The silence after the explosion was unbearable. Dust clung to the air, thick enough to choke, and the cavern stank of iron and ozone. The emerald veins that had once pulsed through the stone were dead now, shriveled into black scars.Maya staggered to her feet, her whole body trembling. Her wounds throbbed, her clothes torn, but pain was the least of her concerns.Because Jace, no, the thing that had once been Jace, stood at the cavern’s heart like a monarch surveying his throne.The twenty-four chains orbiting him rotated in deliberate patterns, never touching, never faltering. They weren’t wild anymore. They were controlled. His. Maya’s throat went dry.“Jace,” she whispered.He turned. And smiled. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t weary. It wasn’t him. It was a predator’s smile. “The vessel endures. The vessel reigns.”The words were calm, too calm, but layered with voices beneath his own. Thousands of whispers threaded through the sound, each carrying hunger, power, inevitability.Maya st

The abyssal arena screamed. The obsidian floor quaked beneath Maya’s knees, splintering into rivers of emerald fire as the storm above split open wider.Chains as thick as mountains crashed down from the rift in the sky, each strike rattling her bones.At the center of it all stood Jace, body trembling, eyes burning silver, green, and black. His twenty-four chains spiraled around him, lashing upward in defiance against the titanic links of the Source.The clash shook the world. Sparks of abyssal fire rained from the sky, searing the ground like meteors.“YOU WILL NOT TAKE HER!” Jace roared, his voice breaking, blood spraying from his lips.The first impact had already broken him. One of his chains was gone, snapped in half, its fragments disintegrating into green dust that vanished into the storm.The backlash had torn through his body, opening fissures across his skin that glowed with fire. Yet still he stood.The Source’s colossal chain descended again, heavier, faster, hungrier. Ja

Emerald thunder rolled across the blackened plains of Veyr. Once lush grasslands, the region was now nothing but charred soil cracked like shattered glass.Fissures glowed with eerie green light, bleeding upward into the clouds. The air stank of ozone and ash, and the ground trembled as if the world itself wanted to flee.And into that wasteland marched the greatest armies ever assembled. Banners from every corner of the world snapped in the wind. Frost wolves howled alongside golden desert stallions.Floating citadels drifted above ranks of armored infantry. The sky itself seemed to buckle under the weight of the gathering.They converged at the center of the dead plain, where a colossal obsidian table had been erected atop a platform of steel. And one by one, the leaders arrived.Kael Varion, Emperor of the East, slammed his gauntleted fist on the table.His voice rang like iron striking stone.Kael: “Enough waiting. We are here to form a single command. No banners, no borders, no r

The battlefield was smoke and ruin. What was once an endless plain of steel banners and marching armies had become a crater of broken earth.The air reeked of sulfur and blood, the ground itself trembling as if the world’s heart were faltering. And above them, the colossus stood.Its towering frame was stitched together with chains, its ribcage a prison of burning faces. Each hollow scream rolled across the sky like thunder.In its clawed hand, a sphere of green voidfire pulsed brighter than any sun. It was not just a weapon. It was an ending.Kael staggered to his knees, gripping his cracked blade as the armies tried to reform around him. His voice cut through the chaos.Kael: “Stand! Stand, damn you! If that sun falls, the world burns!”Ysera: (snapping, voice raw) “There is no standing against this!”Kael: “Then die on your feet!”The soldiers rose, broken shields, burnt armor, bloodied faces. And yet they rose, as if his words alone forced their bones upright.The colossus tilted

The battlefield was a graveyard of echoes. The Third Sun towered above the ruin, wings of chains unfurled across a sky cracked like broken glass.Each movement sent tremors racing across the earth, as if the world’s bones were splintering. The bell embedded in its chest glowed with an alien heartbeat, tolling in rhythm with the collapse of reality itself.Kael stood alone at the cliff’s edge, armor scorched, blade reduced to a glowing shard. Behind him, only fragments of his army remained, broken men and women clutching shattered shields, generals who could barely stand, their eyes wide with the horror of what Azura had become.Kael’s voice cut through the suffocating silence. “Azura! If there’s anything left of you in that shell, hear me! Fight it!”The Third Sun tilted its head. Its hollow eyes flickered. For a heartbeat, the chains around its body slowed. Then the chorus spoke through her, voices layered and inhuman. “She is gone. There is no Azura. There is only the tolling of sil