No one could explain what happened to the sun.
Scholars in towered cities cried of eclipses and ancient prophecies. Farmers knelt in fields of dying wheat. Priests slit their palms on sacred altars, begging their gods to return the light.
But it wasn't an eclipse.
The sun hadn't moved.
It had been swallowed.
And whatever swallowed it now stared down at the world with a mouth that spanned the sky.
It didn't roar.
It breathed—pulling wind, sound, and thought upward.
Toward it.
Toward the throne.
Callan stood at the edge of the capital, black shard humming beneath his skin. The Annihilation Shard hadn't stopped burning since he claimed it. It didn't hurt. It felt like a truth he'd forgotten was always part of him.
The last time he'd seen the sky like this, he was just a soldier—kneeling before the Empire's high mages, begging them not to test the shard's first prototype on a living man.
He remembered the Emperor's words:
"You'll become more than man. More than pain. You'll become purpose."
They'd made him into something inhuman.
Now they'd see what that purpose had become.
"We go straight to the throne room," Callan said.
Solenne stared at the blackened sky. "That thing… it's not just the Emperor."
"No," Lysander said quietly. "It's the shard in him. The one he stole from the Abyss."
"They fused it directly with his throne," Callan added. "The Emperor doesn't wear the shard. He sits inside it."
"And now," Solenne said, unsheathing her blade, "we rip him out."
The capital wasn't guarded by men anymore.
What met them in the streets were empty shells—once-proud knights, now husks of gold and bone. Their eyes glowed silver. Their voices sang in unity. And their swords shattered stone as they marched forward in synchronization.
Callan cut through the first wave like thunder.
He didn't just fight with the shard—he became it. Shadows swallowed blades. Time bent around his strikes. The Annihilation Shard turned his will into force, erasing matter where he focused it.
Lysander followed, hurling mirrored javelins that split and exploded on contact.
Solenne danced between the husks, her dagger finding every chink, every weakness.
Together, they carved a path through nightmare.
Toward the throne.
It sat atop 777 stairs.
Not metaphorically.
The Emperor had ordered it so.
And atop that endless climb, the throne awaited—no longer a seat, but a mouth of churning void, stretched in the shape of an obsidian chair.
They saw him then.
The Emperor.
But he was no longer human.
His flesh rippled like liquid stone. His eyes burned black. Wings of unlight fanned behind him, and beneath his throne, a thousand screaming souls clawed upward, unable to escape the gravity of the Devouring Sky.
"Welcome home," he said to Callan.
Callan said nothing.
Only climbed the stairs.
One step at a time.
The air grew heavier with each step.
The shard in Callan's chest pulsed against the force pulling it upward. The throne wanted it—craved it. Because the throne wasn't a seat of power anymore.
It was a womb.
Designed to consume all shards.
To become a god that devoured gods.
"You were always meant to be mine," the Emperor said, rising. "Your body, your will, your suffering—it was the mold for my ascension. Every scar you wear was a signature I placed upon creation."
"You broke me," Callan said, reaching the final step. "You ruined me."
"I perfected you," the Emperor replied.
Then Callan leapt.
The throne shrieked.
Not with sound—but with force. Wind, blood, memory—all turned inward as Callan and the Emperor collided.
Their powers exploded in a storm of unreal color. The throne howled, devouring fragments of existence as both men battled in its mouth.
The Emperor's arms became blades. His wings lashed like universes unraveling.
But Callan's shadow fought with ancient wrath.
He struck with moments pulled from the past—echoes of every time he'd been betrayed, burned, discarded. He wove them into fury.
Solenne hurled herself into the void with him, slashing at the throne's base, driving its maw to fracture.
Lysander threw a relic-knife straight into the Emperor's back, crafted from the glass of broken timelines.
And for one heartbeat—
Callan struck true.
His black blade pierced the Emperor's chest.
Right where the throne connected to him.
The scream that followed tore the sky.
The throne cracked.
The mouth in the heavens trembled.
And light bled through.
Real, blinding light.
The sun returned in a burst that threw armies to their knees and shattered every illusion of the Empire's invincibility.
The Emperor fell to one knee.
Callan stood over him.
"No more thrones," he said.
And drove the black shard straight through the throne itself.
The explosion wasn't sound or fire.
It was silence.
Everything stopped.
And when it resumed...
The throne was gone.
The Emperor's body lay lifeless on the stairs.
And Callan stood in the middle of a broken capital, breathing, bleeding, and whole.
The war was not over.
But the sky had been freed.