Silence. For one impossible heartbeat, the world knew silence. The firestorm vanished, the earth stopped screaming, and even the winds went still.What remained was a sky painted with scars fractures of gold and black cutting across the heavens like wounds that refused to close.Lyra lay sprawled on the ruins, dust coating her lips, chest heaving in ragged bursts. Her ears rang, every bone in her body screaming with pain. She had felt the explosion rip through her like a tidal wave, yet somehow she still breathed.Slowly, with trembling arms, she dragged herself upright. Her blade was gone. Her armor cracked. Her body ached in places she could no longer name. But her eyes, wide and searching, locked onto the epicenter.The ground there had been erased, swallowed into a crater that seemed to bleed light. And within that burning hollow…Two figures stood. Her throat tightened. “Kael…”He was there barely. His body was a battlefield of contradictions: one side still cracked and leaking g

The heavens tore open. The moment the Ascendant’s form crossed fully into their world, the sky screamed. Clouds shredded into ash. Stars dimmed as if cowering from its presence.The land quaked with every beat of its wings, mountains crumbling like sand under the weight of an unfathomable will.Kael stood beneath it, a shattered man facing a storm too vast to measure. Mira’s glow trembled in his arms, faint but steady, her hands locked over his heart. Lyra staggered beside them, her sword nothing but a cracked relic, yet her stance unyielding.The god’s voice poured over them, not as sound but as raw existence. “At last. No veil, no chains. The sun devours.”The battlefield disintegrated in waves of fire. Towers of black flame roared upward, swallowing armies, mountains, rivers. Tens of thousands screamed in distant cities as the shadow fell over them, turning stone to glass and forests to cinder.Kael’s teeth clenched until blood ran down his chin. He could feel it, this was no longe

The air itself convulsed under the clash.Kael’s lungs burned, every breath like fire, yet his body no longer felt weak. Light coursed through his veins, not just his, but Mira’s warmth fused into him, steadying his every heartbeat.His chain, reforged from despair and flame, writhed in his hand like a living serpent of light and shadow. And beside him the stranger.Wounded, bleeding silver fire from their side, yet still standing tall. Their blade of starlight burned brighter than ever, arcs of power spiraling into the night sky with every swing.They moved like Kael, no, not like him. As him. The rhythm, the defiance, the way their gaze refused to yield to the god towering above them.The Ascendant, wings unfurled across the broken heavens, bellowed with fury. “TWO CAGES. TWO CHAINS. IT MATTERS NOT. I WILL BREAK YOU BOTH.”The ground split beneath its roar, rivers of molten fire surging outward in waves that swallowed entire ruins. Each tremor cracked Kael’s bones, yet he forced his

The Ascendant’s true form was like a catastrophe written in glyphs older than language. It folded space into its fists and squeezed. The horizon burned and reformed; the night was a memory.Kael felt every shard of the world trying to pry him from his feet. Blood and light mixed on his cracked skin. Mira’s pulse thin but relentless beat against his chest like a metronome for survival.Beside him, the stranger pressed their blade to the god’s flank and smelled like a storm.They moved as if against physics: chain and starlight pulling the Ascendant’s attention into a knot, lashing it with the stubborn violence of mortals who would not bow.Each blow they landed bled the monster, but the blood that fell was paradox: silver, star blood, black heat. It stitched the sky with new wounds.“You have a price,” the stranger panted between strikes. “A cost to bind a god again. Are you” Their eyes flicked to Kael. “ready to pay it?”Kael’s answer was the chain in his fist. He had tasted what the

The first guardian hit the ground like a collapsing star. Its body was wrong, limbs bent backward, ribs exposed outward instead of inward, skull split in four with a tongue of black fire lashing between the pieces.Chains of molten bone dangled from its spine, dragging sparks against the fleshy ground as it stalked toward them.Behind it, more shadows shivered into being, clawing out of the god-flesh mountains, dragging themselves free like worms from rotting fruit.The sky screamed. Every eye turned downward. And Mira felt the weight of a god notice her.Her lungs seized. Her heartbeat stuttered. The ember in her palm pulsed once, resisting, keeping her anchored when she should have dissolved under the gaze.Lyra stepped forward, broken blade raised, her mouth split with blood and fury. “You picked the wrong mortals to chew on, bastard.”The guardian shrieked, charging.Mira moved without thought. The ember seared her palm as she thrust it outward. Light ripped from her chest in a ja