OBSIDIAN MERCY
Official Lorebook
Volume One
The World of Khalidor
By Torque Stone | StefilynBooks
KHALIDOR
A realm of shattered oaths, bloodstained magic, and whispered prophecies. Khalidor is as beautiful as it is perilous — a land where desire fuels destruction and power is never freely given.
Once watched over by celestial beings, Khalidor has been left to tear itself apart in their absence. Three great factions war for dominance over its kingdoms and coastlines. Magic seeps through the cracks of a reality that is slowly coming undone. And somewhere in the dark between worlds, something ancient is stirring.
Khalidor is not a world that forgives weakness. It rewards ambition, punishes loyalty, and devours the unprepared. Its beauty is real — breathtaking mountains, thriving night markets, cities that glow with enchanted flame — but so is its hunger.
It is a world on the edge of something irreversible.
THE EMIOHTA CURTAIN
The greatest creation of the beings who once governed Khalidor, the Emiohta Curtain is a barrier woven between worlds — a veil that separates Khalidor from what lies beyond it.
It was built to contain Dark Hunger and the horrors that move within it.
It is failing.
The Curtain weakens with each passing year, fraying in places, tearing in others. Where it thins, reality becomes unstable. The laws of nature bend. Time moves incorrectly. The dead grow restless.
Most citizens of Khalidor know the Curtain exists the way they know the sky exists — as a fact too large to fully comprehend. What they don't know is how close it is to breaking entirely.
DARK HUNGER
Dark Hunger is not emptiness. It is not merely the absence of light or life or meaning.
It is a force. A living appetite. An abyss that seduces as much as it devours.
Dark Hunger feeds on reality itself — matter, magic, memory. Those who come too close feel an overwhelming pull toward surrender. Some describe it as peaceful. Some describe it as the first honest thing they've ever felt.
It whispers promises: power, peace, oblivion.
It does not destroy what it takes. It unmakes it — erasing things from existence so completely that even the memory of them dissolves. A person consumed by Dark Hunger does not die. They cease to have ever existed. The people who loved them forget them. The records blur. Only echoes remain — a name half-remembered, a grief with no source.
No one knows how many people, places, or gods have already been Unmade. We wouldn't remember them if they had.
THE UNMAKING
A fate worse than death.
To be Unmade is to be erased at a fundamental level — mind, soul, memory, history. When something is Unmade, it ceases to have ever existed. Those who knew it forget it. Evidence vanishes. Records corrupt themselves.
The Covenant has mastered Unmaking as both weapon and art form. Empress Vahlesca has Unmade entire concepts — she once erased the word for hope from a village's collective memory.
The truly terrifying truth about the Unmaking is this: it has already happened, countless times, to countless things. The gaps in Khalidor's history, the gods no one can quite name, the kingdoms that appear in no record — some of them were always absent. Others were simply erased.
THE EIDRYN
Before the gods. Before creation. Before light.
The Eidryn existed.
They have been called many things across Khalidor's fractured history — Oblivion, the First Hunger, the Dying Star. The Covenant calls them salvation. The Magisterium calls them catastrophe. The Silver Flame calls them sleeping gods.
The truth is older and stranger than any of these names.
The Eidryn are not dead. They are not gone. They made a bargain — with the celestial beings who fought them at the dawn of creation — and they agreed to sleep. What they were promised in exchange for that sleep is one of the most dangerous pieces of knowledge in existence.
Only one being remembers what the deal was. And he fell from grace for refusing to forget it.
Where the Eidryn sleep, reality thins. Where they dream, Shadowfalls appear. And as the Emiohta Curtain weakens, their sleep grows lighter.
They are becoming aware.
THE SHADOWFALLS
Areas where Dark Hunger bleeds into Khalidor, distorting reality and warping those who linger too long.
In a Shadowfall, time moves differently — hours become days, or seconds stretch into hours. Gravity shifts. Architecture defies physics. The dead sometimes walk, confused and angry, unable to understand why the living can't hear them properly.
Magic becomes unpredictable in Shadowfalls, often catastrophically so. Prolonged exposure causes physical mutation and mental dissolution.
Known Shadowfalls:
The Weeping Chasm — A canyon that screams with the voices of those lost to Dark Hunger. Some claim the voices are coherent if you listen long enough. No one who has listened long enough has come back to confirm it.
The Inverted Spire — A tower that grows downward into Dark Hunger rather than upward toward the sky. Its lowest levels have never been mapped.
The Mirror Plains — A flatland where your reflection moves independently. It watches you. It hungers for what you have that it doesn't — a body, a soul, a heartbeat.
THE SHROUDBORN
Beings from Dark Hunger that slip through tears in the Emiohta Curtain. As the Curtain weakens, they come more frequently.
Lesser Shades are formless hunger given vague shape. They attack by draining life force and memory, leaving victims hollow — alive but empty, breathing but absent.
Voidwraiths are intelligent predators that can mimic the voices of the dead. They lure victims into Shadowfalls using the voices of people those victims loved.
Ancient Shroudborn are nearly god-like in power. They have names, agendas, and cults of mortal worshippers. Some have bargained with the Covenant. They are patient in ways that mortal minds struggle to comprehend — some have been planning their moves for centuries.
THE BOUND ORACLES
Cursed seers who have glimpsed the truths the gods tried to hide. Their words come in riddles, spoken in dying tongues. Those who listen too closely often lose their minds.
The Bound Oracles wander Khalidor's wastes, neither fully alive nor dead, their eyes vacant and weeping black tears. They are not dangerous the way a weapon is dangerous. They are dangerous the way a truth is dangerous — because once you've heard it, you cannot unhear it.
The most famous among them is the Omega Seer of Emiohta, the last prophet who witnessed the gods' departure and spoke the words that became legend before vanishing into Dark Hunger.
"The gods do not fear death. They fear what comes after."
THE PROPHECY OF THE BROKEN THRONE
Spoken by the Omega Seer of Emiohta. Partially recorded. Partially suppressed.
"She who sits the Broken Throne will unmake what the gods have made,
And make what the gods have unmade.
Three will bind her, three will break her, three will become her.
When the curtain tears and the hunger wakes,
The world will kneel or burn — there is no third path."
The prophecy has been interpreted differently by every faction in Khalidor, each reading into it the outcome they most fear or desire.
The Magisterium believes it is a warning. The Covenant believes it is a promise. The Forgotten Tribunal believes it is a map to power.
What none of them know — what only one fallen being has carried since before the world had its current shape — is that the recorded prophecy is incomplete. A fourth line was spoken. A fourth line was erased.
It changes everything.
THE LOST VAULTS
Towering ruins found in the desolate corners of Khalidor, each one tied to a god whose name has been partially forgotten. Their divine seals have begun to crack.
Treasure hunters and sorcerers who venture too close often vanish. Those who return come back changed — speaking in tongues no living soul should know, writing in scripts that predate written language.
The Silver Flame believes one of the Vaults contains a god's corpse that can be resurrected. They may be right. They may be catastrophically wrong.
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Volume Two
The Magic & The Ritual
THE LAW OF SACRIFICE
Magic in Khalidor is never free.
Every spell, every binding, every oath demands three things without exception:
A sacrifice — Something of genuine value must be given up. The more powerful the magic, the more precious what is lost must be. A sorcerer who tries to sacrifice something meaningless will find the magic takes something meaningful instead.
A binding — The magic must be anchored to something. A person, a place, an object, a soul. Magic without an anchor is magic without direction — and magic without direction is catastrophe.
A consequence — There is always a price beyond the sacrifice itself. The healer who mends wounds ages faster with each casting. The summoner who calls power always finds the power wants more than was agreed upon. No sorcerer escapes this rule. No sorcerer who has tried to escape it has survived the attempt.
BLOOD MAGIC & LIFE DEBT
Magic fueled by life force rather than standard casting.
Life Debt spells are vastly more powerful than anything achievable through conventional means, which is why they are both coveted and forbidden across most of Khalidor. A sorcerer can fuel their casting with their own blood, aging rapidly with each use. Or they can drain others — willing sacrifices, captured victims, or something far more insidious.
The Covenant's most horrific innovation is bloodline siphoning. By tracing a person's ancestry to its origin point and anchoring a ritual there, a sorcerer can slowly drain life force from every living descendant simultaneously. Victims don't know they're dying. They simply grow weaker over years, their vitality bleeding invisibly into someone else's power.
The Covenant has wiped out entire family trees this way. No one noticed. That was the point.
THE OBSIDIAN BINDING
An ancient curse. A binding of body, mind, and soul to forces beyond mortal comprehension.
What it was meant to be:
A divine rite used by the Eidryn to elevate mortals into celestial service. Three trials, three bonds, three transformations. The mortal would become a living bridge between worlds — a champion, willing and powerful, elevated rather than consumed.
What the Covenant made it:
Something else entirely. Reverse-engineered from stolen texts and corrupted to serve Dark Hunger rather than divine light, the Covenant's version of the Binding is designed not to elevate its subject but to fracture her — crack her soul open from the inside so that something ancient can slip through the gap.
The suitors aren't meant to empower her. They're meant to accelerate her breaking.
THE THREE STAGES
Stage One — Physical Awakening
The Mark appears the moment the ritual brands its subject — black obsidian veins spreading from the point of first contact. They pulse in sync with the heartbeats of the bound suitors. They glow when those suitors are near or aroused. They cause pain when the subject resists the bond.
The synchronization is immediate and intimate. The bound subject feels her suitors' desire as an ache in her bones. Their pain registers as phantom sensation on her own skin. Their pleasure becomes hers without her consent or control.
When she pushes against the bond, it retaliates. First subtly — a shiver, a stolen breath, a moment of inexplicable weakness. Then with escalating intensity — heat, unbearable craving, the overwhelming sensation of being touched when no one is near. The bond does not ask for cooperation. It demands it.
Her body begins to change. She heals faster near her suitors. She no longer ages the same way. She no longer needs food or sleep the way she once did — the bond sustains her, which is its own kind of trap.
Stage Two — Mental Fracturing
The bond reaches deeper.
Her suitors' voices slip into her thoughts — first distinguishable, then less so. She experiences their memories as if they were her own. Feels their emotions bleeding into hers until she cannot always identify the origin of what she's feeling. Crohm's cold calculation surfaces when she needs strategy. Kaedyn's exhaustion hits her in moments of stillness. Baryn's hunger colors everything.
The more she submits to the bond, the more it rewrites her instincts. Pleasure becomes a form of devotion. Pain becomes a reminder of possession. The woman she was before the ritual grows harder to locate with each passing day.
She was once free. But freedom is a concept that requires a self to exercise it, and her self is becoming something she doesn't entirely recognize.
Stage Three — Soul's Descent
If the ritual reaches its final stage, the subject will no longer be fully human.
Her soul becomes tethered not only to her suitors but to something beyond them — the tether the Covenant designed from the beginning, pulling her toward Dark Hunger like a hook set deep in her chest. More of her mortal soul burns away with each passing day. The Mark spreads until it covers most of her body.
The Covenant's intent: transform her into a vessel. A doorway. A crack in the world wide enough for something ancient and vast to pour through. Her body will remain. What looks out from her eyes may not be her anymore.
What the Covenant did not account for is the possibility that the subject might learn to steer before the door swings open.
THE HIDDEN FAILSAFES
The Covenant built mechanisms into the Obsidian Binding that none of the bound suitors were told about.
Trigger words — Certain phrases spoken by Empress Vahlesca force the bound subject into immediate compliance. The subject will not remember obeying. Her mind edits the memory of compliance before she can examine it. She will only know something is wrong because the evidence doesn't add up.
Pain amplification — If the subject strays too far from The Spirehold, the bond responds with increasing agony. This mechanism keeps her geographically contained until the ritual completes. It is precise, targeted, and invisible to everyone watching except the woman experiencing it.
The final lock — Once Stage Three begins, it cannot be stopped by any magic short of killing everyone involved. There is no reversal. No escape. The only path is through — complete transformation or death.
The suitors were told they were anchors. They were always intended to be accelerants. Their power, their desire, their bond with her — all of it feeds the mechanism. The closer they pull her, the faster she fractures.
Empress Vahlesca's insurance against complications was simple and devastating: "You think you are taking her. But she was never yours to claim. She was ours before she was even born."
LIGHT MAGIC
The counterpoint to blood and void-based casting, light magic draws on restoration, truth, and divine energy. At its purest, it heals, reveals, and protects.
It has limits that its practitioners prefer not to examine too closely.
Light magic requires emotional balance — anger, fear, and grief all weaken it. It cannot heal willing corruption. A person who has chosen darkness cannot be purified against their will, only hurt in the attempt. And it struggles profoundly against void-based magic, which operates on foundational principles that light magic was never designed to counter.
The order of Lumin Hall has built its reputation and its considerable power on light magic for generations. What they have not advertised publicly is that the most powerful light casting requires fuel — and the fuel they use is not always as pure as their doctrine suggests.
Some truths hide better in the light than in the dark.
Volume Three — The Factions coming soon.
For the complete story, find Obsidian Mercy: A Reverse Harem Dark Fantasy Romance on WebNovel.
© Torque Stone | StefilynBooks