Volume 2 — Whispers of the Broken Dawn
Ashardio awoke not to light — but to breath.
A breath he didn't take.
A breath that wasn't his.
It hovered over him, around him, through him — as if the world itself had inhaled and was holding that breath, waiting for his next thought to either rewrite or unravel it. The air carried a weight, not of pressure, but of remembrance. Not memory — memory remembering him.
The threads that had bound him at the end of the first realm were still there, etched like ancient scars along his forearms and across his chest, glowing dimly beneath his skin. No longer burning. Now pulsing. As though the fabric of reality had accepted him — not as a being within it, but as a correction made outside of it.
He was lying on stone — but not stone as he had known it.
This surface was alive. It beat. It hummed. It waited.
He sat up slowly.
No sky overhead. No sand beneath. No constellations, no horizon. Only a towering dome of black obsidian stretching endlessly above and around, its smooth surface marbled with glyphs — thousands of them, suspended in orbit like slow-moving satellites. They twisted gently, watching him with unreadable intelligence. Occasionally, one would freeze mid-spin, pulse once in violet, and then resume its orbit — like it had taken his measure.
Then came the word.
No voice spoke it. No sound was heard. But every cell in his body knew it.
Deviation.
It echoed inside his marrow. A truth, not told — embedded.
He hadn't returned from the last world.
He had tilted the axis of what return even meant.
A door formed in the farthest wall — not built, not opened, but torn. The wall split with the sound of skin parting, and from within stepped a figure.
Small. Silent.
A child.
She had silver eyes. No mouth. No footsteps. She simply was.
She lifted one thin arm and pointed. Her finger didn't indicate direction — it unraveled one.
The wall behind her twisted — physically and metaphysically. It bent time like it was tired of being straight. Within the distortion, visions bled out, as if time had grown too saturated and begun to leak:
— An ocean that bled skies instead of waves, where stars drowned and screamed.
— The Guardian statues in their ruined halls, whispering ancient sins in forgotten dialects.
— Kaelith, weeping in a circular chamber, surrounded by seven Ashardios — each one mutilated differently, each whispering "Kill them. I'm the real one."
— The Demon Thrones breaking apart like eggshells, and from within slithered forms that wore human skin like cloaks over hungers that had never been named.
Ashardio stepped forward. The child shook her head.
From everywhere — above, below, within, behind — a single chorus emerged, layered and toneless:
"You don't walk forward now."
"You walk backward… through truth."
And then it happened — not to his body, but to his anchor in causality.
Ashardio was ripped into the folds of the "almost" — not the past, not the future, but the paths not taken. He saw himself not awakening, remaining sealed in the Thirteenth Throne, the world rebuilding itself wrong, like a body healed over a knife blade.
He saw Kaelith rewritten. Not killed. Not broken. Redesigned. A puppet in white flame, smiling with a voice that wasn't hers.
And above it all, he saw the hands that had chosen those outcomes.
Celestial. Sin-born. Guardian. Even mortal hands. All pushing him like a pawn. Like a contingency.
Then came the voice — not in sound, but through equation.
"Choose again. Or we will choose for you."
Ashardio did not panic. He did not beg.
He simply declared — with every crack in his soul aligned:
"I am the choice."
The obsidian dome groaned. And then — it shattered.
From its broken arch, something fell.
A single memory. Not his.
Kaelith's.
Unedited. Pure.
It drifted like a feather made of blood and gold, landing in his palm — warm, wet, trembling like a child pulled from a dream that didn't belong to them.
He closed his hand around it.
And in that instant, he knew:
This volume of his story would not be about finding truth.
It would be about unmaking the lie before it fossilized into history.
Far, far away — in a realm where time was held together by weeping gods — a Guardian collapsed beside a dying tree and whispered to the stars:
"Volume Two has begun… and this time, the gods will be dragged down with us."