CHAPTER ONE: THE DAY THE SKY ROTTED

The end did not arrive with the dramatic fanfare humanity had so often envisioned. There were no celestial trumpets blasting judgments from splintering clouds, no fiery chariots descending from a vengeful heaven. The scriptures, twisted and rewritten through millennia of human interpretation, offered no comfort, no accurate foresight. There was no grand, cataclysmic crescendo of war, no final, glorious battle between good and evil that would usher in either an age of peace or an eternity of torment.

Instead, the apocalypse arrived as a whisper, a fundamental silence that settled over the world like a shroud of deep-sea pressure. It wasn't the quietude of a freshly fallen snow, nor the solemn stillness that follows a profound loss. This was a silence that was itself a violation, an infection spreading through the very fabric of existence. It was a silence so profound, so unnatural, that it had the power to fold entire cities in upon themselves, not through physical force, but through a sheer, overwhelming sense of disbelief. It was the kind of quiet that could halt a human heart not from fear, but from the impossible negation of sound itself.

For generations, humans had theorised the end, always imagining it as a spectacle of noise and fury. They pictured explosions tearing canyons through the earth, the thunder of endless war machines, perhaps even the cacophony of angels and demons clashing in a final, cosmic skirmish. Their minds, limited by the tangible and the dramatic, could not conceive of an unmaking so absolute that it transcended all sensory experience.

The world, in those agonizing first moments, simply choked on its own breath.

And the sky, once a canvas for fleeting clouds and the sun's benevolent gaze, began to rot.

The initial signs were insidious, almost imperceptible to those still clinging to the illusion of normalcy. At dawn, the sun, a familiar golden orb, flickered. Not a blink, not a momentary eclipse, but a stutter, like a faulty, dying bulb struggling to hold its light. Birds, mid-flight, suddenly lost all aerodynamic grace, crashing into the brittle surfaces of skyscrapers and asphalt streets, their tiny bodies crumpling, their final chirps unheard, absorbed by the growing void. Oceans, vast and restless, grew eerily still, their monumental waves losing their momentum, their surfaces flattening into a glassy, reflecting expanse that mirrored the deepening decay above. Then, without the warning tremor of an earthquake or the mournful sigh of wind, the sky itself cracked. Thin, white lines, like hairline fractures spreading across a fragile piece of porcelain, spiderwebbed across the heavens, extending from horizon to horizon.

And through those nascent cracks, the rot began to bleed.

Clouds, once fluffy and ephemeral, decayed mid-air, their moisture turning to fine, stinging ash that drifted down like malevolent snow. The very air, once breathable and vibrant, took on the metallic, coppery taste of rust, making each inhalation a bitter reminder of the world's corruption. Buildings, monumental and unyielding, began to bleed, dark, viscous ichor oozing from their concrete pores, running down their facades like tears of despair. Rivers, the ancient arteries of the land, flowed no longer with clear, life-giving water, but with thick, black ichor, a viscous, tar-like substance that smelled of stagnant fear and forgotten time.

Stone, once solid and immutable, began to weep memory. Ancient cathedrals groaned, their foundational rocks releasing spectral echoes of forgotten prayers. City streets, paved for generations, shimmered with phantom images of bustling crowds, only to dissolve into silent, crumbling dust. Human thoughts, once coherent and individual, fractured, splintering into fragmented whispers, nonsensical associations, and jarring sensory overload. Time itself, once a linear progression, buckled like bruised metal, stretching, shrinking, and occasionally reversing in localised, terrifying eddies. Language, the very scaffolding of human connection and understanding, collapsed into shrieking tones, guttural sounds that conveyed only raw, undiluted terror.

Something beyond human comprehension had won. Not through a brutal confrontation, not through a war of attrition, but in essence. It had simply become the prevailing reality. The gods, if they had ever truly existed, if they had ever genuinely answered the desperate pleas of their devout, were gone. Not slain on a battlefield, not dethroned by a mightier power. They were simply, utterly erased. Their very concept, their cosmic footprint, annihilated. And in the profound, aching void they left behind, something ancient and terrible began to slither upward.

It was not born. It was not created. It was Lucifer.

He was not, as ancient texts had so mistakenly depicted, a fallen angel cloaked in tragic rebellion. He was no victim of divine wrath, no romanticised outcast cast down from a lofty heaven for the sin of pride. That was a myth, a narrative spun by mortals desperate for archetypes and explanations, for a comprehensible struggle. The truth of Lucifer was far colder, far more absolute.

Lucifer was entropy made manifest. He was a flaw in the cosmic equation, a birth defect in the very fabric of existence itself. His essence had not coalesced from the purity of divine light, nor the familiar fires of an underworld. Instead, it was an amalgamation born from the unfiltered, soundless screams of dying stars, their final, agonising implosions feeding his nascent form. His body, if such a thing could be called a body, was less flesh and more a grotesque, self-sustaining sculpture of concept and collapse. He had not been cast from Heaven; he was the corpse of it, the putrid decay of its foundational ideas given form, slithering into the void left by the erased gods.

And Earth, that once-verdant cradle of divine curiosity and burgeoning life, became his kiln. It was not a place of worship or dominion in the traditional sense, but a crucible where he refined his abhorrent will. He moved with a chilling, methodical purpose. He devoured the remnants of both Heaven and Hell, not with teeth, but with an insatiable, consuming nature that simply assimilated all within its reach. He gutted their libraries, not for knowledge, but to absorb the very essence of their collected wisdom, turning millennia of lore into raw power. He siphoned their relics, ancient artefacts of immense celestial and infernal power, drawing their fundamental energies into himself. He splayed out their cosmology like dissection meat, dissecting the very laws and structures of existence, twisting them to his alien design.

From the nerves of angels, still faintly twitching with residual echoes of grace, he forged a throne, grotesque and living, and then nailed it to Earth's crust, a monument to his absolute, unchallengeable reign over this tiny, significant chiliocosm. As his influence bled outward from Earth, it radiated across the wider cosmos. Nearby planets, once vibrant or barren, began to spiral into madness, their geological structures warping, their atmospheric compositions unravelling, their very orbits becoming erratic and unpredictable. What was left of celestial memory, fragmented and scattered by the prior unmaking, further fractured into irrelevance, became mere dust motes in the vast, uncaring winds of his dominion.

His voice, no longer bound by the primitive limitations of vibration or frequency, became a force that rewrote laws. Physics, the immutable rules governing mass, energy, space, and time, now bowed to his whim, its principles twisting into impossible contradictions. Souls, those ethereal sparks of consciousness, ruptured under the pressure of his alien presence, their essence spilling out to be absorbed or simply annihilated. Lucifer did not ascend to godhood in the way humanity might understand it. He did not become a benevolent or even tyrannical deity of creation or destruction. He mimicked it, twisted it, becoming a grotesque parody of divine power. And in doing so, the entire Milky Way – this chiliocosm once so carefully guarded by the now-devoured Celestials – began to unravel under the weight of his perverse will.

Each breath Lucifer took was not life-giving, but a hymn of inversion. Sanctuaries, places once consecrated by fervent belief, melted into puddles of formless corruption. Faith, once a comforting certainty, unravelled into mathless formulae, abstract equations of despair that defied all logic. Even death, that final, comforting certainty, recoiled from him, its cold embrace rendered meaningless in his wake. He was not a bringer of death, but of un-death, a stasis of suffering that defied the natural cycle.

As he consumed, as he inverted, as he solidified his grotesque new domain, he evolved. He had been a Chaotic Being, a formless instinct, but by devouring the Celestials, by absorbing the very essence of Heaven and Hell, he achieved stability and structure. He became a First Order Low-Level Lifeform. This was his initial, critical ascension within the cosmic hierarchy, a profound leap from his previous formless existence.

But Lucifer would not remain there. He was an entity of ceaseless consumption, of perpetual progression. His corruption, a virulent, non-physical contagion, echoed across dimensions, a discordant chord struck in the deepest recesses of the cosmos. It was this echo, this fundamental disturbance in the fabric of reality, that began to awaken things that should never have stirred. It was the unintended genesis of the Ascension War, pulling in the Devourers, triggering Mutation Waves across the entire galaxy, and initiating the Age of Power for all surviving beings.

The tremor reached all corners of time and form, burrowing deep into ancient bloodlines, hidden in forgotten temples, etched into buried genes.

Something began to rise.

Something old. Something impossibly ancient.

Far from the swirling eye of Lucifer's burgeoning dominion, away from the newly forged throne of angelic nerves and cosmic decay, Lyriq existed. He was a whisper in the echoing desolation, a shadow moving through the ruins of a city whose name had long since been flayed from the collective memory of the world. Here, rivers ran black with the ichor of broken realities, and any thought of prayer was not just futile, but a dangerous, forgotten instinct.

He was a man, yes, in the broadest sense of the word. Tall, standing at six feet one inch, his frame honed by relentless scarcity and endless, desperate motion, not by the vanity of physical pride. His muscles, though lean, coiled with a wiry strength, were visible beneath skin bronzed not by the sun's healthy kiss, but by the pervasive grit of ash and the grime of smoke. His hair, a wild, untamed black, spiked naturally, unevenly, like the tips of small, hungry flames trying to climb toward a sky that no longer offered warmth. His eyes, the deepest black, held nothing that resembled human emotion. There was no anger, no hope, no fear, no joy. Only a profound, haunted stillness, ancient and boundless as the void itself. His clothes were scavenged remnants of another age, a patched and stained assortment of worn leather, ash-stained cloth, and scavenged metal plates, crude armour against a world that offered only lacerations.

He moved through the decaying landscape not with the focused stride of someone with a destination, but with the fluid, instinctual grace of a predator navigating its territory. His worn boots crunched softly on the pervasive bone dust that coated everything, the pulverised remains of forgotten lives. His fingers, long and scarred, grazed against crumbling walls, tracing the outlines of symbols no living tongue remembered, glyphs etched into the very stones by beliefs long since rendered meaningless. He passed the skeletal remains of what were once temples, now grotesque growths of rust and marrow, their former sanctity replaced by a silent, consuming blight. Monuments to forgotten deities scribbled with alphabets only the dead might comprehend, statues of saints devoured by creeping moss and the cruel gouges of monstrous claws.

All around him, the wind, a restless, unseen entity, screamed in frequencies human ears once couldn't hear. In the days before the Fall, such sounds would have existed beyond the threshold of mortal perception, a silent cacophony of the universe's hum. Now, a perverse evolution had broadened human senses, gifting them the ability to perceive the unceasing agony of a dying world. No one, Lyriq knew, thanked this cruel mockery of evolution for that expanded awareness.

Lyriq did not know his name through memory. He had no recollection of birth, no comforting images of family, no ingrained sense of faith. The concept of a past, for him, was a blank, an unwritten page. He was simply here, existing in this moment, driven by an insistent, burning sensation in his chest. It was a heat that never cooled, a constant, gnawing presence. And a hunger that could not be named, a profound yearning that surpassed any physical need. Some nights, he would wake with scars that hadn't been there when he closed his eyes, fresh wounds etched onto his flesh by unseen forces, or perhaps by his burgeoning nature. Once, he awoke with teeth clutched in his palm, not his own, not human, not anyone's he knew. They were alien, predatory, yet strangely familiar.

Still, he walked. He was a wanderer of the corpse-city, drawn by a primal instinct, an unseen current pulling him towards a destination he did not yet comprehend. He reached what had once been a central cathedral, a colossal monument to a faith now annihilated, reduced to a derelict husk of bone and rust. Its grand arches leaned precariously, its vaulted ceilings long since collapsed, leaving only a skeletal frame against the bruised sky. And there, beneath the melted, warped cross that once symbolised salvation, under a heaven stitched with distant, silent thunder, he stopped.

Something was coming. He didn't see it, not with his physical eyes, but he felt its approach in the shifting currents of corrupted air, in the subtle, predatory hum of its impending arrival. It was a knowing beyond sense, a primitive cosmic sensing that vibrated through his very bones.

The "something" that Lyriq sensed did not arrive with a fanfare of footsteps or the groan of ancient metal. It dropped like a shadow made flesh, a sudden, heavy displacement of corrupted air, landing with a muted thud on the fractured pavement of the desolate cathedral ruins. Its presence was a raw, primal malice that rippled through the already dying world, a scent of fresh corruption mingling with the omnipresent aroma of rust and ash.

This was Rathuur.

Once, in a forgotten time, it might have been a man. A creature of flesh and bone, perhaps even of conscience. But the Great Fall, Lucifer's brutal reordering of reality, and the subsequent Age of Power had warped countless beings, twisting them into grotesque parodies of their former selves. Rathuur was no exception. It was now a Second Order Chaotic Being, a product of uncontrolled mutation, its very existence a testament to the brutal, unforgiving evolution that clawed its way through Dominion Aeterna.

Its body was a horrifying mosaic of insectile sinew and humanoid malice. Six limbs, impossibly long and segmented, arched like the predatory legs of a monstrous mantis, each joint ending in a wicked, bone hook that scraped softly against the rubble. Its sagging muscle, once perhaps belonging to a human frame, was pulled taut by glistening, fibrous cords, giving it a gaunt, starved appearance despite its evident power. Dozens of mouths, small and puckered, dotted its belly and throat, their small, black tongues twitching perpetually like drowned worms seeking air, their soft, wet sounds a constant, unsettling murmur. Too many eyes, dark and glistening, glimmered in wet, sunken sockets along its head, each reflecting the bleak landscape with a cold, predatory intelligence. Its spine, rather than ending at its skull, extended grotesquely upwards, forming a horned crown of splintered, calcified vertebrae, a brutal parody of royalty.

It saw Lyriq. Its many eyes, flickering with malignant recognition, fixed on his solitary figure. And then, from its primary, largest mouth, a sound ripped forth, a scream. It was not a scream of pain, nor of fear, but of pure, unadulterated, territorial challenge. A sound that tore through the air, vibrating Lyriq's very bones.

Lyriq staggered back, a primitive, physical response to the onslaught. His breath, which had settled into a slow, measured rhythm in the silence, was suddenly stolen from his lungs. But this was not the common human gasp of terror. It was a jolt of recognition, a sudden, brutal clarity that tore through the detached calm he had cultivated. This was a moment, a confrontation, he had unknowingly awaited.

His body, still standing, suddenly dropped. His knees hit the rough, crumbling rubble with a dull impact, sending a spray of dust into the tainted air. Then came the agony. It was not the familiar ache of old wounds or the gnawing pang of hunger. This was a raw, searing pain that originated in his chest, a sensation of his very essence being ripped apart, not with blood, but with revelation. It was as if a hidden mechanism within him had been violently triggered by the sight and sound of Rathuur, by the sheer, unbridled chaos of the creature.

Glyphs, impossibly ancient and terrifying, erupted across his flesh. They bloomed like black, diseased tumours beneath his skin, glowing with a faint, reddish-purple light. His black hair surged upward, defying gravity for a horrifying moment, then fell forward, its tips now pulsating with the same malevolent reddish-purple glow. His black eyes, which had been hollow and still, now bled shadow, thick, dark rivulets staining his cheeks like tears of ink.

His jaw clenched so tightly that the bone itself groaned under the pressure, shifting, remaking itself, becoming something denser, harder, more predatory. His spine, previously merely lengthened, now stretched, a subtle elongation that granted him an unnatural, almost serpentine grace. His nails, which had been rough and scavenged, blackened completely, thickening and sharpening into wicked claws, perfectly adapted for tearing.

This was not merely evolution, not the gradual, chaotic mutation that had befallen countless others. This was reclamation. It was the Nyz'khalar asserting its dominion over the human husk. Not a species in the conventional sense, not a mere mutation, but a race so profoundly feared, so utterly terrifying in its existence, that it had been locked outside of time itself. A species whose very name, "The Mourning Abyss," was a testament to its philosophy: existence itself is an insult, and death is the only truth.

And now, Lyriq was waking.