Jayden_8148

In the fractured realm of **Everburn Labyrinth**, where ash falls like snow and forgotten gods whisper through cursed bloodlines, **Seryn Octavius**—the last heir of the soul-devouring **Emberdirge Dynasty**—barters memories for power. His family’s ancestral curse binds him to a grim truth: every drop of alchemical elixir he brews erases a fragment of his past. But when his exiled mentor, **Lady Eluinora**, is exposed as a traitor who sold his clan to the God of Oblivion, Seryn’s quest for vengeance unravels a millennia-old conspiracy: the very curses that cripple the ancient dynasties are shards of a slain primordial deity, and *he* is the crucible to resurrect it.  

To survive, Seryn must master the forbidden **Ashborne Alchemy**, turning his family’s funeral rites into weapons—distilling grief into corrosive mists, forging vows into chainblades, and weaponizing his own decaying soul. Allies become liabilities: a mechanized orc warrior whose heart ticks toward self-destruction, a moon-cursed assassin hunting her reflection, and Eluinora herself, whose lies may hold the only key to salvation.  

As the **Clockwork Throne** awakronsume cities into slag and the **Thousand-Eyed Abyss** hungers for his lineage, Seryn faces an impossible choice: embrace the erosion of his humanity to become the realm’s destroyer, or shatter the alchemical laws of the universe—and with them, every soul he vowed to protect

`Ember Oath: Erosion of Souls`

The grinding of gears beneath the city echoed like the jaws of a leviathan chewing through steel bones.

Seryn chased the silver blood droplet through metal pipes coated in mucous membranes. Gurak's mechanical arm fired phosphorescent rounds, burning temporary sigils into the walls—Sargamar's tidal ciphers that wept seawater with every step.

"Left!" Gurak yanked his collar. Seryn's boots skidded at the pipe's edge, inches from plunging into a churning vat of emerald fluid. Thousands of glass skulls floated within, each cradling Guild-marked brain matter.

"Welcome to Hades' antechamber." The orc sneered, her weeping pearl swirling. "Now, stab that key into your erosion."

Seryn pressed the gear-key to his neck. The teeth meshed with metallic veins beneath his rust-crawled skin. As he turned it, his vertebrae clicked like overwound clockwork.

But unlike before. This agony split his spine—molten fire and abyssal frost. His vision doubled: the pipe overlapped with glowing vascular networks. He saw *it*—a weeping infant curled inside Gurak's cannon arm, its umbilical cord fused to the barrel.

"Don't stare." Gurak blindfolded him with mermaid-scale gauze, the biting fabric devouring his lashes. "This key's forged from your coffin shards. It stitches world-cracks… if you pay the toll."

A fissure tore open above—not in space, but *time*. Twelve-year-old Seryn clawed at his father's obsidian coffin, blood smearing harp sigils. Adult Seryn locked eyes with his past self through the rift.

"The toll's a memory." Gurak's voice warped. "Pick one, Funeral Master. The sweeter it tastes, the longer the bridge."

Rain roared beyond the rift. Seryn carved out *that* memory: his mother's neck snapping in a blizzard. As the key devoured it, the fissure contracted into an umbilical cord-like passage, its end grafted to the Guild Tower's waste chute.

Glowing rot clung to their skin. Seryn's erosion now clawed up his right cheek, gears syncing with his pulse. Gurak wrenched open a rusted grate, exposing the Tower's vilest secret:

Rows of infants floated in cylindrical tanks, umbilici plugged into machines. Each bore the harp sigil. Each skull housed a micro Ashborne Core. Eluinora's hair drifted in the fluid.

"Clones…" Seryn's crucible shard morphed into a dagger. "The Guild's mass-producing soul-ferrymen?"

"Worse." Gurak shattered a tank, lifting a corpse. She slit its palm, revealing a subcutaneous astrolabe—the Octavius' lost *Fate Spindle*.

The Tower quaked. Tanks ruptured. The clones' wails bypassed ears, drilling directly into brains. Seryn collapsed, blood-gears spilling from his ears.

"Thirty seconds!" Gurak dragged him toward a vent. "The key's expiring!"

As they climbed, Seryn saw *it*.

His face etched in nebula-flesh, a counterclockwise harp floating in its chest. When it pointed at him, Seryn's sigil ignited—literal cyan flames searing his collarbone.

"Is calamity." Gurak kicked him into the vent. "Now meet the Guild's true god."

Light scorched his retinas. Before blindness took him, Seryn saw:

A colossal mechanized brain stewing in green fluid, every sulcus embedded with pulsating Ashborne Cores. Eluinora's face rippled across its surface, lips syncing with the clones as they chanted her betrayal hymn.

And lodged in its occipital lobe—a coral dagger. *The same blade from the memory-shard.*

The key shattered. Erosion erupted from Seryn's back as metallic wings. As consciousness faded, Gurak's laughter followed him down:

**Chapter 3: Mechanical Hades and the Liar’s Umbilicus**

Chapter 3: Mechanical Hades and the Liar’s Umbilicus