The silence after war is never truly silent.
Beneath the shattered ruins of the celestial capital, where the banners of the old world still hung limp from broken spires, Kael stood amidst the ashes. The once-golden city of Elarion was now a graveyard of crumbled stone and scorched dreams. Wind howled through fractured archways, carrying with it the whispers of the dead.
Kael, no longer just the Gatekeeper, no longer merely the watcher of thresholds, now wore the title that struck both awe and fear—Abyss King.
His armor shimmered with threads of starlight and obsidian, pulsing faintly with the essence of the void. The ancient crown of the Depthborne sat crooked on his head—it didn't belong to him, not yet. Not until the chains of the old gods were broken, and the truth of the sky's betrayal laid bare.
Behind him, the survivors of the rebellion knelt—not in worship, but in quiet resolve. Among them: Solen, the starforged warrior with arms of meteorite and fire; Lirael, the duskblade who could cut the soul from a body; and young Thenn, the last Oracle, whose eyes no longer saw the world, but what waited beyond it.
"Is this what you wanted?" Lirael asked him, voice sharp as the blades at her hips. Her cloak was torn, blood-stained. "You have the throne now. But where are the people?"
Kael didn't answer. His gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the Foldgate had once hovered—a doorway to realms unspoken, now collapsed in a violent flare of cosmic wrath. The Foldgate's implosion had ripped a wound through reality, and something had begun to leak through.
Not demons. Not gods.
Something older.
"We're not done," Kael finally said. "The First Light still burns in the northern sky."
Solen stepped forward, his molten hand clenched. "We have nothing left to give, Kael. Half our forces are gone. The Skyfall Legion still hunts us. The Covenant of Starforge will retaliate. And you want to march north?"
Kael turned slowly. "I don't want to. But I saw what lay beyond the Foldgate before it broke. I saw the truth—the First Light is not salvation. It's a prison. And something is waking inside it."
Thenn, pale and trembling, nodded. "The stars scream in my sleep. A name keeps rising from the silence. 'Eclipse.'"
The group fell silent. That word had only been found in one place: etched into the ancient bones beneath the world, in the Lost Codex of Vaerel.
Lirael spat. "Then we burn the Light before it burns us."
Kael's hand fell to the hilt of his blade—no longer the standard issue of a gatekeeper, but a sword forged in the Abyss itself. It pulsed as if aware, eager.
"We leave by dusk," he said. "We march through the Wailing Plains. We find the remnants of the Starforge Covenant. And we take their truth."
"But what if the Eclipse has already begun?" Solen asked.
Kael's eyes darkened. "Then we end the sky."
And so began the next phase of the Abyss King's rise—not through conquest, but revelation. The world above had chained the world below for centuries. It was time to break the sky open, and see what bled from it.