The gorge had vanished, erased beneath a suffocating expanse of absolute night.
Where fractured quartz battlements, blood-soaked earth, and shattered pavilions once stood, only the abyssal mire of the Shadow Sun Calamity remained. The domain breathed like an apex predator, its outer boundaries pulsating in deep, rhythmic shudders. Black tendrils sprouted from the void floor, coiling and snapping like blind serpents, while wisps of soot-colored miasma curled upward like whispering phantoms. The very atmosphere was thick as tar, suffocating the lungs with the bitter chill of absolute zero.
At the dead center of the black expanse, three presences held the space.
