Lyriq stood at the precipice of the vast, circular basin, the air thick with the peculiar scream. It was no longer a sound in his ears, but a vibration in his very bones, a constant, high-frequency pressure that resonated with the raw, unfamiliar power swirling within him. This was it. The source. The destination his inherent nature had so relentlessly pulled him towards.
The basin was not a natural formation. It was a raw, gaping wound in the earth, as if a colossal, unseen claw had ripped a perfect circle from the planet's crust. Within its depths, at the very centre, something pulsed.
It was a column of pure, raw energy, a vertical torrent of lightless, vibrating force that tore upwards into the bruised sky. It wasn't a colour Lyriq recognised, but a distortion of light itself, a churning vortex of what felt like inverted existence.
And from its heart, emerged the scream.
But it was not a being. Not a creature, nor a monument. It was a fragment. A colossal, jagged shard of reality itself, violently torn from an unseen, higher dimension. It was bleeding pure raw creation, a primordial, untamed power that defied all physical laws Lyriq had encountered.
This was not the unmaking he pursued; this was the violent birth of something fundamentally new, something so potent its mere arrival caused the fabric of Dominion Aeterna to groan in agony.
And bound to this screaming fragment, lashed to its chaotic surface by strands of pure, solidified energy, was a form. A figure of immense, unmeasurable scale, but it was not a Fourth Order titan, not a Devourer King.
It was a being of pure light, a primordial angel, whose form shimmered with an unbearable intensity. Its vast, radiant wings were pinned, its shimmering limbs twisted, its head thrown back in a silent, cosmic agony as the fragment fed upon its very essence. The scream was its scream, amplified by the raw creation it was being forced to endure. A forced, agonising birth.
Lyriq looked at it. The raw power emanating from the angel, the boundless energy of the fragment, was overwhelming. It was the purest form of power he had ever witnessed, a source so potent it made the previous Orders he had consumed feel like mere whispers.
Well now. Lyriq's internal voice surfaced, a low, cold hum of absolute recognition.
Capable of a perverse form of wonder.
This. This is what I've been looking for. Something… truly extraordinary.
He felt the tremors deep within him, not of fear, but of profound satisfaction. His hunger, which had been a constant, gnawing presence, now roared with a new, terrifying eagerness.
This was not just sustenance; this was meaning. This was the ultimate unmaking, the opportunity to consume the very essence of creation itself.
How many things will I be able to unmake after this? How many concepts can I erase from existence? A chilling thrill, a cold, perverse anticipation, shot through his being. His fingers, now subtly elongated and tipped with sharper claws, twitched with a nascent urge to touch, to unravel, to consume.
This angel, this screaming fragment, was not a challenge to be overcome. It was a feast. A revelation. And Lyriq, the unmaker, was finally home.
The air in the circular basin crackled, not with mere lightning, but with the tearing of reality itself. Lyriq stood at the edge, a dark silhouette against the raw, vibrating column of lightless energy that soared into the sky. At its heart, the primordial angel screamed, bound to the jagged shard of raw creation, its essence being violently consumed. This was the feast he had been pulled toward, the ultimate source of power.
Lyriq stepped forward, his movements deliberate, unhurried. He was not a warrior advancing into battle; he was a force of nature stepping into its rightful domain. The raw, untamed power radiating from the fragment and the agonising angel washed over him, a torrent of sensory input that would have shattered a lesser being. But Lyriq, the Nyz'khalar, absorbed it, not as damage, but as information. And then, as sustenance.
His form shimmered. Not with defensive energy, but with an inversion of existence, a field of unmaking that began to resonate with the very raw creation around him. He did not fight the fragment. He did not fight the angel. He simply reached out.
The scream, already beyond human comprehension, rose to a deafening, reality-bending crescendo. The very air around him warped, then buckled. The lightless column of energy seemed to churn even faster, its edges blurring. For a long, indeterminate moment, Lyriq stood at the heart of this cosmic maelstrom, a silent, absorbing void.
He was consuming. Not just energy, but concept. The raw, agonising birth of something fundamentally new was being violently inverted, its essence siphoned into Lyriq's endlessly hungry core.
His internal landscape shifted, expanding, integrating data and power that dwarfed anything he had experienced before. The shards within his chest thrummed with a terrifying satisfaction, gorging on the immense, pristine essence.
When the last echoes of the primordial scream faded, the column of energy in the basin began to diminish, shrinking back into the earth. The vast fragment of raw creation, though still present, pulsed with a significantly reduced intensity, its cosmic scream now a faint, expiring whimper. And the primordial angel, once a being of pure light, was now little more than a desiccated, shimmering husk, its power utterly drained, its very essence unmade.
Lyriq stood amidst the settling dust, unchanged in physical form, yet profoundly different. His void eyes glowed with a deeper, more unsettling violet light. His horn seemed to have subtly elongated, and the runes that crisscrossed his body burned with a faint, cold fire. He felt... full. A profound, chilling satisfaction resonated within him. He had consumed. He had unmade. And the understanding of that act, the knowledge of the immense power he now wielded, settled into his core with a cold, absolute certainty.
This. This was true meaning. His internal thought, no longer merely analytical, held a peculiar, dark resonance. The sheer, glorious unravelling of something so vast.
What else can I unravel now? A strange, almost perverse sense of contentment settled over him, a prelude to a far greater, unhinged satisfaction.
Lyriq turned from the now-silent basin, leaving the desiccated angel and the depleted fragment behind. His path back towards Sector 17 was swifter now, a direct trajectory unburdened by further analysis of the landscape. The city, still battling the Devourers, was a distant, flickering beacon of chaos, its screams and explosions audible even from this distance.
He moved through the desolate canyons and ruined structures with effortless grace, his enhanced senses tracking the ongoing conflict, processing the desperate energy signatures of its inhabitants. Sector 17 was crumbling. He registered the increased density of Devourers, the rising number of unmade souls. He felt no concern. Their fate was their own, a predictable consequence of their existence.
As he re-entered the outer districts of Sector 17, the devastation was far more pronounced. Fires raged unchecked, sending oily black smoke coiling into the perpetually bruised sky. Buildings had collapsed entirely, their contents spilling onto the ash-covered streets.
Devourers, bloated with stolen essence, stalked through the ruins, their roars triumphant. The defenders, those who remained, were broken, scattered, fighting with a desperate, futile rage against an overwhelming tide.
He passed the spot where he had left Astra. His internal memory, having processed her unusual durability, registered her coordinates. He found her, half-buried under a pile of fresh rubble, her sleek dark suit further torn, her body still in the slow process of self-repair. She was battered, but alive. Her emerald eyes fluttered open as his shadow fell over her, filled not with fear, but with a sharp, analytical focus that intrigued him.
Still functioning. Remarkably resilient. Lyriq knelt beside her, his movements as fluid and silent as a predator. He reached out, his black-clawed hand gently, almost delicately, tracing the jagged tear in her suit that exposed the resilient, yet damaged, flesh beneath. There was no intent of malice, no desire to inflict further pain. Only a cold, detached fascination.
His mind worked, processing the data of her unique construction, her extraordinary durability, and her ability to sustain such damage and continue functioning. He had consumed power beyond measure, unmade the very essence of creation. And here was this small, yet remarkably persistent, anomaly. She was a different kind of challenge. A different kind of study.
She breaks, but does not shatter. She heals. She is... interesting. His internal monologue, now touched with a perverse sense of contemplation, hummed with a new idea. A continuous data stream. A persistent study object.
He lifted her with the same casual ease he had used to thrash her before. She was still too weak to resist, her body a puppet in his hands, though her emerald eyes remained locked on his. He cradled her in his arms, not with tenderness, but with the precise positioning of someone examining a fascinating specimen. She was not a threat, not prey, not even an obstacle anymore. She was a plaything. A living experiment. A source of continuous, unique data in a world rapidly ceasing to offer anything new.
Lyriq ascended through the burning, crumbling layers of Sector 17, Astra held effortlessly in his arms. Her limp form was cradled against his side, a peculiar burden that he carried with the same detached purpose he might carry a newly acquired, intriguing artefact. The peculiar scream had faded, its source now siphoned into his being, but the chaos of the city raged on, reaching a furious crescendo.
He moved towards the highest point he could access, a gnarled spire of fused concrete and arc-steel that pierced the smoke-choked sky. Around them, the city writhed in its death throes. Devourers, emboldened by the weakening defences and the scent of overwhelming fear, swarmed through the streets, their forms shifting and tearing through the desperate, fragmented lines of defenders. Fires, once contained, now spread like a disease, painting the perpetual twilight in hues of burning orange and sickly green. The air vibrated with the collective agony of a million dying breaths.
Lyriq reached the apex of the spire, a precarious perch overlooking the unfolding apocalypse. He settled onto a broken section of reinforced concrete, arranging Astra's form carefully on his lap. Her head rested against his chest, her hair, now tangled with debris, fanning out over his dark suit. His hand, the one that had so brutally thrashed her, rested lightly on her arm, his fingers occasionally tracing the subtle tremors of her self-repairing systems beneath the torn fabric of her suit. There was no warmth in the gesture, no tenderness, simply the continuous, detached observation of a complex mechanism.
He looked out at the dying city. Below, a teeming mass of Devourers tore through the last vestiges of organised resistance. He saw the desperate, futile charges of the awakened, their limited powers flaring brightly for a moment before being extinguished by overwhelming force. He witnessed the collapse of entire sections of the wall, the ground opening up to swallow streets whole. The sounds of screams, of explosions, of crumbling infrastructure, all washed over him.
"So many small things, fighting so hard," Lyriq's thought murmured internally, a low, cold assessment, no longer robotic, but laced with a detached, almost philosophical observation. "They build. They protect. They cling. And then, they are unmade. Always. The pattern is constant."
He felt no sorrow, no pity, no sense of responsibility. Sector 17's fate was irrelevant to him. It was a statistical event, a predictable outcome in a world of inherent decay. His concern was not with its preservation, but with the data it now provided: the dynamics of collapse, the final, desperate struggle of life against oblivion. He had simply been a transient force within it, a vector for his purpose. The city's destruction was merely a fascinating backdrop for his new ascent, a necessary stage for the next phase of his understanding.
Asven, the Overseer of Sector 17, fought with a ferocity born of pure, unadulterated desperation. Her skeletal arm, glowing with unstable blue energy, tore through lesser Devourers, but her strength was failing. Around her, the last organised pockets of resistance crumbled. She watched, horrified, as the main gate, the very symbol of their survival, finally buckled and collapsed under the relentless assault.
She was near the central market, surrounded by the screams of the dying, the stench of burning flesh, and the overwhelming presence of the Devourers. Her body screamed with exhaustion, her lungs burned, and her vision was blurred by smoke and despair.
Suddenly, her cybernetic eye, still functional amidst the chaos, caught a glimpse. High above, silhouetted against the burning sky, on the tallest spire, she saw him. Lyriq.
He was sitting. Unmoving. And in his lap, cradled with a chilling intimacy that defied his very nature, was Astra.
A wave of pure, white-hot fury, untainted by fear, washed over Asven. It was not just the sight of his callous inaction, but the twisted image of him holding Astra, the quiet, analytical weapon she had hoped might turn the tide. He had come, he had taken, he had gone. And now, he sat, watching them die, his power unspent, his presence a living mockery of their struggle.
"You… monster," Asven choked out, the word barely audible above the din of the city's collapse. Her voice was raw with a hate so profound it tasted of ash and despair. "You… let us… die."
Lyriq's head did not turn. His black eyes remained fixed on the unfolding spectacle of Sector 17's demise. He did not hear her. He did not care. His attention was elsewhere, observing the intricate dance of destruction, his fingers still occasionally, lightly, stroking Astra's arm. Asven, reduced to a desperate, broken figure, was just another dying spark in the vast, roaring fire below.
A massive, amorphous Devourer, its multiple mouths slavering, descended upon her. Its form eclipsed the burning sky for a moment. Asven did not scream. She simply stared up at Lyriq, her final gaze burning with a hate so absolute, so pure, that it transcended the chaos of her death.
Then, the Devourer consumed her, and Asven, the pragmatic overseer, was unmade, her last emotion a cold, bitter hatred for the force that watched them all burn. Lyriq registered a brief, muted spike in energy from her location, a fleeting disruption in the general chaos. "Another spark extinguished," he thought, utterly devoid of recognition or meaning. "The pattern holds."
From his perch atop the tallest, most gnarled spire, Lyriq watched Sector 17 die. Below, the city was a burning charnel house, swallowed by the relentless tide of Devourers. The last pockets of resistance flickered and died, their desperate struggles ending in gurgling screams and the tearing of flesh. Structures groaned and collapsed, sending plumes of dust and debris boiling into the ash-choked sky, painting the air in grim shades of grey and orange.
He held Astra gently on his lap, her head resting against his chest, her hair fanning out like spilt ink over his dark suit. His fingers, long and tipped with his obsidian claws, occasionally traced the torn fabric of her suit where her self-repairing flesh was slowly, impossibly, mending itself. It was a purely tactile observation, a study in the resilience of her unique construction. He registered the faint hum of her internal systems, the slow, steady beat of her essence, a counterpoint to the roaring chaos below.
"They are so loud, aren't they?" Lyriq's thought formed in his mind, a low, contemplative rumble. "All that effort. All that noise. For so little."
He watched as a particularly large Devourer, a monstrous thing with a thousand eyes, swelled and burst, consumed by something even greater. It was the natural order of things, he reasoned, the constant unmaking that defined existence. He felt no connection to the desperate souls below, no flicker of empathy for their suffering. They were merely part of the process, components in a grand, albeit chaotic, equation of demise.
His gaze swept over the entire panorama of destruction, from the collapsing walls to the burning central districts. He noted the precise moment the final organised resistance broke, the utter disintegration of what had once been a functioning, if desperate, society. The city's lights, once a brave constellation against the gloom, winked out one by one, leaving only the consuming glow of the fires.
"Such beautiful chaos," his internal thought echoed, tinged with a perverse satisfaction that made the back of his throat ache. "A canvas of unravelling. Truly a sight to behold."
A faint tremor ran through Astra's body, a subtle, almost imperceptible jolt as her repairs progressed. Lyriq noted it, a point of data in his ongoing study. He adjusted her slightly, ensuring her comfort was maintained, not out of care, but to optimise the continuous stream of information her persistence provided. She was proving to be a most fascinating plaything.
The last organised cries faded into the pervasive roar of the fires and the guttural triumph of the Devourers. Sector 17 was no more. It was a burning ruin, a monument to a futile defiance against the inevitable.
Lyriq watched the final flames lick at the sky, the last desperate sparks of resistance dying. He felt the vast, cold emptiness of the unmaking settle over the landscape, a profound silence that descended even amidst the raging inferno. He had witnessed a world die. He had contributed to it, indirectly by his very presence and the power he now wielded.
A strange sensation bloomed within him, an unfamiliar tremor that swelled from the depths of his being, a confluence of the vast power he had consumed, the profound satisfaction of witnessing such absolute destruction, and the chilling realisation of his own, untethered nature. It was not joy, not happiness, but something far older, far more terrible. It was the unleashed exuberance of oblivion itself.
A low chuckle began to rumble in his chest, a sound that started deep, almost imperceptible, then quickly swelled. It was not a human sound, not a sound of mirth or pleasure. It was a guttural, raw, unbridled sound, like tearing cloth mixed with grinding stone, echoing off the dying city. It rose, swelling into a full, unfettered laugh, devoid of any human restraint or sanity.
Lyriq threw his head back, his black eyes blazing with a cold, violet intensity, reflecting the burning ruins below. The laughter tore from him, wild and free, echoing over the desolate landscape, a terrifying, triumphant declaration. It was the sound of a being who had found his true purpose, who revelled in the glorious unravelling of all things. It was the laughter of something utterly, terrifyingly, and perfectly mad.
He laughed and laughed, the sound swallowed by the roaring fires, marking the silent, unconcerned death of a city, and the chilling, unhinged birth of a true monster.