The moment Kael stepped through the portal, he felt the weight of the new world settle on his shoulders.
Gravity here was… wrong. The sky pulsed like a wounded heartbeat, a bleeding violet streaked with veins of black lightning. Towering buildings floated in the air like shattered memories, held together by crumbling magic and dying hope.
Kael's boots landed on the jagged obsidian platform that floated in midair, drifting slowly toward the ruins of a once-great city suspended in the sky.
"This world…" Lyra whispered, stepping beside him. "It's crying."
She was right. From above, it wasn't rain that fell but ash. Glowing embers drifted like snowfall, remnants of destruction long past. The air was heavy with despair, yet crackling with a hidden pulse like something beneath the surface still fought to live.
Valen conjured a stabilizing ward as the platform lurched. "The laws of nature here are fractured. This realm is collapsing inward slowly consumed by something unnatural."
Kael closed his eyes, reaching outward not with his hands, but with his connection to the Abyss. The darkness responded eagerly, weaving into the ley lines of this broken world. And then he saw it.
A core of corruption buried beneath the floating ruins. A parasite not born of the Abyss, but something older. Hungrier.
"Abyss-born didn't destroy this place," Kael muttered. "Something else did."
A scream echoed through the broken city. Not a human one. Something twisted. Inhuman.
They turned.
From the shattered buildings emerged shadowspawn unlike anything they'd seen slender, warped creatures with reflective masks and bodies that shimmered between dimensions. They walked in and out of time, like ghosts stitched to memory.
"They're bound to this world's end," Valen said grimly. "Timewalkers. Echo-killers."
The first wave lunged.
Kael raised his hand and the Abyss surged forth, shaping into blades of void and wings of living shadow. He struck, slicing through the creatures with precision. But instead of dying, they unraveled into strands of song screaming notes that echoed back through time.
"They don't die," Lyra said, her eyes glowing. "They… repeat."
Kael narrowed his gaze. "Then we break the cycle."
He planted his hand on the fractured ground. A surge of abyssal energy injected itself into the world's veins. The earth beneath them cracked and twisted but the pulse of decay faltered.
Just a moment. A breath. But enough.
Kael stood. His voice cut through the dead air.
"This world still has a heartbeat. And as long as it does, I will not let it fall."
From behind them, the abyssal army poured through the gate, rallying to his call. And for the first time in years perhaps centuries this dying world had hope.
Because the King of the Abyss had arrived.
And death would kneel before him.