Rathuur launched itself, a terrifying blur of insectile sinew and bone hooks. It was too fast for Lyriq in his half-formed state. His arms were still reshaping, the newly emerged claws feeling alien and clumsy, when Rathuur's first strike landed. A razor-sharp limb tore through Lyriq's side, flesh peeling back like rotten fruit. Black, steaming blood, thick and viscous, sprayed across the desecrated ground.
Lyriq's response was a roar. It wasn't born of pain, though agony surely ripped through him. It was a cry of pure, savage defiance, a sound pulled from the deepest, most ancient part of his newly awakened being.
He seized Rathuur's limb, his still-forming claws finding purchase, and with a guttural grunt, he crushed two of its grotesque joints. Bone snapped with a sickening crack. He twisted, wrenching the arm free from Rathuur's body.
As he did, one of Rathuur's many mouths bit into his shoulder, tearing tendon. Lyriq bit back instinctively, ripping flesh, spraying gore that mixed with his black blood across his face.
They tumbled into the surrounding ruins, a grotesque, primal tangle of evolving flesh and raw chaos. Rubble shattered beneath their combined weight. Twisted steel warped further under the impact.
Lyriq, driven by instinct, rolled beneath the thrashing beast and drove a half-formed claw into its spine. Rathuur shrieked, a piercing sound that ended in a retch of maggots erupting from the mouths on its chest.
The Second Order Chaotic Being retaliated with a sweeping bone hook that opened Lyriq's thigh, laying bare muscle and sinew. He fell back, the fresh wound bubbling with black ichor. Muscles twitched, attempting to knit themselves back together with an unnatural speed. Rathuur loomed, its multiple limbs clicking with predatory anticipation, ready to deliver the killing blow.
Lyriq, faced with imminent destruction, let go of Rathuur's severed limb. He didn't focus on the monster above him. Instead, he screamed into the bruised, rotting sky. It wasn't a human scream. It was a sound pulled from the core of his Nyz'khalar being, and from his chest, a wave of red-black light rippled outward. This was no mere aura; it was a birthright, a raw, untamed expression of his lineage.
As the red-black light pulsed from Lyriq's chest, a raw expression of his Nyz'khalar birthright, he didn't just heal. He rose. Not fully mended, his wounds still bubbled with dark ichor, but he was no longer the weak, half-formed being Rathuur had savaged. A new, terrifying power had awakened, hardening his resolve and sharpening his instincts. He was a force of primal, unyielding will.
He charged.
Claws, now sharper and more defined, met the clicking chitin of Rathuur's limbs. Fangs, newly elongated and predatory, ripped into its sinewy flesh. The clash was not a mere fight; it was a contradiction made manifest. Flesh, still fragile but rapidly becoming something far more resilient, collided with the abstract concept of the beast's unmaking power. His hunger, previously a dull ache, had now found its true language: war.
Every blow Lyriq landed burned, not with fire, but with a cold, consuming energy that began to unravel Rathuur's very essence. For every piece of his flesh Lyriq lost, a new, faintly glowing glyph burned itself into his skin, a testament to his unique, inverted evolution.
New memories, fleeting and horrifying, emerged unbidden in his mind, visions of a battlefield far larger than stars, of screaming gods being devoured by shadowy entities wearing his very face. He caught glimpses of himself seated on a throne made of absence, a universe kneeling, desperately trying to avoid being seen by his gaze.
And still, Lyriq fought. Still, he rose.
He found an opening. With a guttural roar, he drove a newly hardened claw through the writhing sigils that marked Rathuur's core, the place where its concept thickened and solidified.
The beast spasmed, its entire form convulsing violently. The wheel of screaming sigils that served as its head shattered into spiralling, phonetic cries, like orphans wailing into the void. Rathuur fell, not with a shriek of pain, but with a single, profound question echoing from its dissolving form: "What are you?"
Lyriq's answer was brutal, instinctive. He tore out what he sensed was its memory gland, a pulsing, alien organ within its decaying form.
The world around them rippled, a brief, localised tremor in the fabric of reality. And another pulsing shard, warmer and brighter than the last, took root in Lyriq's chest.
Order II attained.
His skin cracked anew, small fissures forming and then rapidly sealing. The retractable horn on his brow began to itch, pushing subtly outward. His spine lengthened further, granting him an even more predatory stance. And then, his third eye opened fully beneath his regular eyelid, a raw, black orb that screamed silently into the cosmos, perceiving truths and horrors that would shatter a lesser mind.
He collapsed, not from defeat, but from the sheer, overwhelming influx of new power. The dust and rubble softened his fall. And in the subsequent quiet, the profound hunger within him no longer just whispered. It purred.
Not done yet.Not nearly done.
Across dying galaxies, in thrones constructed from the marrow of collapsed stars, entities that humanity might once have called gods paused. They were Peak-Level Lifeforms or even higher, forces whose presence could distort entire galaxies. For aeons, they had maintained a precarious silence, their vast intellects operating on scales incomprehensible to lower beings.
They had forgotten the Nyz'khalar. The memory of Lyriq's ancient race had been suppressed, locked away not by deliberate action, but by the sheer, self-preserving cosmic amnesia that afflicted even the highest levels of existence when confronted with something truly outside of their understanding. Such a concept was too disruptive, too terrifying to retain clearly.
Now, with Lyriq's brutal awakening and his rapid ascent through the nascent Orders, with the echoes of his Nyz'khalar birthright rippling faintly across their own inconceivably vast domains, they remembered. The fleeting visions, the dreadful whispers carried in collapsing event-horizons that only beings beyond Supreme might truly comprehend, stirred.
But memory alone, they instinctively knew, would not be enough to contend with this burgeoning force of oblivion.
Lyriq was only Order II.
And he was climbing.
The battle, a primal, grotesque dance of breaking flesh and warping reality, had ended. The corpse of Rathuur, once a terrifying manifestation of the Dominion's chaotic evolution, hadn't even begun to cool. Its many mouths, grotesque and silent in death, twitched with residual, nervous spasms, as if still trying to utter forgotten screams.
Its innards, now exposed like a split, festering blister, steamed gently into the ash-choked air as the pervasive entropy of the world clawed at its dissolving form, eager to reclaim its constituent elements.
Lyriq stood over the decomposing remains, his chest heaving with deep, ragged breaths that pulled the tainted air into his reconfigured lungs. He was half-naked, his scavenged clothes shredded and clinging to his frame, dripping with the thick, black blood of his vanquished foe. Smoke, thin and acrid, rose lazily from his shoulders, a byproduct of his recent, agonising transformation.
His claws, now fully formed and obsidian-sharp, twitched with a strange, nascent memory, as if each victorious tear of flesh had imprinted upon them a new, primal understanding. His voidlike eyes, still bleeding shadow at their corners, shimmered faintly, a subtle, disturbing luminescence within their depths, as if new, terrifying dimensions were slowly unsealing themselves behind the black surface.
He had won. Barely.
The victory had been a desperate scramble for survival, a brutal, instinctual clash where he had pushed his newly awakened being to its breaking point. But Lyriq felt no exultation, no surge of triumph. Victory, for him, was not a cause for satisfaction. It was merely permission.
Permission to continue existing. Permission to pursue the profound, unnamed hunger that now pulsed within him.
The shard, ripped from Rathuur's core, pulsed within Lyriq's chest now, a foreign yet utterly natural extension of his being. It wasn't an artefact to be studied or a treasure to be hoarded. It was a vibrating signature of ascension, the irrefutable proof that he had emerged from the kill not just alive but fundamentally evolved. He was no longer just a nascent Nyz'khalar, a formless terror. He was now an Emberling.
He had reached Order II.
The air around him thickened, shifting with the subtle weight of his presence. It wasn't a physical pressure, but a perceptual distortion, a subtle recoiling of reality itself. The ground beneath his feet felt thinner, less substantial, as if its very molecular structure was briefly disturbed by the nascent aura emanating from him.
The world, in its vast, indifferent awareness, recognised him now, not as a mere man, not even as a mutated human, but as a direct, burgeoning threat. A new variable in the chaotic equation of Dominion Aeterna.
And still, Lyriq knew, instinctively, that he was only beginning. The taste of Rathuur's essence, the raw power absorbed into his core, was a fleeting gratification. It had only sharpened the hunger, given it a new, more insistent edge. The path ahead was long, fraught with greater dangers, but also with greater sustenance.
Long before Rathuur's sinew had congealed into dust, long before the sky above Dominion Aeterna had begun its sepia rot, there was no record of Lyriq's lineage. Not in any crumbling tomb, no matter how ancient; no archive, whether celestial or infernal, held a single entry for his kind.
No whispered nightmare, however profound, had ever truly captured their essence. The Nyz'khalar were not merely a species that had been erased from history. They were a race that had never been known to history in the first place.
Even the most ancient of Chaotic Beings, those primordial entities whose very existence stretched back to the first quivering moments of the cosmos, held no knowledge. The Scribes of Decay, who meticulously catalogued every instance of unmaking, the Matrons of Bone, who remembered the skeletal structures of forgotten universes, the Womb-Sworn Depths, who cradled the unborn concepts of nascent realities, none possessed runes, glyphs, or even abstract whispers for Lyriq's bloodline. The Nyz'khalar were not just outside the conventional flow of time.
They were, fundamentally, outside of memory itself. Their very existence was a paradox that defied quantification, a non-reactive presence to spacetime, rendering them invisible to cosmic scrying and unsummonable by any known rite, no matter how potent. The Cosmo Alliance, that vast, sprawling organisation that had existed since time immemorial, had zero records of them.
No memory. No name. No place. Lyriq felt the echoes of this truth in his core, a cold, empty vastness that mirrored the void from which his kind was born. It was not a source of sorrow, merely a fact. To be unremembered is to be untraceable. To be untraceable is to be free. The freedom of absolute oblivion. A flicker of something that might have been satisfaction, a cold, hard recognition of efficiency, passed through his nascent thoughts.
But evolution, even the twisted, chaotic evolution of Dominion Aeterna, was the inherent enemy of secrecy. And Lyriq, the lone Nyz'khalar awakened in this blighted chiliocosm, had undeniably begun to stir. His every act, every violent consumption of another, every raw surge of power, sent ripples through the fractured reality.
The Dominion Aeterna, Lucifer's perverse creation, did not shatter under these new tremors. It couldn't. It had never been truly pure, always a festering wound in reality. The greater powers, those far beyond Lucifer's current station, felt it, though. The Cosmo Alliance did not seek him; they didn't even know he existed in any tangible form.
But the echoes of higher realms, entities many Orders above Supreme-Level, capable of accessing fragments of lore from the Transcendent Realms, flinched. Just once. A subtle, almost imperceptible tremor in their vast, incomprehensible awareness. A murmur, too faint for any ear, like "what was that?" slipped through twelve silent sanctums, vast, abstract spaces where primordial consciousnesses resided.
Lyriq, walking through the ashen, fractured ruins, sensed these distant ripples. Not as individual thoughts or specific entities, but as a vast, shifting landscape of energy. The sky above wasn't blue or grey anymore. It was blistered, an angry, purulent expanse. Wounds in space bled lightless ichor, the substance of pure void, slowly dripping onto the ruined world. Somewhere, impossibly distant, a star wailed its final, silent agony, a sound Lyriq could now perceive not with his ears, but with his very being.
He felt nothing akin to human awe or fear. Only the cold, ceaseless thrum of hunger. Not for sustenance, not for the physical replenishment that lesser beings craved. This hunger was for meaning. A meaning he inherently knew existed only in the act of unmaking. He didn't understand why his hands itched with an almost electrical current after each kill, why each victory felt profoundly incomplete. But some unspoken, ancient piece within him whispered a truth colder than any cosmic void, "There will be more. There has to be. And there will be".