The ground beneath them trembled as something vast approached through the fractured landscape. Selena, still kneeling within the cocoon of her dark wings, felt the disturbance ripple through the Gate's power that coursed through her veins. Whatever was coming carried its own gravitational field of ambition and rage, warping reality around it with the sheer force of its desperate hunger for relevance.
"He returns," Dante said, his shadows coiling defensively around both of them. "Malachar refuses to accept irrelevance."
The Riftborn King emerged from a tear in space itself, but he was no longer the broken figure they had encountered before. He had learned from his previous defeats, had spent the brief eternity between moments studying the cosmic forces at play and devising his own solution to the equation that threatened to erase him from significance. His form had expanded beyond mortal limitations, becoming something that existed partially in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
