"The wind howled through the ruins like an old king refusing to die."
"Even the silence here is heavy, as if the stones remember the screams."
I walk through the ashes of what was once holy.
Each step grates against burnt bones, rusted blades, and forgotten oaths.
My cloak drags the dust behind me like the shadow of a dying empire.
Above me, the sky bleeds with veins of crimson, cracks in the fabric of a once-divine world.
The gods are no longer watching.
Or perhaps they never were.
Valhalla—the seat of celestial glory—has fallen.
What remains is a shattered carcass, draped in silence and sorrow.
Pillars lean like broken swords stabbed into the earth.
Statues weep molten tears.
And at the center, like a crown upon a corpse, stands the Throne.
Or what's left of it.
Blackened. Cracked. Wrapped in chains of lightless iron.
Once it stood as a symbol of divine judgment.
Now, it is just a memory sharpened by pain.
*"You were flame once."*
*"You ruled with honor."*
*"Now you crawl among the ashes."*
The voice returns.
It does not speak with words, but with echoes inside my bones.
I do not answer. I have learned not to.
Not all voices come from outside.
At my side rests Eorhan, the Blade of Broken Vows.
She hums beneath my fingers, as if hungry.
She remembers the blood she drank.
The oaths she shattered.
I reach the sanctum.
The throne rises before me.
Even in ruin, it exudes power.
It speaks of things long dead.
Of betrayals.
Of forgotten names carved into stone with blood and tears.
I stare.
I do not weep.
A king does not mourn what was stolen—
He reclaims it.
But as I draw near, the shadows stir.
A figure emerges.
Wrapped in a pale shroud, face hidden behind a cracked iron mask.
Chains coil around its arms like serpents.
Its presence is… wrong.
Like a wound that refuses to close.
— "Vaelthir," I whisper, my voice dry as the dust.
He does not bow.
He does not breathe.
He simply *is*.
— "I know you, Eirun," he says.
"The Lord-Crowned. The Betrayed. The one who would bleed the heavens."
"Have you come to reclaim your throne?"
"Or simply to die on its steps?"
— "I've come for what was promised," I reply.
"And to take what was denied."
He lifts his hand.
The chains snap like whips, crackling with voidlight.
The ground trembles beneath us.
— "Then face the judgment of the forgotten."
I draw my sword.
Eorhan sings, her voice cold and eager.
Steel meets steel.
Darkness meets wrath.
And in that moment—
beneath the shattered stars, upon the bones of a broken world—
the war for the gods begins.