The golden beam did not burn; it untethered every drop of royal blood from Elena’s veins.The acoustic scream tearing through the translucent furnace was not human—it was the sound of an ancient lineage being unraveled thread by thread. Elena’s body levitated ten feet above the glass floor, her dark velvet rags whipping wildly as twin rivers of blinding, solar-gold plasma erupted from her palms, stretching across the abyss toward the First Sovereign’s outstretched hand. The grey salt encrusting Cassian’s legs shattered as he threw his upper body upward, his raw, bloodied right hand missing her heel by a hairsbreadth as the anti-gravitational draft pinned him back into the cracking floor."Elena!" Cassian roared, his voice breaking into a guttural, wet tear as he slammed his quartz shard into the vitrified seam to haul himself forward."Cassian... don't look!" she shrieked, her head thrown back, her dark eyes entirely flooded with white-hot solar light. Her voice was no longer just her

The sound did not travel through the boiling water; it unspooled the fabric of space itself.When Yuri drove his dying abyssal soul into the golden horn, the reverse frequency didn't emit a blast—it created an acoustic vacuum that imploded the pressurized steam pocket instantly. The First Sovereign’s gilded armor buckled violently, its ancient solar plates warping inward with a metallic screech that shattered the surrounding leviathan ribs into millions of bone needles. The pitch-black void inside the god’s chest expanded like a ravenous jaw, pulling the boiling ocean, the floating bone dust, and the very air from Cassian’s lungs directly into the gravity well of its empty core.Cassian slammed his raw, salt-crusted elbows into a fossilized bone fissure, his right arm locked around Elena’s waist with a desperate, crushing strength as the inward draft tore at her torn velvet dress."Hold on to me!" Cassian’s voice came out as a wet, ragged tear against the roaring vacuum, his single op

The dry seabed did not open with a roar; it bled black ink.Where the five-mile trench parted the ocean, the exposed shelf of pulverized leviathan bone did not dry. A thick, viscous sludge of pitch-black ink oozed from the fractures, creeping toward the floating bone slab like living, hungry veins. The herald’s sandals made no sound against the slick seabed, but with every step he took in his robes of condensed parchment, the giant blood-red sigils burning in the glass sky above pulsed in terrifying unison, casting a sickening, visceral glare across Cassian’s salt-encrusted face.Cassian didn't attempt to stand—his legs were locked in grey-salted rigidity—but he shifted his torso, wedging his body firmly between the approaching herald and Elena’s fragile frame. His single open eye narrowed, fixed on the massive, iron-bound ledger slung across the entity's pale, elongated chest."Stay back," Cassian rasped, his throat raw, his right hand blindly searching the bone slab until his finger

The interior of Kaelen’s mind did not feel like a storm; it felt like a library carved from black ice and silent ash.There was no sky, no ocean, and no floor—only infinite, towering shelves of solidified violet glass stretching into a lightless void. Stored within every pane of glass were living, moving shadows: soldiers freezing in the northern mud, children starving in debt-prisons, and fallen kings signing away their heirs in blood. The air was frigid, stagnant, and heavy with the suffocating weight of three thousand years of unremembered grief.Cassian slammed onto a narrow bridge of vitrified bone, his bad leg buckling beneath him with a sickening crunch. He immediately dragged Elena into his arms, rolling onto his back to cushion her fall against the cold glass floor."Elena!" Cassian gasped, his throat raw as he searched her face. "Are you whole? Look at me!"Elena lay against his chest, her dark eyes wide and fixed on the infinite shelves around them. The scars across her nec

The gavel did not fall like steel; it descended like the falling of a night that would never see a dawn.The iron head of the colossal gavel was fifty yards wide, carved from the solidified density of ten thousand bankrupt provinces. As it descended through Kaelen’s shattered mind, the air pressure spiked to an unbearable threshold, vitrifying the floating glass shards around them into microscopic dust. The acoustic shockwave groaned through Cassian’s jaw, setting off a fresh hemorrhage from his ears, but he didn't drop his stance. He jammed his bad heel into a fissure on the glass bridge, his body pitched forward, shielding Elena with his own flesh as the cold shadow of total unmaking enveloped them."Hold!" Cassian’s voice tore from his throat as a ragged crimson spray, his single open eye fixed on the crushing weight above.Beside him on the trembling glass fragment, Oi lay pinned on his back, using his torso as a shield over Vanya. His good right hand was clamped over her head, pr