The city still burned. Not with flame, but with silence, ash, and the memories of screams that clung to the air like poison. Ruined buildings groaned as if they mourned their own broken bodies, their shattered glass and twisted steel standing like jagged teeth in the carcass of a fallen beast. The Rift Sovereign was gone its carcass dissolving into nothing but a black smear across the sky but the scars it left were far from invisible. Kael stood in the ruins at the city’s heart, his body slick with drying blood, his chest heaving as the glow of the Void receded from his veins. The silence pressed in around him. Thousands of eyes were upon him soldiers, priests, civilians who had survived the impossible and yet he had never felt more alone. A soldier stumbled forward, armor cracked and helmet missing. He fell to his knees in front of Kael, his voice breaking. “Y-you… you saved us.” One voice became two. Two became dozens. Across the rubble strewn streets, soldiers lowered their h

The throne room was silent, but it was not peace. It was the silence of blades held just before they were drawn, of storms gathering before lightning split the heavens.Kael stood in the center of the chamber, his boots planted in a pool of blood that had once been a priest. His hand still dripped crimson, thick and warm, the metallic stench cutting through the sacred incense that had once filled this place. The nobles lining the chamber recoiled, faces pale beneath their jeweled masks. The High Priest staggered backward, his golden staff trembling in his grip, eyes wide with horror and fury.“You dare desecrate holy ground with slaughter?” the High Priest hissed, voice cracking as though half choked on fear.Kael’s gaze snapped to him, and for an instant his irises glowed black, as though shards of the void itself had broken through his flesh. “I desecrate nothing. I only reveal the truth. Your gods are hollow, your rituals empty. And I will prove it with your blood if I must.”The n

The battlefield was not silent it screamed.Kael stood ankle deep in blood and ash, the sky cracked with divine fury overhead. A holy knight’s helmet rolled past his boot, split clean down the middle, the head within staring up in eternal shock. Around him, the Void pulsed, hungry and alive, a black storm that made the air itself tear apart.He dragged his greatsword, the obsidian edge of it humming with parasitic energy. Every soul it drank clung to its blade, whispering, shrieking, begging. And Kael listened not to their pleas, but to the power their despair poured into him.“Kael of the Void!” a priest screamed from atop the ruined chapel stairs, his robes drenched in holy fire. “You are no man only an abomination! By the grace of the Eternal Father, I condemn you”The words never finished.Kael’s sword carved through the priest’s torso from thirty paces away, a wave of void energy following like a tidal blade. The priest’s body split, his organs scattering like wet pulp across the

The air still burned.Ash drifted through the night sky, glowing embers carried on the wind like falling stars. The once proud spires of the Holy Sun Cathedral lay cracked and broken, their radiant mosaics shattered, the gilded dome collapsed in on itself like the skull of a slain beast. Fires raged through the streets of Solheim, the holy capital, and the stench of charred stone and blood fused into a suffocating haze.And in the middle of the ruin stood Kael.His chest heaved with every breath. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the sheer pressure of the thing he had just consumed. His skin glowed faintly with cracks of void light, pulsing like veins filled with liquid night. His eyes no longer human in the faintest sense burned with amethyst fire, the pupils fractured into slitted shards.Around him, nothing dared move. Corpses of zealots, inquisitors, and holy knights littered the ground in grotesque patterns. Some were split clean in half, others twisted into impossible

The cult carried Kael through the forest as though he were both prophet and weapon. Their chanting did not cease; their bone masks glowed faintly, their footsteps left streaks of dark resonance across the earth. Where they passed, plants withered, and the air thickened with the scent of burning incense and blood.Kael walked among them, his body weary, but his mind alive with fire. The battle against the divine knights had nearly torn him apart, yet the system continued to whisper with intoxicating promises.[Title Upgraded: Voidbane → Crownless King of Shadows][Influence Detected: Followers gained 73 cultists of the Forgotten Choir now bound by oaths of faith.][System Update: The Host may now form a Shadow Dominion.][Warning: Dominion is considered open defiance against Solarius. Prepare for escalation.]Kael’s lips curled into a smirk. The system, the gods, the cult they were all converging into something inevitable. War.The stag masked leader walked at his side, his steps stead