The Bastion Beyond Worlds pulsed like a living thing.
In its foundations, severed realms groaned against the bindings Kael had woven.
Above its spires, the skies shimmered with bruised violet and bleeding gold, remnants of the shattered veils.
Reality was thinner here now — pliable.
Kael had made it so.
Atop the central tower, he gazed across his newborn empire — an empire that defied the natural order itself.
His black cloak whipped against the corrupted winds. At his side, Severance gleamed faintly, hunger barely restrained.
Below, preparations were underway.
The first Court of Chains would soon be held — not for mortals, but for cosmic intruders.
Kael moved through the inner sanctums of the Bastion, flanked by his commanders.
Each chamber they passed had been meticulously prepared:
The Halls of Reflection: rooms where thought itself slowed, trapping unwary minds.
The Crucible Gardens: places where memories were twisted into weapons.
The Silent Vaults: tombs where stolen cosmic anchors were kept to weaken any intruder's connection to their native realms.
Lady Ardyn briefed him quickly.
"The Parley Envoy will arrive at the Gate of Severance at the appointed hour. The wards will be silent until the signal."
"The Sovereign's Blades?" Kael asked.
"Hidden within the Shardfolds, masked from even higher senses," she answered. "Ready to strike."
Kael gave a nod.
Everything was proceeding according to plan.
The Eidolons thought they came to negotiate.
They came to bleed.
The appointed hour came.
The Gates of Severance groaned open — not to welcome, but to allow.
The Envoy floated across the threshold, not walking, not breathing, not fully existing. It was a construct of seven intertwined beings, each bearing a chain that fed into a central mass — a thing like a heart, but crafted from starless stone.
It had no face, but a hundred mouths whispered from beneath its chains.
"We come... bearing the Edicts of Accord."
The air grew heavy. Men at the walls staggered. Some wept without knowing why.
Kael stood unmoved at the threshold of the Grand Hall.
"Come," he said, voice cutting cleanly through the oppressive pressure. "Speak your terms."
The Envoy drifted forward, chains clinking softly, like the distant echo of battlefield bells.
Around the chamber, unseen, the Sovereign's Blades closed their invisible net.
Within the Grand Hall, the Envoy wove its offer:
In exchange for Kael's submission — his recognition of Eidolon sovereignty — they would allow his Bastion to stand, as a vassal-realm.
They would grant Kael a fragment of godhood, binding him as a Warden of the Rift.
They would protect his people — or at least those "useful" to the cosmic designs.
The words dripped with false generosity, every sentence hiding a collar, a leash.
Seraphina, standing silent behind Kael, clenched her fists until blood welled from her palms.
Lady Ardyn's eyes burned with fury.
Yet Kael — Kael only smiled.
A slow, dangerous curve of the lips.
"I see," he said lightly. "You offer chains gilded with promises. How quaint."
"Accept, Sovereign, and you will ascend," the Envoy intoned. "Refuse... and you will be unmade."
Kael stepped forward until he stood mere paces from the thing.
The Bastion shuddered around them, the very stone reacting to his will.
"You think I fear unmaking?" he murmured. "Fools. I was forged in the fires you fear to tread."
With a flick of his hand, the Severance Blade leapt into the air — and split into nine reflections, each hovering around the chamber.
The Sovereign's Blades revealed themselves in the same instant, stepping from folded space, their weapons drawn and ready.
The Envoy recoiled — but too late.
Kael's trap had already sprung.
The Bastion's wards twisted inward, collapsing the dimensions around the Grand Hall. The Envoy's link to its masters snapped like dry twine.
The chains binding the seven beings twisted — and began devouring their own carriers.
The Envoy screamed — not in words, but in a chorus of cosmic agony that shook the walls.
Kael watched impassively as the seven beings were stripped apart, their energies siphoned into the Heartforge below.
"Let your masters hear this," Kael said, his voice a dark benediction. "There is no parley. No surrender. No compromise."
"Only conquest."
With a final convulsion, the Envoy was annihilated, leaving behind only a blackened sigil scorched into the Bastion's stones.
Far beyond the Bastion, in the unfathomable halls of the Eidolon Courts, the death of the Envoy rippled like a thunderclap.
Selqara the Veil-Torn howled in fury.
Vaer'zhul the Entwiner demanded immediate retaliation.
Even Izh'ra stirred from its brooding — not with rage, but with a cold, calculating interest.
They could no longer dismiss Kael as an insolent mortal.
He was now a sovereign force.
A contender.
And war was inevitable.
After the destruction of the Envoy, Kael ordered the creation of a new throne in the heart of the Bastion.
It was not a throne of gold, or marble, or mortal pretensions.
It was crafted from the chains of the slain Envoy, woven with the crystallized remnants of broken realms.
It pulsed faintly with restrained cosmic agony.
When Kael ascended it, the Bastion itself seemed to bow.
Around him, his commanders knelt.
Even Seraphina, proud and defiant, bent the knee.
"Rise," Kael commanded, voice echoing with layered resonance. "You kneel not to a man. But to a Sovereign. To the will that will remake the worlds."
They rose — transformed.
Bound by blood.
By will.
By the severed chains of the cosmos.
Kael sat in silence upon his throne for a long time after the court was dismissed.
In the flickering half-light of the Heartforge, he plotted.
The Eidolons would come.
Stronger.
Angrier.
More desperate.
Good.
Let them throw their champions into his jaws.
Let them bleed their courts dry.
Kael would turn every incursion, every battle, into another stone in his rising empire.
Not merely survival.
Ascendancy.
His hand curled around the Severance Blade's hilt, feeling the pulse of stolen divinity within.
He smiled, slow and dark.
The war was coming.
And Kael would be ready.
To be continued...