The void had no floor. Jason drifted, his body twisted and broken, his fire guttering into wisps that curled away like dying smoke. His chest was hollow where the shard had been.The once-burning furnace that carried him through battles, through pain, through loss, was now a crater of ash. Every beat of his heart was a question, Why am I still alive? Why am I not dead already?He wanted death. If death meant silence, peace, release from the agony of losing her, then let it come. But death did not come. Instead, something else stirred in the abyss. A whisper. Not Sovereign, not fire. Older. Colder.“You are hollow,” it said, curling around his ears like frost. “And hollow things are… useful.”Jason groaned, his eyelids heavy, vision blurred by blood and shadow. He tried to move, but his limbs were too heavy. His body wasn’t falling anymore, he was suspended, dangling like a marionette.The shadows shifted, forming shapes. Not Sovereigns, but fragments, splinters of something deeper, so

Jason’s world was ending in his arms. Her body was so light. Too light. His daughter’s head lolled against his chest, golden strands of her hair streaked with ash and blood.He pressed his hand against the wound in her chest, trying desperately to keep the life from pouring out, but the shadow that had pierced her wasn’t blood alone. It was rot. Poison. Sovereign corruption.Her small fingers curled weakly into his scorched tunic. The same hands that once tugged on his beard when she was a toddler, laughing at his clumsy faces. Now they trembled like dying embers.“Stay with me,” Jason choked, rocking her against him. His voice was hoarse, ripped raw. “I don’t care what they say. I don’t care what it costs. You’re not leaving me, do you hear? You’re not!”The Sovereigns’ laughter filled the cavern, a chorus of hunger and mockery. “Fool. She has already chosen. The shadows are her blood now.”Jason bent his head low, his forehead pressed against hers. “I won’t let them take you. I won’

The cavern was fire and shadow. Jason’s scream tore through the chaos, louder than the thunder of collapsing stone.His bloodfire exploded outward in a crimson storm, colliding with the Sovereign King’s abyssal darkness. The clash split the world in two, one side searing light, the other devouring void.But Jason wasn’t aiming at the King. His fist, blazing brighter than ever, was hurtling straight toward his daughter. “Papa…”Her voice wasn’t her own. It was fractured, twisted, layered with a Sovereign’s hiss, yet fragile enough to cut through his fury like a knife.Her small frame, once fragile with life, now moved with the precision of a predator. Her eyes were bottomless shadows, flickering with crimson sparks that belonged not to her, but to the abyss.Jason’s fist stopped inches from her chest. The bloodfire wavered. Every instinct screamed to end it before the corruption consumed her completely. But every fiber of his heart resisted.He saw her as she had been, laughing, runnin

The world bent around him. Jason stood in the ruin, his chest heaving, but the breaths no longer sounded human. Fire hissed with each exhale, sparks spilling from between his lips.His skin was a map of crimson fractures, glowing veins pulsing like molten rivers beneath paper-thin flesh. Where the Sovereign King’s shadow reached for him, it recoiled, as though burned by the raw storm leaking from his body.The fire no longer obeyed him. It wasn’t contained, it wasn’t restrained, it lived outside him, wrapping his frame in a shifting cloak of burning glass and bleeding flame.Jason lifted his head. His gaze locked on the King. And for the first time, the Sovereign King’s grin faltered.“You…” His voice, once effortless and mocking, edged with unease. “…you should not exist.”Jason’s throat rumbled with a sound that was no longer his own. A voice layered with echoes, human grief, fire’s roar, and something deeper, something Sovereign, spoke through him.“You took her from me.”The King’

The cavern was silent for the first time since the inferno began. Jason stood frozen, the King’s abyssal hand buried in his chest of flame.The sound was not of flesh tearing, it was the hiss of fire being devoured, the shriek of something fundamental unraveling. His outline shuddered, wavering like a candle about to die.The King’s grin was jagged and hideous. Shadows poured down his arm, sinking into Jason’s chest, trying to wrap around the pulsing core of flame within him.“I told you, fire cannot exist without a vessel,” the King hissed. His face pressed close to Jason’s, eyes glimmering with cruel victory. “And you… are no vessel. You are a mistake.”Jason’s voice rasped through the roar of the flames. “If I’m a mistake… then why are you bleeding?”The King’s grin faltered for an instant. Jason’s hand shot up, grabbing the Sovereign’s wrist. Fire surged, searing through the abyssal flesh.The King screamed as Jason’s grip tightened, burning deeper, higher, devouring his arm up to