The stone did not shatter; it gave way like wet sand beneath a falling tide.Yuri’s small frame vanished into the expanding throat of the dark abyss before his scream could even clear his throat. The floor of the Great Hall buckled downward in a sickening cascade of black granite, swallowing the throne’s dais, the ancient pillars, and the iron weapon racks into a churning, subterranean maw."Yuri!"Kaelen didn't leap; he dropped his three-hundred-ton volcanic mass straight down into the void.The white-hot gold plasma of the Sun-Cleaver ignited in a single, blinding flash as Kaelen slammed his free obsidian hand into the sheer rock face of the collapse. Sparks of molten stone rained down into the dark like shooting stars, illuminating the horror falling below them. Yuri was tumbling thirty feet beneath him, his salt-crusted tunic fluttering like a dying bird, his small hands clawing uselessly at the air as the ancient, calcified bone-construct surged upward through the rift to crush h

The sea did not enter the abyss as water; it slammed into the subterranean darkness as a solid, suffocating wall of pressurized liquid violence.Kaelen went under with his left arm locked in an iron vise around Yuri’s chest. The black, salty torrent roared with the deafening scream of a collapsed aquifer, tearing through the narrow granite channels three hundred feet beneath the shattered foundations of Aethelgard. The obsidian carapace covering the Sovereign’s shoulder ground violently against the raw basalt rockface as the current dragged them through the dark, each collision sending blinding sparks of molten solar plasma through the churning water before the black brine instantly smothered the light.In the suffocating, weightless void, Kaelen’s single golden iris flared against the murky depths.His right arm remained dead and calcified, encrusted in the dark, light-devouring salt. But beneath his cracked chest-plate, his solar core throbbed with a desperate, wild rhythm. He pulle

The blood-red light on the southern horizon did not cast shadows; it erased them.Where the crimson glare touched the shattered parapets of Aethelgard, the vitrified black glass faded into a dull, lifeless grey, its volcanic density melting into a fine, powdery dust that drifted away on the icy mountain gale. The three-hundred-ton weight of the citadel felt suddenly weightless, suspended over a world whose physical constants were being unwritten by an ancient, unyielding authority."Look at the stone..." Logan breathed, his hand trembling on his sword hilt as he watched the granite gatehouse crumble into silent, airborne ash. "The stone isn't breaking. It's dissolving."Kaelen didn't move. His obsidian frame remained rooted to the slate floor, but the glowing gold veins beneath his chest flickered erratically, their solar heat struggling against the sudden, unnatural vacuum that was leeching the thermal density directly out of his core.Beside him, Yuri remained standing on his small,

The anti-matter wave did not burn; it erased physical memory.As the crimson shockwave tore through the foundations of Aethelgard, the physical concept of density collapsed. Kaelen’s three-hundred-ton volcanic frame was caught mid-stride, the outer plates of his obsidian armor disintegrating into fine, lightless ash that was instantly sucked upward into the skyward vacuum. His solar core hummed a frantic, screaming death-knell, its white-hot plasma violently expanding against the vacuum as the primordial titan’s gravity squeezed his chest like a rotting orange."Hold!" Kaelen roared, his metallic voice warping into a terrifying, multi-layered screech as he drove his bare, glowing glass fingers into the fading bedrock.He didn't reach for his bow; he reached backward with his body, throwing his massive frame over Vanya and Oi. The blistering heat radiating from his exposed, cracked core created a tiny, hemispherical thermal shield—a three-foot dome of boiling white plasma that deflecte

The pressurized brine didn't splash as the bone-encrusted tentacle breached the surface; it shattered the glassified quartz crater into a million razor-sharp needles.Kaelen’s dying body didn't hit the water—it was violently dragged through it. The massive abyssal limb wrapped three times around his chest, its calcified barbs biting directly into the open, bleeding gap where his solar heart had been. Black sea-salt instantly began to surge into his exposed thoracic cavity, hissing and popping as it drowned the last sputtering violet embers of his life core."Kaelen!"Oi didn't calculate the drop. He launched himself off the quartz rim, his short iron spear gripped in a two-handed overhead strike.He drove the iron tip four inches into the thick, pressurized mass of the tentacle, but the impact was like striking a column of compressed granite. The violent backlash shattered the ash-wood shaft of his weapon into splinters, hurling Oi backward across the freezing ice floor. He crashed ha