The eternal twilight seemed darker than usual, as if the very air had thickened with foreboding.
A slender figure shifted on her post, her pale skin nearly luminous in the dim light that perpetually bathed the temple grounds. The bone-deep chill that was ever present clawed at her with unusual ferocity today, if such a thing were even possible. Elena pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, the fabric whispering against itself like secrets exchanged in darkness. No breath fogged in the cold air—nothing as mortal as warmth remained in the lungs of those who served the Ashen Court.
The camp behind her lay in hushed reverence. Most of the servants had retreated to their beds for what passed as rest in this realm, and only the night guardians remained—scattered figures around a small fire that cast more shadows than light, their voices hushed with age and the weariness that comes from centuries of vigilance.
Elena traced the single rune etched into her wrist with a slender finger—the mark of the Ashen Dynasty that granted her authority within the Death Realm. Her body yearned for rest, but something felt wrong in the air itself, a dissonance in the usual rhythm of the twilight realm.
She thought of her twins waiting in the city. Seven cycles old now, their small faces still carrying traces of the life they had once known. She'd promised them trinkets from the life realm, perhaps even a small flower preserved in resin. She could almost hear Thomas' sharp, bell-like laughter and see Lily's wide-eyed amazement, the silver flecks in her irises brightening with childish wonder.
Her chest tightened with an ache that had become a familiar companion. Her bonded, Jonas, had been unmade a cycle ago. A moment's distraction near the boundary, that's all it had taken—a ripple in the veil, a flash of light, and he was gone, scattered like ash in a violent wind. She had no room for grief now. Only duty remained, hard and cold as the stone beneath her feet.
A shadow moved near the fire, detaching itself from the greater darkness.
It was Aiden—her ally, fellow servant of the Pale Council and an Kay
Aiden gave her a small nod, the weight of centuries evident in the hollows beneath his silver eyes, which caught the firelight like polished coins. She returned the gesture, the unspoken acknowledgment of comrades in an existence that allowed for little joy but demanded constant vigilance.
And then...
She froze, muscles tensing beneath her pale skin.
The air had gone still. The usual whispers of the realm, distant sounds of night—gone, swallowed by a silence so complete it pressed against her ears like cotton. The world seemed to wait, holding its breath in anticipation of something terrible.
From the darkness beyond the ancient temple gates, a figure emerged.
Tall. Pale. His skin so white it almost glistened under the twilight, as if lit from within by a cold fire. Golden-white hair framed a face of impossible symmetry, features carved with precision that no mortal hand could achieve, and his eyes... his eyes glowed like two orbs of captured starlight, ancient and piercing.
The guardians stiffened, hands moving to shadow-blades with practiced instinct, the whisper of metal against leather scabbards barely audible in the oppressive silence.
Aiden was the first to move. He stepped forward, shadows gathering around his fingertips like liquid night, his stance shifting to readiness, weight balanced on the balls of his feet. As an Ascended, he feared little—their kind could only be truly killed by beheading, a fact that had made them the most formidable warriors in the Death Realm for countless cycles.
"Who disturbs the temple grounds? Identify yourself!" Aiden's voice was steady, but Elena heard the tension coiled beneath it, a serpent ready to strike.
The figure stopped, not ten paces from the fire. His cloak shifted slightly though no wind blew, the fabric rippling like water, and he seemed untouched by the perpetual cold of the realm, no discomfort in his perfect stillness.
He spoke, and his voice was deep, steady—carrying the weight of countless cycles, resonating through the air like the toll of a bell.
"Thou dost stand before mine path. I seeketh that which lies beyond thy gates. Stand aside."
Aiden's eyes narrowed, shadow-tendrils coiling around his arms like living smoke. "This temple belongs to the Death realm. No one passes without permission from the Pale Council."
The stranger tilted his head slightly, a gesture both curious and unsettling, like a predator studying unfamiliar prey. "The gods themselves were afeard to Barring mine way. Who art thou to withhold mine entry, mortal?"
"Gods? What are you, a lunatic?" Aiden's voice hardened with scorn. "You're not going anywhere." He took a step forward, drawing himself to his full height, shoulders squared with determination. "Turn back now."
The stranger's gaze shifted, calm and piercing as a winter blade. "Thou knowest not what thou protecteth, nor the weight it beareth. I give thee one chance more. Stand aside."
Shadows condensed into a blade in Aiden's hand, darkness solidifying with a whisper, the weapon drinking in what little light reached it.
"I don't care who you are." His voice trembled only slightly, a ripple in otherwise still water. "You're not getting through."
Aiden stepped forward, his free hand outstretched, wreathed in tendrils of darkness that writhed like hungry serpents.
Time slowed, the moment stretching thin as spun glass.
Before his hand touched the stranger's shoulder, the air warped. Light twisted and bled like dawn piercing eternal night, reality folding in upon itself.
And a pale hand burst from Aiden's chest, gripping his still-beating heart—a heart that hadn't beat in centuries suddenly pulsing with impossible life, crimson and vital against the stranger's alabaster fingers.
Aiden's shadow-blade dissolved into wisps of darkness as his eyes widened in shock and incomprehension, mouth forming a perfect circle of surprise. His gaze found Elena's, and in that moment, she saw something she had never witnessed in all their centuries together—fear. Pure, mortal fear.
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"How...?" The word escaped Aiden's lips, barely a whisper.
The stranger's voice was soft, almost contemplative. "Thy nature hath been... corrected."
Elena's world tilted on its axis. Impossible. Utterly impossible. No blade could permanently harm a Kay
The stranger stepped back with fluid grace, letting Aiden's body fall to the ashen ground. The heart slipped from his hand and landed with a soft thud in the dust, still glowing with stolen essence, pulsing once, twice, before growing still.
Elena's scream caught in her throat, choked by horror that froze her voice to ice.
She forced herself to move, shadow-claws extending from her fingers like talons of midnight, her form partially dissolving into mist as she attacked. Her fangs extended fully, razor-sharp and gleaming, her eyes blazing silver with fury that burned cold as frost.
And when she struck...
He simply stood to the side, so fast it seemed like he disappeared for a fraction of a second and reappeared next to her, leaving only a whisper of displaced air in his wake.
Before she could comprehend it, a cold hand wrapped around her throat, fingers like bands of iron against her skin.
Her feet left the ground. She struggled, clawing at his wrist, but his grip held her in place immovable as a mountain. It felt as if his fingers were made of steel, unyielding and impossibly strong. His eyes locked onto hers—not with malice, but with something worse. Curiosity, detached and clinical as a scholar examining an insect.
And suddenly... he was inside her mind.
Memories spilled open like torn pages—quiet evenings with Jonas, his fingers intertwined with hers; Lily's tiny hands writing her first letter, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration; Thomas' wide-eyed fascination with boundary tales, begging for one more story before sleep claimed him.
She couldn't move. Her mouth opened in a silent, agonizing scream as her most precious moments were rifled through by cold, alien hands.
*This is the end,* she thought with strange clarity.
But the stranger... dropped her.
She hit the ground hard, gasping, choking on centuries of memories and terror, her limbs trembling with the violation of her mind.
The figure looked down at her, his expression unreadable, ancient eyes holding something almost like recognition. Then he turned away, stepping past the fire where the other guardians stood frozen, weapons shaking in their hands, fear pinning them in place like insects mounted for display.
The man placed his hand on the gate. The temple gates shuddered as the ancient glyphs flared with dark energy, trying to resist him. The air crackled with power, the scent of ozone and ancient magic filling the night.
The glyphs cracked and broke with the sound of shattering glass. A wave of energy released from the glyphs made the soldiers sway like reeds in a storm. The obsidian doors creaked open, protesting with the voices of stone scraped against stone.
He stepped through without a word, his form silhouetted against the deeper darkness beyond, a void entering a void.
The gates slammed shut behind him with the finality of a tomb being sealed, the sound echoing across the temple grounds like thunder.
Elena lay on the ground, trembling, broken—but still existing. She touched her throat, feeling the marks where his grip had been, and looked at the place where Aiden had fallen, a dark stain on the ashen ground the only evidence of his centuries of service.
And the realm went silent once more, as if nothing had happened. As if centuries of existence hadn't just been snuffed out like a candle in a careless breeze.
"What did just happen?" she whispered to the dead air, her voice cracked and raw.
No one answered. But somewhere deep within the temple, ancient mechanisms ground into motion, awakened by the presence of something the realm had not felt in eons.
Something beyond death itself.
---
Lord Thorne, the Shahriyar
“Tell me again,” he commanded, his voice colder than the void between dying stars.
Elena stood straight, though exhaustion blurred her form, her outline wavering like a watercolor left to the rain. “A stranger approached. Pale, with hair like spun white gold. He... he killed Aiden with a single motion. Then entered the temple.”
Thorne’s silver eyes narrowed, a flicker of shock betraying centuries of discipline. “Killed Aiden? A Kay
“Yes, my lord.” Her voice trembled despite her effort. “He reached into Aiden’s chest and drew forth his heart. It beat... and then it stopped. He died like any mortal. The stranger said something about correcting his nature.”
“Impossible,” Thorne murmured, his pallor deepening. “The Kay
“Beheading. I know.” She swallowed, the memory of that cold hand still tightening around her throat. “I’ve fought beside Aiden for three centuries. I’ve seen him survive wounds that would annihilate lesser beings. But this… this unmade him.”
“We could not move,” whispered a younger guardian, voice thin as mist. His translucent hands trembled despite his attempt to still them. “It felt like… standing before something beyond all reason.”
Thorne’s fangs flashed briefly as he frowned, irritation sharpening the fear in his eyes. “And the gates opened to him? Without rites?”
Elena nodded once, her throat raw. “He forced them. The glyphs... they yielded. As if they knew him. As if they feared him.”
The lord turned toward the massive obsidian gates, tracing broken sigils with his gaze. They had once pulsed with ancient power. Now they lay as dead and black as coal. “Only the Shahriyar
No one spoke. No one dared.
“Send word to the city,” Thorne ordered, his voice slicing through silence like a blade. “We need reinforcements. And summon the Shroud Collectors. I want Akasha.”
Elena’s breath caught. Akasha. The most feared among the Shroud Collectors — those few who could commune with the truly dead, souls beyond even the veil of the Death Realm.
“Akasha? The Councilwoman herself?” she asked.
Thorne’s grim nod came like the toll of a funeral bell. “If anyone can name what manner of being breached our walls, it is her. She has walked between realms longer than memory.”
He turned once more to the great doors, his expression hardening into something unyielding. “Whatever he is, he will emerge. And when he does, we will be waiting.”
Elena thought of that stranger’s eyes, how he had torn Aiden’s heart free as though flesh were vapor. Of immortality unmade with a touch. Of the voice that carried eternity’s weight.
And in truth, she prayed he never came out.
---
Deep within the temple, Astraxian moved through darkness that parted before him like silk drawn back from a blade.
Golden cracks veined his flesh with each measured step, light spilling from within him in slow, shimmering fractures—a broken vessel brimming with something too vast, too ancient, to be contained. Pain thrummed through him, steady and unrelenting, the cost of wearing a form never meant to hold what he was.
The Fragment of Death called to him, its voice a whisper colder than the void, pulling at him like a tide that would not be denied.
, murmured the voice in his mind. Not his own. Never his own. Older than memory, cruel and mocking.
"It will sustain," he answered the silence, his voice ragged but resolute, steady even as agony licked at the edges of his soul.
Astraxian’s fist clenched, golden light seeping between his fingers like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. "Long enough to finish what I began."
The corridor yawned open ahead of him, revealing a chamber vast and silent. Black water spread before him, smooth as glass, reflecting nothing. A mirror for oblivion itself. At its heart, an island of bone and ash, stark and lifeless.
And upon that isle, pulsing with shadowed energy that rippled across the water’s surface like dying breath, lay the Fragment of Death.
He stepped onto the water. It bore his weight, though it swayed and rippled beneath him, solid and liquid all at once—a thing beyond mortal understanding.
Astraxian faltered for but a moment, eyelids fluttering shut as Lythara’s face rose in memory. Beauty and grief intertwined, eternal and terrible. "She is gone."
He gave no answer. Only forward. Each step sent gentle ripples outward, fading into the void.
The fragment loomed close now, its pull a living hunger that gnawed at his resolve.
It waited, pulsing in silence. A heart torn from the chest of reality itself, wrapped in tendrils of darkness.
"Forgive me," he breathed. To whom, he did not know. Perhaps to the world. Perhaps to her.
He reached out. Fingers trembling.
And the world exhaled into darkness, as if creation itself braced for what would follow.
