Silence. Then light. Not warmth. Not radiance. A devouring whiteness cold, infinite, endless.Adrian floated inside it, weightless, formless. Lightning pulsed in thin ribbons across his skin, each spark fading before it reached his fingertips. His breath didn’t echo. His heart barely moved.He opened his eyes and realized there was no ground, no sky, no direction only light. “Emily?”His voice vanished as soon as it left his lips, swallowed whole. He tried again, louder. Nothing. For a moment, panic clawed through his chest. Then he saw her.A golden ember in the distance. Small. Flickering. Struggling to stay alight.He forced his limbs to move. The light resisted. Every motion felt like pushing through solid glass. His blood sparked, veins glowing with faint lightning as he clawed his way toward her.Emily knelt on nothing. Her body flickered between solid and light, patches of her form dissolving and re-forming like golden smoke.Her eyes were closed. Her hands were pressed over he

The air was alive. It wasn’t sound or motion that made it tremble, it was presence. The blood-sea beneath Adrian and Emily pulsed like a living heart, each beat sending tremors that shook the abyss around them.The colossal being of crimson lightning faceless, ancient stood slowly, its shape blotting out what little light remained.Adrian stared up, chest rising and falling. Lightning crawled across his arms involuntarily, answering a call older than him, older than the worlds themselves.The Heir hovered above it all, halo blazing with twisted serenity. “So this is where your power came from,” he said, his voice echoing like the crack of a whip across eternity.“The First Storm. The thing that burned the skies before the first flame was born.”Emily could barely breathe. “That thing… it’s alive.”Adrian nodded grimly, his body trembling from proximity alone. “Alive and watching.”The crimson colossus tilted its head, tendrils of storm-like energy rolling down its arms. Its voice was

The silence broke with a breath. Adrian’s lungs expanded sharply as if he’d been underwater for centuries. Lightning hissed beneath his skin, crackling faintly before dimming into a quiet, steady pulse. His eyes snapped open.He was lying on fractured stone, surrounded by the dying embers of what had once been the void. The storm was gone.The chains were gone. But so was the world. He sat up slowly, chest heaving. Around him stretched a barren field of white dust and broken light, endless in every direction.The sky above shimmered like cracked glass faint patterns of storm flickering behind it, like a memory fading away. “Emily…” he whispered.His voice echoed, too loud in the silence. He tried again, forcing strength into it. “Emily!”No answer. Panic rippled through him, faint but real. His pulse surged. He pushed himself to his feet and winced as a faint burn crossed his right hand.When he looked down, the veins along his arm flickered black before returning to their usual blue-

Silence. Then breath. Emily gasped awake, choking on ash and light.She was lying in a field that wasn’t a field more like an ocean of mist that rippled beneath her hands. The air shimmered like liquid glass, shifting between sky and void with every heartbeat.She sat up, clutching her head. Her flame flickered weakly at her fingertips, sputtering before catching again. “Adrian…”No response.The world around her was empty, too empty. The horizon bent in strange ways, folding over itself like a reflection caught in water.Above, fragments of stars flickered and vanished, only to reappear in new constellations seconds later. “This isn’t real,” she whispered.“Not entirely.”The voice came from behind her calm, low, resonant, and… unfamiliar. Emily turned sharply, flames coiling around her hands.The figure that stood a few steps away wasn’t human. It looked like it had been carved from light tall, featureless, its form shifting constantly, sometimes man, sometimes woman, sometimes noth

Far above the mortal sky, past the void, past even the echoes of creation a realm of pure radiance hung suspended in infinity. Its floor was glass and flame; its sky, a living aurora that pulsed with divine memory.Here, the Pantheon convened.Twelve thrones floated in a perfect circle, each forged from a different concept Flame, Shadow, Time, Dream, Judgment, War. Their light met in the center, forming a great sphere of silent power.Today, that sphere trembled.A single pulse of silver lightning had reached even this realm a signal from below. The fall of a god. The awakening of a mortal who had touched eternity.The Council was not pleased.A tall figure stood first Eryndor, the Arbiter. His armor shone with reflected suns, his eyes deep as law itself. “You all felt it,” he said, voice echoing across the hall. “A pulse from the lower planes. The Heir of the Abyss is gone.”Gasps rippled across the circle. The goddess of Flame leaned forward, her body a constant dance of fire. “Gone