The sunlight tore apart like a lie.
Shade felt the heat ripped from his skin, replaced by a cold that did not belong to this world — a void that seeped into his bones, licking his marrow with a tongue of ice. Primordial terror receded for just an instant, and in that blink of feigned relief, he opened his eyes.
Red against black. Enormous tongues of rock hung above him like teeth in a collapsed jaw. The wind howled, whipping his clothes against his body like lashes.
Then he heard the wings.
Not one. Not a hundred. Countless. A beating that vibrated in the air, in the stone, in his chest.
He looked down.
His face drained of color.
The abyss was full.
Moths. Each one dozens of meters across. Sixty, eighty, more. Their wings were not velvet but corrupted flesh, translucent membranes where black veins like rivers of poison could be seen. They ascended in a slow spiral, an inverted hurricane of nightmare, and all — all — were looking at him.
Shade summoned.
The Saint's Mantle erupted from his essence like a second silver skin. The Crown of Repose settled upon his brow, and for a moment the voices of the abyss fell silent. His second-level Supreme Memory — the White Flower Sword — cut the air at his right side. Two more hands sprouted from his shoulders, made of shadow and will: one grasped the Wyrm's Fang, the other a Transcendent sword trembling with astral light.
"Gunlaug!" His voice was not a plea. It was an order.
The Winter Beast emerged at his call, and the Winter Gown unfolded like a mantle of living frost. The cold intensified — not the cold of the abyss, but his own, the one that obeyed. Gunlaug extended his will like a protective cloak, creating a dome of heat and will against the winds that sought to tear them apart.
The first moth crossed the threshold.
The frost caught it in an instant embrace. Crystals of ice burst from its compound eyes, sealed its wings in a white explosion. Gunlaug lunged, claws open, and shattered it with a roar that echoed through the canyon.
[You have killed a Great Monster.]
The spell spoke once.
Then again.
Then it could no longer count.
The moths fell frozen, crashing into each other in a cascade of broken bodies — but there were thousands. Thousands more rose to replace each one that died. The air became dust of wings, crushed chitin, frozen hemolymph.
The Winter Beast floated at Shade's command: a lantern, an anchor of ice in the middle of hell. The blizzard intensified until it became a furious gale, a god of frost licking the swarm and devouring it piece by piece.
[You have killed a Great Monster.]
[You have killed a Great Monster.]
[You have killed a Great Monster—]
Shade ignored the notifications. His dark storage unfolded before his inner eye, a library of forgotten objects, fragments of power saved in moments of madness or boredom. He searched. Desperately. He rummaged through memories and remnants.
Until he found it.
A Supreme soul fragment. He had kept it on a whim, enchanted to make it explode in his free time, when boredom consumed him and he needed to see something burn.
Thank you, he thought with a smile that did not reach his lips. Thank you, bored past self.
Gunlaug roared.
A sea of black flames erupted from his jaws, devouring hundreds of moths in an instant. Wings charred, bodies fell like ash — but there were already more. Always more. The swarm was an ocean, and they were two paper boats.
The Winter Beast, high in the tunnel, was being torn apart. Hundreds of moths covered it like a white plague, ripping pieces from its frozen flesh. It had seconds left.
Gunlaug flew faster than he had ever flown, plunging into the heart of the swarm. His body was a living shield: the moths crashed against him, bit him, clawed him, and he tore them apart with claws and fangs while protecting Shade in the center of his mass.
Shade poured all his essence into the fragment. Every fiber of his being fed the bomb that was about to explode. His cores — seven tiny suns within his chest — emptied one by one.
Six.
Five.
Four.
"NOW!"
He spent six of his seven cores in a single exhalation.
He dismissed the Winter Beast an instant before the moths could annihilate it completely. He felt the bond sever, a lash to his soul. Then he created an ultra-dense sphere of darkness around himself — a cocoon of absolute night, a lie of protection in the middle of hell.
He opened an active space. He invoked the enchantment. He released the Supreme soul fragment.
He closed the sphere.
The Water Pearl entered his mouth. His body curled into a fetal position.
All this took less than a second.
Then, the world broke.
The explosion was stronger than the one that had shaken all of Antarctic Center. Stronger than anything Shade had ever witnessed. It spread as if a thousand suns had decided to be born in the same instant, at the same point, with the same fury.
The moths that had gathered around the sphere — thousands — evaporated. They did not die. They did not explode. They simply ceased to exist, their bodies disintegrated within a radius of kilometers.
The sphere of darkness shattered like fragile glass.
The shockwave found Shade's body.
Pain.
There were no words for it. No comparison. He had been hit before, wounded, shattered. But this was different. This was the hand of a furious god accidentally crushing an ant.
His bones splintered into dozens of fragments. His muscles tore like wet paper. His eardrums burst, and the world became absolute silence — no, not silence, a white buzz that filled everything. His eyes exploded in their sockets, and the last image he registered was a blinding white flash.
The Saint's Mantle, his pride, his protection, was left in tatters. Tatters that embedded themselves in his exposed flesh like blades.
Shade could not scream. Could not think. He could only feel.
He felt his body hurled downward at dizzying speed, a meteor of flesh and bone falling toward a destination he could not see, could not hear, could not imagine.
The wind howled around him, but he no longer heard it. Something immense was approaching from below — he felt it in the weight of the air, in the pressure that grew second by second. He clenched his teeth. They were broken, but he clenched them anyway.
I am not going to die here.
It was not a thought. It was a promise. An oath made of broken teeth and shattered bones.
---
Inside the Great Tomb of Ariel, seven suns shone on the ceiling of a cavern that should not exist. They illuminated a river whose current did not follow the laws of time — it flowed from the future to the past, eternal, unstoppable, indifferent.
The water was clear and transparent, reflecting the blue sky, alongside the bright suns.
Among the seven suns, a tiny point appeared at the highest point.
A body.
It fell at projectile speed, wrapped in silver tatters and blood that froze in the air. It did not slow down. It did not stop.
It impacted the surface of the river.
It was not a splash.
It was a catastrophe.
The water did not part — it exploded. A liquid wall hundreds of meters high rose toward the tomb's ceiling, a column of black and silver that seemed to hold up the sky. Shockwaves traveled kilometers upstream and downstream, breaking the surface into fractures of light.
The sound was a thunder that had no right to exist underground.
And then, silence.
The water fell again in endless cascades, and Shade's body sank into the current that flowed from the future to the past.
The Water Pearl in his mouth glowed weakly, feeding his lungs with oxygen, preventing him from drowning — but it could do nothing else.
Shade floated unconscious, face up, arms open like a crucified man. His blood stained the river red, and the river dragged it backward in time.
His empty eyes stared at the blue sky reflected on the great river, illuminated by the seven bright suns.