The monster’s form towered above, framed in burning violet light. His wings had grown larger, fire dripping from the jagged feathers like molten steel. His eyes gleamed with cruel satisfaction, and his voice split the void like thunder.“You see now, Jason Miller. You can never win. Even in sacrifice, you feed me. Even in love, you deliver me power. He is gone, and yet… his fragments are mine.”Jason raised his head, eyes bloodshot and wild. “Shut your mouth!” His roar carried desperation, not strength, but his fists clenched, fire flaring around him. “You don’t get to say his name!”Kael chuckled, and the void trembled with the weight of it. “His name is meaningless now. He exists only in shards, broken embers scattered through your soul. And through those shards, I drink his essence. You carry him… but he belongs to me.”Jason staggered to his feet, trembling. He wanted to charge, to tear Kael apart with his bare hands, but his knees buckled under the crushing weight of grief and ra

Jason’s fire faltered. He realized the truth too late. His desperate surge, his refusal to let go, it was fueling Kael, just as the monster said.Kael lunged, shadows wrapping around Jason’s body like serpents. Jason tried to resist, but the fire sputtered out, consumed by the abyss.“No!” Jason roared, thrashing violently, but the shadows sank into his skin, black fire etching across his veins. His arms trembled, then locked. His chest constricted, lungs burning.Kael leaned close, his whisper poisonous. “It’s over. You can’t fight me anymore. You never could.”Jason’s scream broke into a sob as Kael’s fire poured into him. He could feel it, Kael wasn’t just outside him anymore. He was inside. His blood, his breath, his thoughts.Jason staggered, falling to his knees, his own body betraying him. He tried to lift his hands, but they no longer answered him. And then, horror struck. His body rose, without him.Jason’s mind was still inside, screaming, but he no longer controlled his lim

Kael snarled, shadows whipping around Jason in desperation. “You can’t resist me forever! You are mine!”Jason screamed back, chains snapping one by one. “I BELONG TO MYSELF!”For an instant, he felt it, freedom. The ember of Elias blazing beside him, the chains melting away, Jason reached out, ready to rip Kael from his soul once and for all, But then, Kael smiled. Not with panic. With cruel delight.“Then watch, Jason Miller. Watch the price of defiance.”Jason’s body outside suddenly hurled the unstable firestorm downward. Onto the refugees, Onto the children. Onto innocents who thought they had escaped.Jason’s scream of horror split the prison as the world above erupted in blinding white fire. Jason finally begins to resist Kael, breaking his chains with Elias’s faint guidance.But just as hope flickers, Kael twists it against him, forcing Jason to unleash devastation on innocents at the very moment he thought he was winning. The firestorm fell like the wrath of the gods.Scream

Jason’s scream shook the void. It wasn’t just sound, it was the sound of a soul ripping itself apart. The chains binding him snapped taut, cutting so deep that black fire leaked into his veins, but still he strained, his body convulsing, his mind tearing at Kael’s grip.Outside, his hand held his mother aloft, fire curling like a strangler’s garrote around her neck. The child in her arms sobbed violently, tiny fists pounding against her chest as though they could somehow save her from Jason’s unrelenting grip.Her lips trembled. Blood vessels burst in her eyes. Yet she didn’t look at the flames, nor at the monster who controlled them. She looked at her son.“Jason,” she rasped, her voice cracked but steady. “Fight him.”Jason’s heart convulsed. He threw himself forward inside the prison, every bone in his arms shattering under the strain of the chains. His vision blurred red.“LET HER GO!” he howled. “KAEL—TAKE ME! TAKE ANYTHING! JUST LET HER GO!”Kael’s laughter spread through him li

White silence. Jason couldn’t feel his body. Couldn’t hear his heartbeat. Couldn’t even tell if his lungs were drawing breath. For a moment, he thought Kael had won, that he’d been snuffed out, devoured whole.But then the silence shifted. A pulse, faint but steady, echoed through the void. Not his heartbeat. Something deeper. Something older. “He’s not gone.”The voice wasn’t Elias’s this time. It was softer, sharper, like wind across steel. Jason turned, or thought he did, and in the white expanse saw a figure approach, Not Kael, Not Elias. It was… himself. But hollow.A Jason with eyes empty of light, with a chest carved open where no heart beat. His skin was pale ash, his smile cruel and knowing.“You fight so hard to defy him,” the hollow version murmured. “But the truth is, you’ve already become me.”Jason staggered. “No… I’m not”“You are,” Hollow Jason whispered, stepping closer. His voice was Kael’s and Jason’s at once. “Every time you break, every time you kill, every time y