I looked at my right hand for a moment, as if it were a strange tool that didn't belong to my body. It wasn't just shadow this time — it was flame, red laced with black, burning from within. Fire that didn't burn as I once knew, but swallowed the light and smiled to the darkness. I raised my hand slowly, the blaze growing like a glowing trunk, writhing like a serpent of dark flame.
— "What…?" I whispered in a voice that didn't sound like my own.
In a sudden, twisted moment, memories struck me: my power had always gathered in my left hand — shadow, cold, a void that devoured. But now my right hand burned; I was no longer just shadow. Two opposites ran through my veins: fire that consumed, and darkness that devoured.
I laughed — a sharp, broken, storming laugh. I laughed until its echoes clashed against the dead city, bouncing off the cracks and shattering on the ruins of broken towers. It wasn't joy; it was a ritual. An announcement of a new birth.
— "Hahahaha…" I laughed, clasping both hands together, fire and shadow intertwining like two ropes weaving a crown. "Do I… wield both fire and darkness?" I whispered in awe, then answered myself with a jagged voice: "I will be the King of Void and Hell."
The words carved themselves on my tongue like the edge of a blade. A cold triumph gnawed at my bones; not only triumph over others, but the revelation that I was no longer bound to a single fate. My right hand burned, my left hand devoured — both lines on the same map, a map I would draw with a breath of shadowed flame.
I raised both palms to the hollow sky. Fire licked the air while shadow coiled around my wrists like ancient bracelets. I whispered slowly, as if sealing a pact with the world itself:
"Let the earth witness my vow. The realms will learn that the one who refused to be a puppet… will forge his own empire."
Then I stepped forward. Each step left a black shimmer on the ashes. Behind me, the whispers and cries turned into muted lament — not of fear, but of knowing: something new had been born in the land of the void. Something that would burn… and devour.