The fires hadn't yet died, but silence had begun to creep through the ruins.
Smoke curled into the sky like the ghosts of fallen empires. Cracked marble pillars stood like broken teeth. The capital of Andrelia, once the jewel of the Celestial Order, was now a scar on the land.
Graxion stood at the heart of it all—bleeding, breathing heavily, one knee in the rubble, his shadow spear impaled in the ground before him.
Across from him, Selena lay unconscious. Her blade shattered. Her armor in pieces. Her divine light extinguished—for now.
Graxion's hand trembled as he reached for the fractured ring on his finger—the one he forged from his own essence long ago. The last piece of his identity. His burden. His power.
He whispered, "I was never meant to survive this long."
Kaen limped toward him, holding his ribs, his once-playful smirk now muted by grief. "You won, didn't you? You brought them down."
Graxion looked up, eyes hollow. "Did I? Or did I just replace one tyranny with another?"
Kaen sat down next to him, ignoring the pain. "You gave them a choice. That's more than the Order ever did."
"The choice to fear me instead?" Graxion asked. "To replace the sun with a colder shadow?"
Kaen was quiet. The air was too heavy for lies.
Then—a pulse.
Low, deep, ancient.
Beneath them, the earth cracked. Graxion's eyes widened. "No…"
From the ashes, from the buried heart of the palace, something awakened. The Sunstone—the Celestial Order's greatest artifact—hadn't been destroyed. It had mutated.
It burned no longer with divine light... but with twisted radiance. A fusion of light and shadow. Of him and them. Of what should never have been.
"Graxion," Kaen warned. "This feels wrong."
Graxion rose slowly, painfully. "That's because it is."
He staggered toward the crater. At the center, a child-like figure emerged—skin as pale as bone, eyes swirling with both gold and violet.
It smiled at him.
"Father."
Graxion froze.
The ring on his finger shattered.
Shadow energy exploded outward in jagged waves—but the figure absorbed it. Controlled it.
Kaen stepped back, horrified. "What is that?!"
Graxion couldn't speak. He felt it—not just a power echo, but a bloodlink. A true descendant. Not born of flesh, but of will, essence, and curse. Born from the collision of his rage and the Order's desperation.
A new species. A Null-Blood Godling.
It tilted its head. "You ended their world… now you'll build ours."
Graxion whispered, "No. That's not what this was for."
"But it's what you've made."
Kaen reached for his blade, but Graxion stopped him. "Don't."
"You're not actually letting that thing live?"
"It's not a thing," Graxion said, eyes still locked on the child. "It's my consequence."
---
That night, Graxion disappeared from the world.
Some say he died. Others say he descended into the Shadow Realm itself to seal what he had accidentally birthed. Only Kaen knew the truth—and he never told.
But centuries later, when the world forgot the names of gods and the sunstone was lost to time, one relic remained:
A ring.
Forged of shadows.
Waiting for a new bearer.
And one name whispered through nightmares:
Quinn Talen.