The air in the throne hall felt wrong.
Not cold.
Not warm.
Just… hollow.
Like the world had forgotten to breathe.
Kael forced himself to stand, though his legs shook against the black marble floor. Erynthos descended from his throne slowly, each step echoing like the tick of a massive clock.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Time itself was keeping rhythm with him.
Kael reached for his sword. His fingers brushed the hilt—
And the blade dissolved into smoke.
Kael staggered. "What—?"
Erynthos didn't stop walking. "Metal has no place here. This is the Hall Between Seconds."
Kael swallowed. "Where am I?"
"In the space that exists only when I choose it to exist." Erynthos smiled—too wide, too perfect, like a sculptor's mockery of a human expression. "You are in my time."
Kael's pulse hammered. "Let me go."
Erynthos lifted a hand.
Instantly, Kael lifted off the ground and slammed against an invisible force. It wasn't physical—it was like being pinned by the weight of a thousand memories.
His own memories.
Voices broke open inside his head.
His childhood.
His training.
His first battle.
His mother's laughter.
Commander Rhyla's voice.
Dreams of burning cities—
The cloaked figure on the road—
Everything flashed violently and overlapped.
Kael couldn't breathe.
Erynthos closed the distance between them without moving his feet—the air folded, and suddenly he was inches away.
"You," the god-king said quietly, "are a crack in my world."
Kael managed to choke out, "I didn't ask to be—"
"Oh, I know." Erynthos tilted his head. "But that doesn't matter. Existence is not permission. Existence is intrusion."
His hand snapped upward. Kael was thrown backward like a rag doll and crashed onto the marble.
Pain shot through his ribs. He struggled to rise—
But the shadows around the throne moved.
Slowly.
Purposefully.
They crept like liquid darkness, pooling around the floor before stretching upward into thin, unnaturally long shapes.
Faces formed in the black mist—blank, open-mouthed, whispering words Kael couldn't understand.
Whisperers.
No—
Not the ones he'd seen at the outpost.
These were older.
Stronger.
Wrong.
One of them leaned close to Kael. Its face was inches from his. He could see the emptiness where its eyes should have been—two hollow pits pulling at the light.
A whisper slid into his ear, faint and hungry:
We know you.
We saw you.
We smelled your time.
The king wants your end.
We want your beginning.
Kael jerked away.
Erynthos chuckled softly. "Don't mind them. They are pieces of broken time—a gift I extracted from the void."
Kael spat blood on the floor. "You didn't create this world out of love. You created it out of fear."
Something changed in Erynthos's eyes.
They sharpened.
They darkened.
And Kael felt every hair on his body rise.
"Fear?" the king repeated quietly. "No. I created it to devour fear. I created it so nothing—not gods, not fate, not death—could ever touch me again."
The hall trembled.
The marble under Kael's palms cracked.
Erynthos raised one finger.
Kael's lungs froze.
He clawed at his throat, gasping, but no air came. Panic surged through him as his vision blurred and darkened.
"Do you feel that?" Erynthos asked, voice calm, almost gentle. "Your body is struggling to stay inside the moment I allow it?"
Kael collapsed to his knees, choking.
Erynthos leaned closer. "I could unravel you in one breath. I could erase every version of you from every possible time. But I won't."
Kael's forced breath returned in a painful rush. He coughed violently, unable to speak.
Erynthos's smile widened.
"I need to know," the king whispered, "what you are. And why can you slip through the threads I have woven for centuries."
Kael steadied his voice. "I don't know how it happens."
"Then you will learn," Erynthos said. "Here. Now. Under my hand."
He snapped his fingers.
The world convulsed.
The air shattered into shards of light. Kael was ripped backward across the hall, thrown through a swirl of images—
A battlefield soaked in blood.
A city frozen in mid-explosion.
A forest screaming as it burned backward—fire returning to wood, ash reforming into trees.
A woman crying over a cradle that held no child—because time had undone its existence.
A throne cracking.
A god falling.
A world splitting open.
Kael crashed onto solid ground again and rolled, coughing and disoriented.
He looked up—
And froze.
He wasn't in the hall anymore.
He was outside.
On the edge of a cliff.
Wind howled around him, carrying the sound of distant screams. Below the cliff, a massive valley churned like a living ocean—twisting, ripping, spinning with thousands of broken timelines devouring each other.
Time storms.
He'd only heard whispers of them.
Places where reality shredded itself into ribbons.
And Kael was standing inches from falling in.
A voice whispered behind him.
"You must learn to stand where others collapse."
Kael spun around—
Erynthos was there, floating above the cliff, cloak billowing in the impossible wind.
He lifted his hand.
Kael's feet slid toward the edge.
"No—!"
He dug his heels into the ground, but the pull was relentless, invisible fingers gripping his spine and dragging him forward.
Erynthos watched with cold fascination.
"Show me," the king murmured. "Will you shatter? Or will you slip?"
Kael felt the earth crumble beneath his boots.
The cliff edge fell away.
His heart lurched.
He dropped—
Straight toward the swirling mass of screaming timelines.
The air tore past him, ripping sound from his throat.
The storm opened its jaws of fractured light—
And just before Kael was swallowed, something inside him snapped.
Or awakened.
A pulse shot through his veins. The world flickered. Colors inverted. Reality twisted sideways—
And then—
He wasn't falling.
He was standing.
On solid stone.
Inside a different place entirely.
Kael gasped for breath, clutching his knees.
Erynthos's voice echoed through the air, distant and enraged:
**"You shifted without my hand."**
The sound cracked the world around Kael like ice under strain.
He looked around wildly.
He had escaped the king's trial.
But he hadn't escaped the king.
Because far off in the darkness of this strange new place…
Something moved.
Slow. Tall. Waiting.
And Kael realized with a chill that crawled up his spine—
Wherever he was now, **Erynthos wasn't the only monster searching for him.**