In the moment when the Gate turned its attention to savoring Malachar's dissolution, when its cosmic smugness filled the air like the scent of burning worlds, Selena saw her opportunity. The Riftborn King's crown of shattered bone had survived his destruction, lying forgotten among the crystalline ash that had once been his flesh. But survival had changed it, transformed it into something that neither the Gate nor its creator had intended.
The crown now pulsed with the concentrated essence of rebellion not mere ambition or hunger for power, but the pure distilled fury of defiance against cosmic inevitability. Where once it had been decorated with the skulls of Malachar's victims, now it bore the faces of every soul who had ever refused to bow to superior force. The bone had blackened to the color of the space between stars, and from its jagged points leaked a substance that was neither blood nor darkness but something far more dangerous: the liquid essence of absolute negation.
