The void remembered everything.
Not in the way memory clings to life, but in the way fire remembers fuel—by consuming it completely.
And in the heart of that void stood Abyssus, unmoved.
Before him, the six Heralds remained in tension, still caught in the echoes of the Hall of Want. The seductive illusions had crumbled. The warmth had faded. The Seed—small, motionless, barefoot stood among them in the shadow of its cosmic progenitor, a flickering ember between colossi.
But then, something snapped.
Not in Abyssus. Not in the Seed.
In the Heralds.
Three of them—Korayn, Vashiel, and Luminara had seen too much. Their judgment cracked under the weight of everything they could no longer
understand. They looked to the child, no longer innocent in their eyes, but a weak point, a tether. A trapdoor.
If they could kill it… maybe they could sever Abyssus. Unmake him. Or delay the inevitable.
They moved.
Blades ignited. Aether surged. Thought became action.
They struck.
And in that instant…
Abyssus responded.
There was no light, no roar, no telegraphed gesture.
Just absence.
A swiping arc through the fabric of everything across time, soul, gravity, and will. A motionless devastation.
The three Heralds did not even fall.
They were unmade.
Korayn, once a Titan of ash and mountain, was reduced to an elemental scatter that never touched the ground because gravity forgot how to claim him.
Vashiel, songweaver of galaxies, had her symphony reversed into a scream so loud it erased itself and her with it.
Luminara, radiant judge of dying suns, blinked once and was replaced by her own shadow, which then bled into the dirt, lifeless.
Gone. Without ritual. Without farewell.
Abyssus stood unchanged.
The Seed did not move. Not even to look.
The Hall of Want—its false angels, endless mirrors, erotic gods, seductive avatars—all crumbled as if ashamed of their failure. Their beautiful forms twisted and collapsed into dust. The Hall of want, illusions or otherwise, was utterly disintegrated.
Abyssus turned toward the remaining three Heralds—Seraphiel, Theron, and Elysia with the calm of an entity that did not care, yet acted nonetheless.
He spoke.
“The child is not protected. The child is me.”
The voice was velvet and death. Silk draped in razors.
“You may return to your fractured realms.”
“But know this…”
The sky peeled open like a second mouth. The void itself twisted into a spiral, fractal and eternal. Inside it, futures bled backward, realities where the Heralds were slaughtered, their planets imploded, their children fed to oceans made of teeth.
“Sacrifice your greatest loves,” Abyssus whispered. “Burn your most treasured truths.”
“If you fail...”
“I will end every life in your universe. Slowly. Unforgivingly.”
“And I will loop your souls through the screams of those you failed, across every version of yourselves that could not resist me.”
Silence followed.
The Seed looked up, blinking once. Still calm. Still small. Still part of the storm.
And with that…
Abyssus vanished.
The Heralds were hurled across dimensions, flung back to the broken worlds they once called home, carrying nothing but memory, grief and the ticking threat of extinction.
Elysia landed in silence.
Not with a crash, not with grandeur but with the slow descent of ash upon marble. Her boots touched the glass-like stone of the Sanctum of Mirrors, the headquarters of the Astral Concord. Her people, once vibrant, met her eyes with terror.
They saw it in her face: Luminara was dead.
And worse they felt what followed her.
The light in the stars seemed… dimmer.
The warmth of suns slightly hollow.
The air carried an echo, like reality had been grazed by something it could not comprehend and would never recover from.
Across the galaxy, in the iron-spired citadel of Theron’s Dominion, the warrior-priest dropped to one knee. His arms trembled, not from pain, but from something he could not name. He was a god to millions, but in that moment, he felt like a child cast into fire.
“He didn’t fight them,” Theron murmured to the chamber of High Judges.
“He didn’t strike. He didn’t speak.”
“They simply ceased.”
The room was silent.
Not out of reverence.
Out of terror.
Seraphiel, eldest of the Heralds, stood alone upon a bridge of stardust, floating high above the Black Cradle, the first planet she had ever saved.
There were no tears. No screams.
Only the bitter taste of knowing that Abyssus had let her live.
Not because she mattered.
But because she had not yet been required to die.
She looked to the heavens, and in the folds of space, she could feel him watching. Not with judgment.
But like a gardener watches a root fail to grow.
The message was clear:Sacrifice all that you love.Destroy what gives you meaning.Or everyone dies.And they will relive their deaths... forever.
Elsewhere, in hidden shrines, underground labs, and cursed worlds, the surviving Heralds gathered what they could. Lore. Weapons. Ancient pacts. Forbidden devices. Whispers of gods older than time, long-buried.
But in every plan, one truth remained:
None of it was enough.
One archivist, trembling in a forgotten moon-library, unearthed a passage older than recorded history. Written in soul-blood, encoded in fractals:
“He who was not born, cannot be undone.”
“He who predates time, will inherit its end.”
“And from him shall come a thousand deaths, and each one worse than the last.”
Abyssus had no origin.
He did not arrive.
He had always been.
And so, no god could judge him.No death could cage him.No dream could survive him.
The Heralds met once more, through projection, through fracture echoes, through forbidden rites.
Seraphiel spoke first.
“We cannot survive him.”
Theron growled, “Then we must change the rules.”
Elysia, eyes hollow, whispered, “Or become monsters like him.”
A beat of silence.
Then Seraphiel raised her head.
“No,” she said. “We must become worse.”
“We must become impossible.”
In the black of the void, Abyssus watched.
Not as a being might watch, he did not possess eyes in the conventional sense, nor did he require focus. His observation was something deeper. More intimate.
To see for Abyssus was to consume the idea of a moment.
And across the billions of light-years now pulsing with dread, he observed the surviving Heralds as one might regard dying stars—beautiful, irrelevant, and fated.
He knew they would try.
They always did.
Meanwhile, in a long-forgotten tomb beneath the Spine of Vem’Renn, the Heralds reunited in physical form. The tomb had once been the site of a pact made by the First Pantheon—a grave-marker not for a person, but for a truth too dangerous to live.
There, inscribed into the bones of titans and the walls of eternal ice, was the only thing the Heralds had ever sworn never to speak aloud.
And yet…
They spoke it now.
“The Forge of Shattering.”
Elysia said it, though her voice trembled. The name alone frayed the edges of her soul.
Theron clenched his fists.
“We swore—”
“We died to keep it buried,” Seraphiel said, her voice iron. “But three of us are already gone. Abyssus can kill us at any moment. And he hasn’t. Not because we’re worthy…”
“But because we amuse him.”
A silence.
Unbearable.
Then Elysia stepped forward and pressed her hand to the coffin-shaped slab of obsidian.
The glyphs responded.
The tomb opened.
Inside, glowing faintly in hues unknown to physics, was a weapon that did not exist.
Not forged. Not built.
Chosen.
The Forge of Shattering was not a blade or gun or relic.
It was an event.
A concept too sharp to survive in linear time.
A machine designed to do one thing:
Unwrite the rulebook of creation.
Theron stepped back.
“It can erase constants. Reroute causality. It could destroy everything just by being used.”
Seraphiel nodded grimly.
“That’s why we’ll only activate it when he strikes again. When there’s no other chance.”
Elysia whispered:
“What if he wants us to use it? What if this is all a game to push us toward that?”
They said nothing.
The Seed, untouched, hidden on a distant world now sleeping, pulsed softly.
Its heart still beat.
Abyssus still allowed it to live.
For now.
But somewhere, across layered multiverses, Abyssus tilted his head ever so slightly.
He had just birthed three new clones, each designed to fight a version of an ancient god-simulation in another reality. The clones won instantly, splitting their host dimensions in half and feeding the fragments into their next iterations.
And still, the Heralds believed.
Still, they plotted.
He allowed it.
Because even meaningless resistance had a shape.
And Abyssus collected shapes.
Like children collect bones.
The deadline loomed.
Across all realms, the echo of Abyssus’s ultimatum had become more than prophecy. It was a law, embedded in causality itself.
Time bent around it.
Even the most stubborn stars began to dim—dying early, not from age, but from dread.
Every surviving Herald now stood at a crossroad: Sacrifice all that they love, or lose everything that breathes.
Elysia, once the Guardian of the Astral Library, returned to her homeworld of Solenne. There, waiting for her, was her wife, Vara and their daughter, Nima, born of cosmic weave and mortal blood.
They ran to her.
They embraced.
And Elysia stood silent, arms around them, knowing her next breath could be her last with them.
“Is it true?” Vara asked, voice shaking. “The children feel it. The people have begun to dream of their own ends.”
Elysia nodded.
“I’ve been told… to kill you. Or all of you will die.”
Vara stared. Nima did not understand.
Elysia could barely stand.
But she left.Without a word.To make the decision elsewhere.
In a forest lit by drifting moons, Seraphiel stood beneath a shattered tree she once raised herself, when love still meant something.
A single name burned in her hand, carved into skin, unwilling to fade:
Kael.
Once her bonded, now bound in the Cryosleep of Promise, waiting for the war to end.
Abyssus’s demand rang louder now, crawling into the marrow of her bones:
“You will end them, or I will end your universe.Slowly.With glee you will never understand.”
She screamed.
A silent scream that only the tree heard.
And then she began her walk.
Theron was different.
He stood on the peaks of his war-forged world, alone. His people had long since been trained to die well.
But love?
Even war-priests loved.
Deep below, in the Vault of Honor, stood Ivos, his twin brother. A brilliant tactician. A poet. The other half of him.
Theron watched the world one last time.
And then descended the mountain.
Not with regret.
But with fire.
Elsewhere...
Abyssus watched.
And laughed.
But not aloud.
He had no laughter.
Only the shadow of what laughter might be, if humor had ever mattered to a being who transcended irony, empathy, or cruelty.
“They will break,” he murmured to nothing.
“And if they do not…”
He turned to the Seed.
“You will.”
The child looked up.
Its eyes flickered.
It was learning.
Not hope. Not fear.
Pattern.
And that was more dangerous than anything.
Twelve seconds.
That’s how long it took.
From the moment Abyssus opened his hand… to the moment three Heralds were erased.
It began with the sky splitting open—not in thunder, not in flame, but in silence.A cleaving of reality itself, as though existence had been torn like wet paper.
And in the midst of it—
Oblivion.
Kael was the first to go.
Seraphiel had returned too late. She had decided. She would not kill him.
Abyssus didn’t care.
The moment she stepped into his cryo-chamber, the entire vault collapsed into a point of inverted space—folding him into an echo of time that never was.
His final breath froze in her lungs.
Her scream broke the walls.
But Kael?
Gone.
Not dead.
Never existed.
Vara and Nima were next.
Elysia had been in orbit, weapon aimed at the ground, fingers trembling above the trigger. She couldn’t do it.
Her family smiled up at the sky, unaware.
And then the sun shattered.
It cracked like glass—not with fire, but with a sound like hope dying.
Their bodies were turned to particles.Then concepts.Then… forgotten.
Elysia’s eyes bled silver.
Her scream echoed across the void of twelve systems.
Ivos never saw it.
Theron was three feet from him.
About to explain.
About to beg for understanding.
Then Abyssus snapped his fingers—not because Theron hesitated—but because he didn’t.
Abyssus had been… bored.
So he ended Ivos with a whisper.
And Theron’s sword shattered against the wall behind him—striking nothing but memory.
Three Heralds collapsed.
Not physically.
Existentially.
Three minds broke.Three souls fractured.Three immortals fell to their knees and wept, though none of them believed in sorrow anymore.
Abyssus floated into their minds.
Not in words.
Not in voice.
But in dominion.
“I told you what I would do,” the voice said, from inside their bones.“And I have.”
“You are not special.”
“You do not deserve exceptions.”
“And yet…”
“I will give you one more gift.”
The world bent.
The Seed stood before them, unharmed. Eyes wide. The shape of a child. The weight of a dying star.
Abyssus turned to the others. The survivors. The remaining Heralds and loyal warriors who had clung to the idea that they still had time.
“You have seven revolutions of your stars,” he said, in pure law.
“Kill what you love. Destroy your dreams. End your gods. Burn your temples. Salt your hopes.”
“If even one of you fails—”
“I will return.”
“And I will let every soul live their death ten thousand times.”
“As a child watches.”
He gestured toward the Seed.
“You call it pure.”
“I call it my mirror.”
“We will see… who becomes me first.”
And with that, he vanished.
But not like vanishing.
More like the memory of him was forcibly pulled out of every atom in the air—leaving behind a hole in causality that nothing could ever fill.
The Seed stood in the ruins of the chamber.
Alone.
Eyes empty.
Watching the stars.
One of them flickered.
Then blinked out.
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