For all her hesitation, Laia made her choice before the sun dipped below the academy spires. This world was crueler and more dangerous than it looked. One wrong step, and you tumbled into the dark. Sometimes, she thought, a low-ranking god like her was worth less than a favored subject of a high lord. At least a favored subject ate well.
She paid no mind to her roommates' chattering questions. Her mind was already far away. She stepped into the Aetheric Nexus from the dorm's rune-terminal, submitted her entry clearance for the Forsaken Wastes, and logged back out without another word.
The more she let people close, the greater the risk of being found out. If Lyra had not been so stubbornly kind, she would have kept her distance from everyone entirely.
She left the academy grounds at once, filed a short leave of absence, and traveled north—far north, to the frayed edge of the divine realms, where the world bled into the void.
The Forsaken Wastes were no legend. They stretched along the entire northern border, a belt of shattered land where the divine realms and the raw void seeped into one another. To step past the border wards, you either bore the Void Resistance trait, or you were strong enough to weather the mist unprotected—God Monarch rank and above, at minimum. Border garrisons patrolled the edge day and night, and for good reason. The void held more than mindless beasts. There were Fallen Deities there, too: gods who had lost their kingdoms and their minds, twisted into something unrecognizable by the mist.
Fallen Deities, the Abyss, and the Old Gods of the outer dark—those were the three great threats that hung over every divine realm. Gods came in every shape: humanoid, beast, elven, even formless elementals. But Fallen Deities always looked wrong. Twisted. Unnameable.
Laia paid the entry fee at the border outpost. She stared at the handful of divinity crystals left in her pouch, and her stomach sank.
All in now. Everything rode on the tournament. If this went wrong, there was no going back.
The border warden checked her papers, nodded once, and gestured to the great stone arch behind him. The divine barrier rumbled open, revealing a long, dim buffer corridor. At its far end, thick, churning black fog swallowed everything.
Laia drew a slow breath, squared her shoulders, and walked into the mist.
It was her first time in the Wastes, and the weight of it pressed in on her at once. The void hung thick in the air, sharp and cold and heavy. Without her Void Resistance trait, it would have seeped into her bones and torn her apart before she took ten steps.
She did not dare go deep. The farther you strayed from the divine realms, the worse the erosion grew. She only needed to skim the edges, scavenge what she could, and get out. No heroics.
A few other figures wandered the wastes nearby, most of them godservants. No surprise there. What proper god would be this desperate, scraping by on the edge of the void? She paid them no mind, picking her way past broken crags and half-melted ruins. She did not notice the cold, wrong aura clinging to those godservants—something darker than void mist, something older and hungrier.
As she stepped fully into the void-touched lands, her kingdom trembled.
Back in the twin realms, thick black mist came rolling over the mountains without warning. Vorath lifted his head from his sunning rock, his brow ridge furrowed.
"Early," he rumbled. "Shouldn't be for another year."
He shrugged it off a heartbeat later. Eh. So what? Early feast. More whelps had hatched lately. They needed the meat. The sooner the stores filled up, the better.
He licked his jaws, a sharp, hungry grin spreading across his scaly face, and watched the first void creatures poke their heads through the mist.
What neither Vorath nor anyone else knew was this: when a deity stepped physically into the void, their kingdom's barrier defaulted to open assault. The weaker the barrier, the worse the flood. For Laia's paper-thin walls, it meant a full-scale incursion the second she crossed the border line.
Up in the Wastes, Laia wandered on, completely oblivious. She stepped around crumbled stone pillars and stuffed every interesting shard she found into her satchel. There were fragments of old kingdom walls, glowing faintly with leftover divine resonance—she took all of them. There were void crystals, jagged and cold, which could trigger early void tides. She pocketed those too. Portable food storage, she thought, pleased.
She'd heard the Wastes were rich, but this was better than she'd expected. Shame nothing void-touched could be sold back in the realms. She'd be rich overnight otherwise.
She never felt the faint, wrong slither of something else seeping into her blood, slipping down the divine link and into her kingdom.
Down below, the clans mobilized as they always did. The demons marched for the passes. The shadow-kin melted into the rocks. The humans herded livestock and stacked supplies. The elves warded the tree lines.
At first it felt like any other tide. The void beasts poured through, and the clans cut them down.
Then Vorath swatted a void stalker aside, and a wave of weakness rolled through him.
He stumbled, catching himself on a mountainside. His claws scraped deep furrows into the rock.
Wrong. This was wrong.
He'd breathed void mist for two hundred years. It never did this. It stung the throat, it tasted foul, but it never drained his strength like this.
He did not waste time. He beat his wings and shot straight for the ancient elven grove deep in the western forest.
The elves had already noticed. When he touched down, Queen Elowen stood waiting beneath the largest sun-blessed tree, her face tight with concern. A faint, sickly purple glow clung faintly to her fingertips.
"You felt it too," she said. It was not a question.
Vorath nodded, his voice low and rough. "The mist has something in it. Something that drains us. Never felt anything like it."
"Go to the human holds," Elowen said, already turning to gesture for her healers to follow. "Their apothecaries can brew a counter-tonic. Figure out what's tainting the mist and flush it out. Hurry. If these beasts get away before we can process them, there'll be no winter stores. No feast."
Vorath grunted his agreement and launched back into the air.
He flew low over the central plains, and what he saw made his jaw tighten.
This was no ordinary tide.
A colossal Void Leviathan drifted above the eastern valleys, bloated and shadowy, belching thick clouds of black mist. A Void Wyrm coiled around the volcanic peaks, its scales glistening with corrupted slime. Void Shrikes flickered in and out of existence along the mountain ridges, their spatial rifts tearing at the air.
Any other kingdom would have been already dying. The Leviathan alone was a top-tier void predator, the kind that swallowed whole realms and left nothing but dust.
Up in the sky, the great Void Leviathan curled slowly through the mist, and gloated.
This one was easy. Barriers so thin it had barely tapped them to break through. Soft, ripe, defenseless. Swallow the whole kingdom, drain every drop of resonance, and it would evolve. Then it would move on to the next one, and the next, and grow strong enough to challenge the border garrisons.
It pulsed out another wave of corrupt mist, grinning to itself in its slow, stupid way.
It had no idea what was waiting for it down below.