like a lead weight, coating the capital in a shroud that smelled of oil, ash, and something sweet-rotten that Kazimir had learned not to think about.
The snow didn't flutter. It dropped. Like the world itself was too tired to make anything beautiful anymore.
Kazimir's breath misted in the freezing air. Minus thirty degrees celsius—a standard winter evening for the Zimny Perlas quarter of the city, where the Frost-blooded nobility made their estates. For anyone else, standing outside without mana-reinforcement would mean frostbite within minutes.
But Kazimir wasn't cold.
Well, he was. His teeth chattered and his fingers were numb. But that wasn't what made him tremble like a leaf in a storm.
It was the pain.
Always the pain.
He looked down at his hands, forcing them steady through sheer willpower. They were pale—too pale, almost translucent, like rice paper stretched over bone. Blue veins stood out in stark relief, pulsing with a rhythm that didn't match his heartbeat. There were three different pulses, actually. Three different frequencies trying to flow through the same channels, slamming into each other like drunks fighting in an alley.
Faint, jagged scars ran up his wrists. Not the clean, proud scars of battle. These were medical. Surgical. The marks of extraction needles inserted week after week for three years.
Just a little longer, Kazimir told himself, clutching the lapels of his coat tighter. Tonight changes everything.
The coat was the last piece of his old life, back when people called him "Young Master" instead of "Mongrel" or "that thing." It was a heavy military-style trench coat of midnight blue wool, embroidered with golden thread forming the sigil of the Ra bloodline—a sun with nine rays—and lined with the silver fur of the Ahn family crest—a frost wolf mid-howl.
But the gold was tarnished now, the thread fraying. The fur was moth-eaten and patchy. The wool was threadbare at the elbows, and there was a stain near the hem that he'd tried to scrub out but couldn't.
It was a prince's garment worn by a beggar.
No, Kazimir corrected himself. Not a beggar. A battery.
That's what Elara had called him when she thought he was unconscious after their last extraction session. "My little battery," she'd cooed to her handmaid while he lay in a pool of his own vomit. "So dense with mana, even if he can't use a drop of it himself. What a waste it would be to let all that power just sit there, rotting."
He'd pretended to stay unconscious while she laughed.
But tonight—tonight she'd make it right. She'd promised. Three years ago, when he'd been desperate enough to believe anything, she'd whispered promises in his ear with fingers that traced his jawline like he was precious.
"Your blood is special, Kaz. It's so dense, so potent—like a mana spring condensed into a person. If you let me borrow just a little... I can become strong enough for both of us. And when I'm a High Mage, when I'm standing among the stars, I'll heal you. I'll fix what your parents broke when they made you. I'll elevate you to my side."
He'd given her everything.
Week after week, he'd let her sink those silver needles into his veins and pull out the thick, iridescent blood that carried raw, unaligned mana. It left him bedridden for days, vomiting black bile and seeing double. His Soul Core would spasm, the three warring frequencies tearing at each other even harder without the blood to cushion them.
But Elara had grown radiant. From a minor baron's daughter with barely Kindling-rank resonance, she'd risen to Flame-rank within a year. Now she stood at the threshold of Inferno-rank—a feat that usually took a decade of dedicated cultivation.
She'd become a candidate for the Imperial Court Mages.
She'd become untouchable.
And tonight—the Winter Solstice Ball, the grandest celebration of the year—she'd announce their engagement to the Empire. She'd reveal that her secret was her fiancé, that she'd been cultivating through their bond. She'd ask the Emperor to grant Kazimir a noble title in his own right, to forgive the scandal of his mongrel blood because of the service he'd rendered.
She'd promised.
The massive steam-pistons flanking the cathedral-like doors hissed, startling Kazimir from his thoughts. White vapor erupted from the brass cylinders, smelling of ozone and myrrh—the scent of Purification Arrays activating. Somewhere deep in the door mechanism, gears the size of wagon wheels ground together with a sound like dying thunder.
The obsidian doors began to open.
Music spilled out immediately, heavy and rhythmic. It was the Solstice Waltz, played by an orchestra of automatons and—if rumors were true—bound spirits that the Court Necromancers kept for these occasions. The melody was beautiful in a cold, mechanical way, like something that knew what emotions were supposed to sound like but had never actually felt them.
Kazimir took one last breath of the freezing, sooty air. He checked his reflection in the polished black steel of the doorframe.
He looked terrible.
His angular face was gaunt, cheekbones jutting out like knife edges. His amber eyes—the only feature he'd inherited from his Ra grandfather—were sunken deep in their sockets, ringed with the purple-black of chronic exhaustion. His jaw was shadowed with three days of stubble because he hadn't had the strength to shave. His hair, which should have been a lustrous black, hung limp and greasy.
He looked like a ghost haunting its own body.
She'll fix this, Kazimir thought, forcing his spine straight. She loves me. She said she loves me.
He stepped over the threshold into light and warmth and music.
The heat hit him like a physical slap. After the freezing cold outside, the Grand Celestial Hall felt like stepping into a furnace. It smelled of roasted boar, expensive perfumes with names like "Cherry Blossom Dawn" and "Eternal Spring," and the sharp copper tang of active magic saturating the air.
The hall itself was a architectural monstrosity, beautiful and terrible in equal measure. It was where the three great powers of the Tri-Continental Alliance met, and each had demanded their architectural legacy be represented.
The ceiling was a holographic projection of the Al-Shams night sky, powered by Solar Resonance arrays. Constellations moved in real-time, and the stars weren't illusions—they were actual pinpricks of burning plasma held in formation fields. Looking directly at them hurt.
The pillars were Eisenherz engineering at its finest: columns of black steel engraved with defensive runes that hummed with a bass note just below human hearing. Each rune pulsed with a faint grey light—Steel Resonance made manifest. Touch one without permission and the pillar would liquefy your hand.
The floor was Zimny Perlas craftsmanship: crystal so clear and perfectly formed it looked like walking on frozen air. Beneath it, in a layer of enchanted water, koi fish the size of wolves swam in lazy circles. They weren't normal fish—their scales were every color of the aurora, and their eyes glowed with intelligence that was deeply unsettling.
Kazimir's boots—worn, leaking melted snow—squeaked on the crystal floor.
The sound cut through the music like a knife.
Heads turned.
Oh, how they turned.
The nobility of the Tri-Continental Alliance were not subtle creatures. They didn't glance—they stared, making sure you knew you were being examined and found wanting.
To Kazimir's left, a Duke from the Eisenherz Dominion stood seven feet tall, his left arm replaced entirely by a steam-powered hydraulic prosthetic that hissed and clicked with every movement. He was drinking wine from a goblet made from a skull—possibly real, probably criminal—and his eyes were replaced with brass optics that whirred as they focused on Kazimir.
To his right, a Duchess from the Zimny Perlas Kingdom wore a gown made of living ice that misted around her feet. The dress never melted because it wasn't water—it was her mana made solid, constantly renewed. Two snow leopards the size of horses sat at her feet, their eyes the same glacial blue as hers, connected to her by thin chains made of frozen wind.
When they saw Kazimir, the conversation didn't stop.
It changed frequency.
"Is that him?" a whisper floated through the air, sharp and deliberate enough that Kazimir knew he was meant to hear it. "The Ahn-Ra failure?"
"Look at him. He looks like a corpse that forgot to lie down."
"Why is a mongrel allowed at the Solstice? Isn't this supposed to be a celebration of purity?"
"I heard he has no affinity at all. Three bloodlines, three Primal Frequencies, and he can't even light a candle."
"My handmaid said she saw him collapse in the market last month. Just fell over like a puppet with cut strings. They thought he was dead, but no—just another seizure."
"Embarrassing. If I were his family, I'd have had him quietly disposed of years ago."
Kazimir kept walking. He'd learned long ago to let the word "mongrel" wash over him like rain. It was the favorite insult of the Pureblood faction, used so often it had lost its sting.
Well, that was a lie. It still stung. But he'd learned to pretend it didn't.
In Aeternys, purity was power. Purity was destiny. The Doctrine of Purity—the founding principle of most major kingdoms—stated it clearly: the gods died so their children could inherit their strength, and diluting that inheritance was spitting on their sacrifice.
A pure bloodline meant your ancestors had served only one god, allowing your Soul Core to resonate with a single Primal Frequency without conflict. Those people could cultivate smoothly, advancing through the ranks with only their talent and effort as limits.
A mixed bloodline—two frequencies—meant internal conflict, slower cultivation, and a lower ceiling. But at least the two frequencies could eventually learn to coexist. With discipline and careful technique, a mixed-blood could still reach Flame-rank, maybe Inferno if they were exceptional.
Three frequencies?
That wasn't cultivation. That was suicide.
Steel demanded order and structure. Frost demanded chaos and freedom. Solar demanded consumption and expansion. Put them in one body, and they'd wage war for dominance until the body destroyed itself.
Most three-frequency mongrels died before age ten, their Soul Cores tearing themselves apart.
Kazimir had made it to twenty-three.
He was a medical miracle and a social abomination.
The church called him proof of the Doctrine. Living evidence that mongrel blood was divine punishment. His very existence was a sermon they preached to keep bloodlines pure.
But Elara doesn't care about that, Kazimir reminded himself, navigating through the crowd like a shadow avoiding the light. She sees my value. She sees what I can become.
He bumped into someone.
"Watch it, trash."
The voice was cold, clipped, aristocratic. Kazimir looked up into the face of a young knight, maybe nineteen, clad in solar-plate armor that gleamed like solidified sunlight. The crest on his chest marked him as a member of the Radiant Order—the Al-Shams military elite.
"I—I apologize," Kazimir mumbled, stepping back. His legs almost gave out, but he caught himself.
The knight looked him up and down with undisguised disgust. "You're that mongrel, aren't you? The Ahn-Ra mistake. I've heard about you."
Kazimir said nothing. What could he say?
"My instructor uses you as an example," the knight continued, a cruel smile playing at his lips. "He says, 'This is what happens when nobles think with their cocks instead of their duty. This is why we maintain purity.' You should thank him, really. You're quite educational."
The group of young nobles around the knight laughed. Not loud, mocking laughter—that would be beneath them. Just polite chuckles, the kind you made at a moderately amusing joke.
Kazimir's face burned, but he bowed his head and moved on. Don't make a scene. Not tonight. Elara is counting on me to behave.
Then he saw her.
The crowd near the raised dais at the far end of the hall parted like the Red Sea, and there, standing beneath the golden light of a floating chandelier powered by captured starlight, was Lady Elara Sol-Hara.
Kazimir's breath caught in his throat.
She was breathtaking.
She wore a gown of woven sunlight—not metaphorical sunlight, but actual photon-threads harvested from the Solar Resonance arrays in the Al-Shams desert. The fabric clung to her curves like liquid gold, warm enough that Kazimir could feel the heat radiating from her from twenty meters away. Her hair—a cascade of honey-blonde curls that seemed to glow from within—was adorned with a tiara of stardust diamonds that cost more than a small estate.
She looked like a goddess.
She looked like his goddess.
Kazimir took a half-step forward, a smile breaking across his gaunt face—
Then he saw who she was standing next to.
The smile died.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered, and carried himself with the kind of effortless arrogance that came from being powerful and knowing it. He wore the charcoal-grey military dress uniform of the Eisenherz Dominion, but his epaulets were solid platinum—the mark of royalty. His eyes were the color of gunmetal, hard and cold and assessing.
Crown Prince Viktor von Eisenberg.
The strongest Steel Resonance user of his generation. A combat prodigy who'd reached Inferno-rank at age twenty-one. The heir to the Eisenherz Dominion and the loudest voice in the Pureblood faction.
He was also the man who'd publicly advocated for the sterilization of mongrels during last year's Continental Council.
Why is she with him?
Kazimir's mind raced, panic fluttering in his chest like a trapped bird. It must be protocol. She's a Court Mage candidate now. She has to pay respects to the royals. That's all this is.
Elara was laughing at something Viktor said, her hand resting delicately on his bicep.
That's... that's just formality. Political courtesy.
As if sensing his gaze—as if the weight of his stare had mass—Elara turned.
Her eyes, bright blue and glowing with mana, met Kazimir's amber ones.
For exactly one second, Kazimir smiled. It was a weak, hopeful expression that cracked his pale face like ice breaking. He took a half-step forward, ready to go to her side, to stand beside her as she'd promised—
Elara didn't smile back.
She looked at him with the same expression someone might have when spotting a cockroach on a wedding cake. Mild annoyance. Disgust. And worse than either of those—boredom.
She leaned up on her tiptoes, her lips brushing against Crown Prince Viktor's ear as she whispered something.
Viktor's eyes found Kazimir. A smile spread across his face, slow and cruel as a knife across a throat.
He nodded to someone out of sight.
The music stopped.
The silence that crashed down on the Grand Celestial Hall was so sudden, so complete, that Kazimir heard his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.
Three beats. Then silence. Then three more beats.
His Soul Core was stuttering. The three frequencies were colliding again, and without Elara's recent extraction to relieve the pressure, they were hitting harder than usual.
No. No, something's wrong. This isn't—
"Lords and Ladies of the Tri-Continental Alliance!" Elara's voice rang out, clear as a bell.
She didn't need to shout. A Wind Resonance rune pinned to her dress amplified her voice, carrying it to every corner of the vast hall with perfect clarity.
Kazimir's heart hammered against his ribs. This is it. She's going to call me up. She's going to announce—
"Tonight," Elara said, her voice melodious and sweet, "is a celebration of purity."
Kazimir started walking forward. Just a few steps. Enough to be closer when she called him.
"A celebration of strength," Elara continued, spreading her arms to encompass the assembled nobility. "As many of you know, I have recently advanced to the rank of Flame, and my instructors believe I will reach Inferno within the year. My mana capacity has tripled, my resonance clarity has increased by forty-seven percent, and I have been granted the honor of candidacy for the Imperial Court Mages."
Polite applause rippled through the room.
Kazimir clapped the hardest, his hands trembling. Yes. Yes, she did it. And I helped. We did it together.
"However."
That one word silenced the applause instantly.
Elara's expression shifted. Her smile faded, replaced by something somber. Practiced. She was an excellent actress—Kazimir had watched her rehearse expressions in the mirror before minor social functions.
This expression was her "reluctant truth-teller" face.
"However," she repeated, "progress requires sacrifice. More than that—progress requires the wisdom to recognize when we have been... misguided."
Kazimir stopped walking. Something cold slithered down his spine.
"For the past three years," Elara said, and her voice took on the tone of someone confessing a sin, "I have been burdened by a regrettable charitable endeavor."
Charitable endeavor?
"I was young," Elara sighed, walking to the edge of the raised dais. Her eyes found Kazimir in the crowd. "I was naive. I believed—truly believed—that even the most tainted, broken things could be fixed with enough care. Enough love."
The word "love" hit Kazimir like a physical blow.
"I entered into an engagement with Kazimir Ahn-Ra," Elara declared, and her voice hardened, "out of pity."
The room went so quiet that Kazimir could hear the koi fish swimming beneath the crystal floor.
Every eye turned to him.
He felt naked. Exposed. Like someone had stripped away his skin and left his organs on display for the court to examine.
"Elara?" he whispered. No one heard him.
"I thought," Elara continued, her voice taking on a lecturing tone, "that his mixed blood could be purified. That through careful cultivation and the right techniques, we could isolate one frequency and suppress the others. I consulted with healers, scholars, even Regressionist cultists who claimed to have ancient knowledge."
She shook her head sadly.
"But I was wrong."
Kazimir's hands were shaking. Not from the cold. Not from the Soul Core stuttering. From something deeper, something breaking.
"Science and magic agree," Elara said, and now her voice was hard as steel. "A mongrel is a genetic dead-end. Three divine frequencies in one vessel is not a gift—it's a curse. A punishment for ancestral sin. Dirty blood cannot be cleaned."
She reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a scroll.
Kazimir recognized it immediately. Red ribbon. Gold seal. The engagement contract they'd signed three years ago when he'd still been able to walk without pain.
"It can only be discarded," Elara finished.
With a flick of her wrist, she ignited a small flame on her fingertip. The fire was bright and pure, the color of sunlight. Solar Resonance made manifest.
She touched it to the contract.
The paper curled, blackened, and crumbled to ash.
"I, Lady Elara Sol-Hara, do hereby annul my engagement to the mongrel Kazimir Ahn-Ra, on the grounds of irreconcilable genetic incompatibility and the preservation of my bloodline's purity."
Something inside Kazimir's chest snapped.
Not his heart. Hearts didn't break—that was just poetry. What broke was the fragile illusion that had kept him breathing for three years. The delusion that his suffering had meant something. That he was building toward something better.
"No," Kazimir heard himself say. His voice was small, broken.
The crowd began to titter. Soft laughter, hidden behind fans and raised goblets.
"Furthermore," Elara said, and now—now—she smiled.
It was the smile of a predator that had just made the kill and was about to feed.
"I am pleased to announce that my compatibility with true greatness has been confirmed by the Imperial Resonance Testers. Tonight, I pledge myself to His Highness, Crown Prince Viktor von Eisenberg."
The applause was thunderous.
Viktor stepped forward, wrapping a proprietary arm around Elara's waist. He pulled her close, staking his claim in front of everyone.
She melted into him, tilting her head up to smile at him with an expression Kazimir had thought—had believed—was reserved for him alone.
No.
Kazimir didn't think. Couldn't think. For the first time in his life, the rage burning in his chest was hotter than the agony in his veins.
He lurched forward, boots slipping on the crystal floor. "You... you can't!"
His voice cracked, broke, came out as a hoarse scream.
He pushed past a startled Duke, nearly falling, catching himself on a pillar. The defensive runes flared, warning him, but he didn't care.
"Elara!" Kazimir screamed. The sound was raw, ugly, animal. "I gave you everything! My blood! My life! You promised—you said I was your savior!"
The crowd gasped. A mongrel screaming at a future Crown Princess? It was heresy. It was madness.
Elara looked down at him from the raised platform.
She didn't look angry.
She looked amused.
"Savior?" Elara laughed. The sound was like glass breaking, sharp and bright. "Oh, Kazimir. You poor, deluded creature."
She stepped closer to the edge of the dais, looking down at him with genuine pity.
"You weren't a savior, darling. You were a battery."
The word hung in the air like a curse.
"Your mongrel blood is useless for casting spells," Elara explained, her tone patient, like she was explaining something simple to a child. "The three frequencies cancel each other out. But raw, unaligned mana? The kind that sits in your veins doing nothing? That's wonderfully dense. Potent."
She examined her fingernails, bored.
"I didn't love you. I was farming you. And now?" She looked back at him, eyes cold. "You're empty. You're a husk. You're used up."
She waved her hand dismissively, like shooing away a fly.
"Someone please take out the trash."
Kazimir reached the bottom of the stairs leading to the dais. His hand was outstretched, fingers hooked like claws. He wanted to climb those stairs. He wanted to reach her. He wanted to wrap his hands around her throat and squeeze until—
BOOM.
The air in front of him exploded.
A boot—clad in heavy steel, glowing with a grey aura of reinforced resonance—slammed into Kazimir's chest with the force of a hydraulic press.
There was a sickening crunch of bone.
Kazimir's feet left the ground. He flew backward through the air, weightless for one horrible moment, before crashing onto the crystal floor.
He slid ten meters, leaving a smear of dark, unhealthy blood on the pristine surface.
He tried to inhale.
His lungs were full of fluid.
He coughed, and red spray painted his chin, his chest, the floor.
Crown Prince Viktor stood over him, lowering his leg with mechanical precision. His steel-reinforced boot gleamed, spotless despite having just caved in Kazimir's ribcage.
"You dare," Viktor's voice was a low growl, vibrating with barely contained power, "approach her? You dare speak to my betrothed with that filth-stained mouth?"
Kazimir tried to push himself up. His arms shook violently. His vision swam with black spots. One of his lungs was definitely punctured—he could feel it deflating, hear the wet whistle of air escaping somewhere it shouldn't.
"She... liar..." Kazimir wheezed.
Viktor walked over, his heavy boots echoing like a funeral drum. He stopped right next to Kazimir's head.
"She is a Pureblood," Viktor said simply, as if that explained everything. And to him, it probably did. "And you are a mistake."
Viktor raised his hand.
The mana in the room surged, drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet. The decorative steel swords hanging on the pillars began to rattle in their mounting brackets.
"Please," Kazimir whispered.
He wasn't begging for his life. He was begging for the truth. For someone to admit that this was real, that the woman he'd loved had just publicly destroyed him for sport.
He looked past Viktor's legs at Elara.
She was checking her fingernails. Bored.
That casual apathy hurt worse than the broken ribs.
"This creature," Viktor announced to the room, his voice carrying with practiced authority, "has insulted the Royal Family. More than that, his very existence is an insult to the purity of our nations."
Viktor grabbed the collar of Kazimir's coat—the coat with the family crests, the last piece of his old life.
With one effortless motion, he ripped the embroidery away.
The golden threads of the Ra bloodline—the nine-rayed sun. The silver fur of the Ahn lineage—the howling frost wolf. Both torn away, shredded, reduced to loose threads on the floor.
"I strip you of your names," Viktor spat. "You are no longer Ahn. You are no longer Ra. You are nothing."
He kicked Kazimir in the stomach.
Kazimir curled into a ball, retching. Blood and bile poured from his mouth.
"Guards!" Viktor barked.
Two automatons stomped forward. They were disposal units—crude, inelegant machines designed for heavy lifting and waste management. They smelled of grease and rust, and their grinding gears were loud enough to hurt Kazimir's ears.
Metal hands clamped around his arms, hauling him upright. His legs dragged uselessly behind him.
"Where shall we dispose of the waste, Your Highness?" one of the automatons droned in a flat, mechanical monotone.
Viktor smiled. It was the kind of smile that made Kazimir understand—truly understand—that some people enjoyed cruelty the way others enjoyed music.
"The Winter Solstice is a time for cleaning, isn't it?" Viktor mused. "Sweeping away the old year's trash to make room for new beginnings."
He gestured lazily toward the floor.
"Throw him in The Maw. Let the Forgotten Things have him."
The crowd gasped.
The Maw of Forgotten Things—the Reality Rift beneath Vermillion Gate—was where the capital disposed of its mistakes. Failed magical experiments. Cursed artifacts. Political prisoners who needed to vanish without a trial.
No one had ever returned from The Maw.
Elara finally looked up from her nails.
Her eyes met Kazimir's one last time.
She blew him a kiss.
"Goodbye, little battery," she said sweetly. "Thank you for your service."
The journey to the castle's bowels was a blur of pain and darkness. Kazimir faded in and out of consciousness, aware only of the cold grip of metal hands and the sickening lurch of a service elevator descending, descending, descending.
The sounds of the party faded above him—laughter, music, the clink of glasses.
They were toasting. Celebrating.
They'd already forgotten him.
The elevator stopped with a grinding shudder. The air down here was different. Stale. Thick. It smelled of sulfur and rot and something else—something old and patient and hungry.
"Disposal sequence initiated," one of the automatons chirped pleasantly.
Kazimir was hauled to the edge of a precipice.
He forced his eyes open, looking down.
Below him was darkness. Not the darkness of a room with the lights off. Not the darkness of a moonless night.
This was the darkness of nothing. Of void. Of a hole torn in the fabric of reality itself.
The Maw breathed.
Kazimir could feel it—a rhythmic pulse of air that shouldn't exist in a sealed space. Something down there was alive.
He didn't struggle. What was the point? His body was broken. His Soul Core was burned out from years of extraction. His heart...
His heart was just a lump of cold coal in his chest.
Is this it? Kazimir thought, staring into the infinite black. Born a mongrel. Used as a tool. Died as trash.
But as the automatons prepared to release him, something else flickered to life in his chest.
Not hope. Hope was for people who still believed things could get better.
This was hatred.
Cold. Sharp. Pure.
He didn't want to rest. He didn't want peace. He wanted to watch their world burn. He wanted to wrap his hands around Viktor's throat and feel his windpipe collapse. He wanted to see fear in Elara's perfect blue eyes.
I curse you, Kazimir thought, screaming it inside his mind with every ounce of consciousness he had left. I curse you to the stillness of the grave. I curse your bloodline to rot. I curse your names to be forgotten.
The automatons released him.
Kazimir fell.
Wind roared in his ears. The darkness swallowed him whole. He fell for seconds that stretched into hours, the sensation of gravity warping, twisting, until he wasn't sure which direction was down anymore.
The pressure increased. It felt like being crushed in a vice.
Then—
CRACK.
Impact.
Kazimir's body hit something that snapped and crunched beneath him. Not stone. Something else.
He groaned, tasting copper. His spine was shattered—he couldn't feel his legs. One of his lungs had fully collapsed. His left arm was bent at an angle that arms didn't bend.
But he was alive.
Barely. Technically. In the way that a crushed insect was alive for a few moments before finally dying.
He opened his eyes.
Pitch black. Absolute darkness.
But he could feel what he was lying on.
Bones.
Thousands of them. A mountain of calcium and keratin and the remnants of things that had been alive once. Ribcages of beasts. Skulls of men. Femurs of giants. All of it piled in a grotesque cairn at the bottom of The Maw.
Kazimir coughed, spitting out a tooth.
So this is how I die, he thought, staring up at the nothingness. Alone in the dark.
Then, a voice.
"You are loud."
The words didn't come from the air. They vibrated directly into Kazimir's skull, resonating in his very bones. The voice sounded like tectonic plates grinding against each other—ancient, heavy, and impossibly vast.
Kazimir froze.
He wasn't alone.
"Your soul," the voice continued, echoing with a strange metallic distortion, "it is screeching. Like a wounded animal. Like a broken bell that won't stop ringing."
A sound echoed in the cavernous darkness.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack.
Metal footsteps.
Something was walking toward him.
Kazimir strained his neck, forcing his head to turn despite the agony. In the absolute darkness, he saw—
Light.
Thirty meters away, a pair of eyes flickered into existence. They glowed with a terrifying crimson luminosity, vertical slits like a dragon or a viper.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim red light radiating from those eyes, Kazimir saw her.
She sat on a throne made of black obsidian and skulls, encased in a translucent amber barrier that looked like it had been there for a thousand years. The barrier was cracked, spiderwebbed with fractures, but still intact.
She was massive. Even seated, she loomed. She wore armor of jagged blackened steel that seemed fused to her skin, etched with glowing red runes that hurt to look at. Her skin was the color of dark bronze, flawless and hard as stone. Her hair was a cascading river of liquid silver that floated around her head as if underwater, defying gravity.
But it was her presence that terrified him.
The air around her twisted and warped. Reality itself seemed to glitch near her throne, pixels of the world flickering in and out of existence.
The woman—the thing—leaned forward, resting her chin on a gauntleted fist. She looked at Kazimir with those burning red eyes.
She didn't look at him like Elara had—like he was an insect.
She looked at him like a predator examining a curious piece of meat. Interested. Hungry.
"Tell me, little mongrel," she said, and the pile of bones beneath Kazimir rattled from the force of her voice.
"Do you desire death?"
A pause. The crimson eyes narrowed.
"Or do you desire to kill them?"
Kazimir coughed. Blood bubbled on his lips. He looked at the monster in the dark—the thing that shouldn't exist, the nightmare made flesh.
He should be afraid. He should be praying to the Seven Dead Gods.
But the gods had abandoned him.
Everyone had abandoned him.
So Kazimir bared his bloody teeth in a rictus grin and gave the only answer that made sense.
"I want..." he rasped, his voice barely a whisper yet echoing in the silence.
"I want... to kill them all."
The woman on the throne smiled.
It was a terrifying expression, revealing teeth that were too sharp, too white, too many.
The amber barrier cracked.
"Good answer."
[END CHAPTER ONE]