The false dawn bled into a morning painted in unnatural hues.
Violet light streaked across black clouds, and the wind carried the faint scent of ozone and ancient dust, as if the world remembered what had been buried for eons.
Kael stood in the central courtyard of the Dominion Citadel — no banners flew today, no soldiers trained.
Only silence reigned, heavy and expectant.
Today, the world would change again.
One by one, they arrived — his handpicked agents, selected not for loyalty alone, but for an iron will, a hunger that mirrored Kael's own in miniature.
Elyndra, bearing her reforged twin blades, her silver armor shimmering faintly under the alien light.
Selene, her crimson cloak stitched with the sigils of conquest, eyes burning with fervor.
Arden, wrapped in shadows so thick they seemed to drink the very light.
Cassian, the war-mage who had betrayed two kingdoms for Kael's favor.
Veyra, the soul-witch whose whispers could unravel a man's sanity from a mile away.
They knelt as one before him.
Kael descended the black marble stairs slowly, the echo of his boots falling like thunder across the silent courtyard.
"Rise," he commanded, voice carrying the subtle weight of dominion itself.
They obeyed.
"You are the Spear," Kael said. "You will pierce the veil that separates this fragile world from the true battlefield beyond."
None spoke. None dared interrupt.
Kael unfurled a new map — but this was no earthly cartography.
It depicted the Realms Beyond:
* The Shattered Thrones of the dead gods.
* The Scarlet Belt where fallen empires still waged spectral wars.
* The Maw of Endless Hunger, where reality itself frayed.
"Our enemies are not merely kings and queens," Kael said, his voice a low growl. "They are realities in themselves — desperate to resist the inevitable."
He let the map burn away in black flame.
"You will go forth. You will offer them one choice: bend the knee... or burn."
A shiver of something — excitement? terror? — passed through the gathered agents.
Kael smiled thinly.
"Go," he whispered, the word a blade itself. "Begin the First March."
And the envoys vanished into mist, into shadow, into portals of screaming starlight.
Elyndra was the first to arrive at her target.
The Maw of Endless Hunger was not a place but a wound in space — a howling abyss that devoured everything near it.
Fragments of dead worlds floated like carrion around its edges.
Here, the ancient Leviathans stirred — creatures older than suns, minds vast and alien.
Elyndra descended upon a fragment — once a city, now a drifting ruin — where the Cult of the Maw worshiped the eternal hunger.
Their leader, a being of living smoke and jagged bone, rose to meet her.
"Another supplicant?" the creature hissed, voice like rusted knives.
"Another offering?"
Elyndra smiled coldly.
"No," she said. "An ultimatum."
The cultists laughed — until she moved.
Steel flashed, reality warped — and within moments, the leaders lay dead, their forms unraveling into ash.
Elyndra stood before the altar of the Maw, driving her blade into the black stone.
It pulsed once, then fractured — sending a shockwave that rolled across the realm.
The Leviathans stirred in their slumber — and noticed.
Elyndra's message was simple, undeniable:
Kael was here. Kael was coming.
Meanwhile, Selene marched through the Scarlet Belt — a ring of dying worlds locked in eternal battle, their skies red with endless war.
On the first world she touched down, armies clashed in brutal silence, their fleshless forms trapped in battles they no longer remembered the reasons for.
Selene walked untouched through the carnage, her presence parting the combatants like a divine edict.
At the heart of the battlefield stood the Crowned Revenant, an ancient warlord wearing a crown of thorns and broken swords.
Selene knelt, not in submission — but in honor.
"You fight for nothing," she said. "I offer you purpose."
The Revenant laughed, a hollow, beautiful sound.
"Purpose? Purpose died with the First Fire."
Selene rose to her full height, eyes blazing.
"Then be reborn in Kael's name. Or be forgotten forever."
The Revenant hesitated — then knelt in turn.
Across the Scarlet Belt, the dead armies stirred — some screaming, some weeping — as the oath rippled across reality.
Selene planted Kael's black sigil into the bloody earth, and the world trembled.
Another realm fell under Dominion's shadow.
Arden traveled into the ruined pantheons — great thrones where gods once sat, now shattered and empty.
Here, the echoes of divine beings lingered, dangerous and broken.
Most mortal souls would shatter from mere exposure.
Arden thrived.
He moved like a wraith through the marble dust, whispering Kael's promise into the ears of forgotten titans and bitter echoes:
"There is a new Throne rising.
There is a new King ascending.
You have one chance to kneel and live... or be erased."
Some he seduced. Some he broke.
All carried his whispers deeper into the cracks of the dying worlds.
While his agents tore through the beyond, Kael was not idle.
Within the heart of the Dominion Citadel, Kael descended into the Forge of Becoming — a place lost even to myth.
Here, molten rivers of possibility flowed.
Here, new realities could be hammered into existence.
Kael stepped into the Forge's crucible without fear.
The fires licked at him — stripping away weakness, burning away anything unworthy.
Visions flooded him:
Himself crowned in galaxies.
Himself betrayed by those closest.
Himself slain by a child not yet born.
Himself alone, victorious but empty.
Kael endured them all.
He reached into the fires and drew forth The Spear of Eternity — a weapon not meant to slay flesh, but to pierce the very concept of an enemy's existence.
When Kael emerged from the Forge, his armor was darker, his aura heavier.
Even the Citadel itself seemed to bow slightly.
The Dominion was no longer merely an empire.
It was a seed of something greater:
An inevitability.
A singularity of will.
Days later, as the skies darkened into unnatural colors again, the first true envoy arrived.
Not one of Kael's.
An emissary from the Assembly of Infinite Thrones — the ancient coalition of higher powers who ruled the Beyond — dared cross into Kael's domain.
He appeared as a tower of golden light, faceless, speaking directly into the minds of all who could hear:
"Kael of Dominion.
You trespass upon sacred ground.
Cease your expansion. Return to your world.
Bend the knee. Or face annihilation."
The message echoed for hours, reverberating across cities, into dreams.
Panic spread among the common folk.
Nobles convened emergency councils.
Even some among Kael's inner circle hesitated.
But Kael?
Kael merely laughed.
A deep, resonant sound that shook the hall where he sat.
"Annihilation?" he whispered to the shadows.
"Let them try."
He stood, donning his new armor, Spear of Eternity in hand.
"Summon the Legions," he commanded.
"Prepare the Crucible Gates."
His voice rolled out like thunder:
"We will not merely survive the Infinite War.
We will end it.
We will write the new laws of existence in the bones of the old gods."
Across the Dominion, across the scarred heavens, a new prophecy was born:
Kael was not a king.
Kael was not a god.
Kael was the storm that would end everything... and begin anew.
To be continued...