The Black Perch lay in half light, a terrace of obsidian slabs suspended over an endless violet abyss. The refugee camp pulsed with uneasy life, tents of scavenged cloth stitched across the crystalline ground, cooking fires coughing dark blue smoke into a sky that never turned fully day or night. Soldiers paced with hollow eyes, children clung to the legs of strangers, and the Wardens of Dusk, those tall, veined silhouettes of living stone watched everything without moving.Kirin stood at the cliff’s edge, arms folded, the faint crackle of Chaos Lightning crawling along his fingertips like restless insects. He hadn’t slept since the transference. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Malakar collapsing inward, its sky folding like paper, its screams devoured by the nothing that followed. Survivor’s guilt burned behind his ribs like a second heart.A ripple spread through the Dusk Qi.Not wind but presence.The Wardens turned first. Their crystalline helmets tilted toward the eastern rim

Kirin’s heartbeat slowed as the silver lit path stretched before him. Each step resonated with a deep thoom, as though the realm itself acknowledged his defiance. The oppressive weight that had nearly broken him in the first stage now receded, leaving behind a strange quiet, a pause before the next storm.He flexed his fingers, testing the feel of his own power. His Chaos Lightning no longer roared like a hungry beast. Instead, it pulsed with the steady rhythm of the Dusk Qi he had just faced and survived. The fusion of the two energies buzzed in his veins like a storm contained inside a crystal cage.“Alright,” he muttered, voice echoing through the pulsating cavern of roots. “What’s next? Another round of trauma I ptesume?”The roots answered with a low hum. Ahead, the path widened into a glowing basin. At its center stood a single obelisk of black crystal, jagged and wet with flowing Dusk Qi. Vines curled around it like veins around a heart, their pulses synced to his own.When he

The southern cliffs of Erebo were still bleeding black mist from the night’s skirmish when the air shifted again, an unsettling ripple that felt too deliberate to be a natural rift. Kirin sensed it first. His Chaos Lightning hissed across his skin like a nest of angry serpents, warning him that something dangerous and personal had crossed into their perimeter.He turned toward the obsidian ridge behind the camp. A lone figure stood on the jagged slope, half hidden in the smoke.For a heartbeat Kirin thought his mind was breaking.The silhouette was wrong in a hundred tiny ways, longer in the shoulders, leaner in the waist, posture more like a predator than a boy. But the face, when the wind pulled back the hood, was burned into Kirin’s memory like an old scar.Seth?Except... not the Seth he remembered.The friend who once laughed beside him in the academy was gone. This Seth looked older, almost weather worn, as if he’d lived a hundred years in the short time since their last encount

Seth POVThe air in the Warden Citadel always smelled like burnt incense and storm ash, the scent of purification through pain.Seth stood before a dais of light suspended above a pit of liquid dusk. Runes crawled like serpents across the chamber walls, feeding into the crystal thrones of the Wardens. They never sat, they floated. Always above. Always watching.He knelt on one knee, eyes shadowed, his breath shallow. His cultivation pulsed faintly but unstable, every beat of his core carried static pain.“You return late,” one of the Wardens said. The voice was distant, cold, carried through the echo of many. “The mission in the lower quadrant failed. You interfered with containment.”Seth bowed his head. “Containment would’ve meant extinction. The rift wasn’t closing, it was feeding.”A pause.Then the voice again, sharper now. “You were told to observe, not interpret.”He clenched his jaw, the veins in his neck darkening with the mark of corruption. The same energy that had allowed

The skies above Erebo were dark again, not with storm, but with judgment.A stillness hung over the floating city of the Black Perch, that eerie terrace of onyx stone suspended by unseen qi currents. The air was sharp and cold, thin like a blade against skin. Even the smallest whisper carried weight here, every word like a hammer in the quiet.The Sky Wardens stood gathered in the upper sanctum, twenty one figures draped in woven shadows and pale light. Their eyes glowed faintly, not with color, but with essence, the mark of those who had bound themselves to Erebo’s Dusk Qi for centuries. Beneath their circle stood Vael, weary yet resolute, and beside him, was Kirin.He did not bow. He didn’t even look at them with respect. His hair, streaked faintly with pale black from his time in the Dusk currents, framed a face that had seen too much. His eyes, however, were storms. Not metaphorically, they were storms. Every flicker of his emotion sent faint arcs of lightning crawling down his ne