The battlefield bore an echo of what had passed through it. A scent lingered—a complex mix of blood, lilac, brimstone, and something more celestial, something vast and unnameable. It was the scent of death, yes, but also of love—of something eternal and unyielding.
Kael stood alone in the crater left by the collapse of a world. The terrain around him was a twisted reflection of the destruction that had just occurred. The realm itself flickered in and out of focus like half-burnt film, the very laws of existence barely holding onto coherence. Time was broken here, twisted, warping in ways that defied comprehension.
Yet, within this devastation, one thing was certain: she was gone.
Lilith. The Eternal Mother. The Queen of the Abyss. The woman who had shattered kingdoms for him, torn apart gods and their will to defy him, bled fate itself for his rise.
Gone.
Not killed in the traditional sense. Not cleaved by a blade or struck down in battle.
She had been unwritten.
Erased from existence as though she had never been. But even in that erasure, there were remnants—fragments too powerful to disappear. The traces of her, the echoes of her power, still clung to the air. Her essence was a lingering stain on the universe itself.
Kael stood motionless, his knees stained with the dust of what had once been—a world, a reality, that no longer existed. Around him, the ground trembled, crumbling like the bones of an ancient god, as if the earth itself was mourning the loss of something it had never truly understood.
The realm stretched around him like a living thing, fragile and hanging by a thread, its very structure flickering in and out of focus, just as it had when Lilith's body had unstitched in the face of the Singularity's wrath. There were no sounds here, no screams, no cries of anguish. The silence that now filled the space was not peaceful—it was the kind of quiet that settled after a storm too great to understand, too vast to ever contain within the scope of mortal comprehension.
And yet, even in the midst of this eerie silence, Kael felt her.
Not her body. Not her soul. But something deeper—something intangible, but present nonetheless.
Where she had stood, a pulse ran through the fabric of reality itself—a ripple that felt like the last beat of a dying heart, an echo of something too immense to vanish completely.
"You were never meant to be my weapon…"
Her voice.
Sharp, clear, and piercing, it filled Kael's mind, a painful reminder of the last words she had spoken before she had vanished from existence. The words were not cruel; they were not angry. They were the words of a mother, a woman who had known him in ways no one else ever could. They were the words of a woman who had loved him, in all his dark glory, without ever truly understanding the weight of the thing she had created.
The weight of that loss pressed down on Kael as he stood there, his expression unreadable. He had faced the deaths of so many in his life—lovers, friends, enemies, allies, and rivals alike—but this… this was different. This was a wound that cut deeper than any blade, deeper than any betrayal. This wasn't just the death of someone who had been close to him. This was the loss of a mother, of someone who had not only given him life but had shaped him into the force he was now. She had known him in ways that even Kael himself could not fathom, and in that knowing, she had always accepted him for what he was, never questioning, never fearing him.
Kael's fingers twitched, his hand closing into a fist around the last lingering fragment of her power. The essence of the Abyss—the very force that had defined her existence—still burned within his hand, glowing faintly with the light of something dying. It was a thread of her, a final remnant of a being far beyond the mortal plane.
He could still feel her presence in that thread, in the way it pulsed against his palm, as if it were breathing, as if the very soul of Lilith was still somehow alive in that small fragment.
And then the sky cracked.
A thin, impossibly sharp line of white light tore through the ruptured heavens, splitting the already-broken realm apart like paper. From that line, descending like a harbinger of inevitability, came the Enemy.
The Woman of the Singularity.
She came not as a force of anger, not as a storm of wrath, but as something far more terrifying—something calm, serene, and yet utterly unstoppable. Her presence was an antithesis to the chaos around them. Where the world had unraveled, she stood unwavering, her form an impossible constant in a realm where nothing was meant to endure. She had never been a part of the world Kael had built. She was a force outside of it—a thing beyond mortal comprehension, beyond even the limits of godhood.
Behind her, like shadows trailing an ancient ruler, her army flowed forth. They were creatures born not of flesh and bone, but of collapsing truths and broken timelines. They were phantoms, born of paradoxes, of things that should not have been and never would be. Their forms shifted and writhed, impossibly fluid, as they marched in perfect unison, like a tide too vast to escape.
The stars above blinked, as if they were stunned by the sheer audacity of her existence. The laws of gravity hiccupped, bending and twisting in ways that defied all logic. The world around Kael seemed to ripple in and out of focus, as if even reality itself were unsure of its place in the face of this presence.
She stepped forward, her gaze never leaving Kael.
There was no arrogance in her eyes. No mockery. There was only inevitability. She was not here to destroy him. She was here to remind him of what he could never escape.
"You see now," she said softly, her voice a perfect blend of certainty and sorrow. "This is not about hate. Or power. One man is not meant to rule beyond fate."
Kael did not move, nor did he speak. His gaze was fixed not on her, but on the very point where Lilith had been, where she had disappeared from the world. He could still feel her presence there—the last vestiges of her being—and that was enough.
The enemy's voice broke through the stillness once more, but this time, Kael's mind was distant, lost in the weight of his loss.
The Woman of the Singularity sighed.
"I warned her. She made her choice."
Kael moved.
Not with rage.
Not with vengeance.
But with purpose.
Each step he took cracked the air, like the first stirrings of a storm long suppressed. His shadow stretched across the broken landscape, dark and suffocating, as if it were an omen of things to come.
The last tears of a broken mother, the final remnants of Lilith's love and pain, turned into fuel. Fuel for something darker, sharper, far more dangerous than Kael had ever been before. It was not the fire of vengeance that burned in him now—it was the cold, calculated burn of loss. He could feel his grief turning into a weapon, a sharp edge that he would wield against those who dared to dictate his fate.
The Singularity surged.
Her army poured forward, a sea of impossible creatures and warping realities. Their forms bent and twisted in ways that should have been impossible, yet here they were, tangible and real in this fractured place. They were beings that should never have existed, but they did. And they moved toward Kael with a singular purpose: to destroy.
Kael stood alone.
The ground trembled beneath him, the very fabric of reality rippling as his power surged to meet the challenge. But this time, it was not just his own strength that surged through him. No, this time, it was the weight of Lilith's legacy, the bitter remnants of her sacrifice, that gave him the strength to rise once more.
And as his hand closed tighter around the last of her essence, Kael whispered to himself, "You broke the wrong one."
And the war began anew.
Not for conquest.
Not for power.
But for the right to mourn, for the right to grieve for the only person who had ever truly known him.
For the right to mourn the loss of the woman who had been both his protector and his greatest adversary.
To be continued…