"Each beat it gave was another piece of me dying."
The screams of the Void still echoed behind me as I stepped into the light.
Not light of the sun—no, the Fractured World had no sun. What spilled across its ruin was the corpse-glow of dying skies, a sick luminescence that felt more like decay than dawn. The air was heavy with ash and static, humming like a body trying to remember how to breathe.
I walked through the silence that followed slaughter. Every step left an impression on the ground, shadows that didn't fade. The Elarin—those crystal beings of false light—had been reduced to shards scattered across the blackened plains. Their hearts had sung when I devoured them. Their light had screamed.
And yet, somewhere beneath the cracked surface of this world, something else pulsed.
A rhythm too steady. Too alive.
The first heartbeat.
The earth split under my hand. It did not crumble—it parted, as though flesh obeying its master's touch. From the wound, a faint glow rose, dull red and wet with mist. I felt it then—a vibration that wasn't sound but understanding.
Thrum.
A beat.
Not of life, but of defiance.
The void inside me responded. It didn't like competition.
My resonance stirred. The ground's pulse met mine, their rhythms clashing—one alien, one infinite. I reached down, and when my fingers touched the warm edge of the fissure, the world shivered.
"Show me," I whispered—not in speech, but in thought sharp enough to cut through the fabric of this place.
The ground obeyed.
A stairway of black bone unfolded beneath me, spiraling into the wound like a throat swallowing itself. The air grew dense, then liquid. Each breath carried the taste of rust and despair. I descended.
Thrum.
The second heartbeat. Louder.
Shadows stretched and bent toward me as I passed. They whispered without mouths, using the tongue of the Void—my mother's language.
[Az'renoth… thal'vukar…]
[Heir of the Hollow Sun…]
The words coiled around my mind like smoke. They did not praise me. They feared me.
Good.
The deeper I went, the less gravity meant. My steps lost sound. My body felt distant, as though the world was forgetting me. The walls glistened like the inside of a vein. Something warm trickled across my hand; I raised it and saw black ichor streaked with purple light. My blood. Or perhaps the world's.
When I reached the bottom, the tunnel opened into a cavern vast enough to hold a dying god.
And there it was.
The Heart.
Suspended in the center of the void, beating slowly. It was neither flesh nor crystal—something between matter and memory, wrapped in endless strands of dark light. Every beat made the walls breathe.
Thrum.
Thrum.
The resonance struck me like a hammer. My knees nearly buckled—not from pain, but from recognition. It was as though something ancient inside me had found its twin.
I stepped closer, every motion heavy with inevitability.
The whispers grew clearer now. Not the language of the Void this time, but something older. The Heart spoke not in words, but impressions.
You are mine.
No… you are me.
I reached out. My palm hovered inches from its surface. The air around it shimmered, alive with screams too small to hear. The light was red, but when I looked longer, it wasn't light at all—it was souls, trapped, orbiting like dust around a dying star.
"Is this what you guard?" I asked quietly. My voice broke the silence like a blade through silk. Even the Heart seemed to flinch.
It answered with another beat.
Harder. Louder.
Thrum.
A wave of energy tore through the chamber. Rocks screamed as they turned to liquid. The ground convulsed.
And inside me—something cracked open.
For the first time since my birth, I felt.
Not warmth. Not love. But pressure. Something filling the hollow space where emotion should have been.
The Heart was rewriting me.
I stumbled forward and pressed my hand to it. My resonance screamed—black and violet light erupted from my arm, veins glowing like molten glass. The Heart absorbed it, then returned it magnified a thousandfold.
Pain. Ecstasy. Creation. Destruction.
It was all the same.
Images flashed behind my eyes: worlds consumed by voidfire, stars bleeding, faces I did not yet know—but one… three figures—silhouettes of women whose gazes cut through eternity. The faintest taste of something dangerous, something tender.
Love.
Then the vision shattered.
Thrum-thrum-thrum—
The beat became a roar. My teeth elongated—sharp, blinding, platinum fangs gleaming as lightless fire spilled from my mouth. The transformation burned through me, each pulse reshaping my bones, my aura expanding like a storm without end.
I screamed, not in agony, but declaration.
"Bow."
The sound wasn't human. It wasn't sound at all—it was a command written into the air, forcing the cavern to collapse inward.
The Heart trembled.
Thrum.
Then silence.
When the dust settled, I stood before it—changed. My body still dripped with black aura, but beneath it, silver light coursed like veins of lightning through stone. The resonance had fused with me completely. I could feel everything—the heartbeat of the world, the cries of the dead above, the infinite distance of the stars beyond.
And somewhere in that chaos, a whisper brushed against my mind.
[Azael…]
It knew my name.
The Heart had recognized me.
Then, for the first time, it beat not with sound—but with words.
[Welcome home, son of the Void.]
"Each beat it gave was another piece of me dying."
The chamber no longer breathed.
The stillness that followed was too complete—like the pause between a predator's inhale and the strike. The Heart hovered in the air, motionless, its glow dimming as if exhausted. Yet its silence was worse than its pulse.
I listened. There were no echoes here anymore, only the faint hiss of reality stitching itself back together after what I had done.
Something within me stirred.
I looked down at my reflection in a pool of molten stone. The face staring back was not the one I had entered with.
My skin shimmered with shifting black aura, coiling and tightening like serpents made of smoke. Beneath that veil, traces of light pulsed faintly—silver and violet. And when I bared my teeth, the cavern caught their glint.
Platinum.
They did not belong to mortals, nor gods. They belonged to something the Void itself had decided should exist.
I ran my tongue along their edge and tasted silence—no blood, no breath, just a promise of unending hunger.
The Heart pulsed again. Once. Softly.
And the moment it did, the cavern responded. The ground below me flexed, as if muscle and vein extended deep into the crust of the Fractured World. The realization struck me—this entire realm, every decaying mountain and broken plain above, was alive because of this thing.
It was a parasite feeding on existence.
And now, it was feeding on me.
The sensation crawled under my skin. A thousand invisible threads reached from the Heart and buried themselves in my flesh, drawing resonance through me, tasting what I had become.
I allowed it—for a moment.
Then I clenched my hand into a fist, and my resonance bit back.
A deafening crack tore through the air as dark energy surged from my palm. The threads burned to nothing. The Heart recoiled, its surface rippling like a sea of blood in reverse.
"Do not mistake your creator for your master," I said. My voice was low, calm. The kind of calm that made silence cower.
The Heart froze.
Then, faintly, it laughed.
A sound not made of mirth, but of recognition—a tone that existed between heartbeat and thunder.
Thrum… thrum… thrum…
The sound built until it was not just around me—it was inside me. I fell to one knee, clutching my head as the resonance collided with itself, my power against its ancient rhythm.
Images crashed through my mind like falling stars:
—A thousand void-born villages scattered across infinite black, each ruled by a bloodline like mine.
—A sun inverted and chained beneath them, screaming light instead of burning it.
—And above all, a throne made of the same black bone as the stairway I had descended.
A throne waiting.
For me.
When I opened my eyes again, the cavern was gone.
I stood in a great expanse of nothing—a horizonless plain of shimmering obsidian, where the stars themselves bled downward.
A figure waited ahead.
Tall. Shapeless. Cloaked in radiance that looked like the inverse of light. Its presence was both infinite and suffocating.
[Azael Voidborn…]
Its voice was thought and thunder, melody and blade.
[The blood of the First Line flows through you. The Heart was a fragment of what you were meant to be.]
I stared into it. "Then what am I meant to be?"
Silence. Then—
[The End of Endings.]
The words carried the weight of prophecy. They didn't echo—they consumed. The stars fell faster, dissolving into streaks of black flame.
The figure extended a hand. Its fingers were long, jointless, each dripping violet luminescence.
"Why show yourself now?"
[Because you have awoken it.]
The Heart.
It appeared beside the figure, vast and trembling, beating slower now—its rhythm matching mine perfectly.
Thrum.
Thrum.
Our resonance had synchronized completely.
[Every world you enter will now feel your pulse. Every god will hear it.]
The figure leaned closer, its outline warping. For the first time, I saw its face—or perhaps my own reflection upon it.
I smiled. "Then let them tremble."
The vision shattered.
I was back in the cavern, standing before the now-silent Heart. Its glow was gone, but a faint pattern pulsed beneath its surface—my resonance sigil, etched into its flesh like a brand.
Above, the fractured ceiling opened into darkness, and beyond that, the world.
It was time to leave this corpse.
I stepped forward. The Heart twitched once more, a farewell or a warning—I couldn't tell. My aura flared, shadows rising to swallow the light entirely.
The stairway that had brought me down crumbled into dust as I ascended, floating upward on a current of energy drawn from the resonance itself. The world above awaited—a world that now unknowingly carried my heartbeat in its core.
When I reached the surface, the sky greeted me with silence.
The Fractured World was still dying, but something new bled into it now—a rhythm it had never known.
My rhythm.
I gazed at the horizon where ruined mountains met endless dark. Somewhere beyond them were other lands, other beings, other challenges. Perhaps even those who had built the thrones I had seen in the vision.
I licked my lips. The platinum of my fangs caught the dying light, sharp enough to split reflection from reality.
"Let them come," I murmured.
My aura flared outward, shaking the ground. Cracks spread like veins of night across the landscape.
The Fractured World groaned beneath me, its surface breaking into a thousand shards of silence.
And beneath it, far below where the Heart once beat, a faint echo answered my call.
Thrum.
It would not be the last.
End of Chapter 6 — The Heart That Should Not Beat