The world fractured into two irreconcilable realities.
In one, a miracle. Lyra Dawnsinger, Judicator of the Solar Church, stood reborn. The crippling agony, the petrifying backlash, the shattered Blessing Mark that had been a weeping wound on her soul. All were gone. In their place was a body humming with pristine, focused power. The crystalline remnants of her failed transformation had been excised and replaced with polished, integrated plates of solidified sunlight that moved with her musculature like a second skin. Her Dawnblade felt lighter in her grip, its connection to her spirit a clear, unobstructed channel. She was whole. She was perfect. It was a state of grace beyond any prayer, a manifestation of divine favor so absolute it felt like the touch of the God-King himself.
And it was a heresy.
The other reality was a portrait of such profound defilement that it made a mockery of the first. The churned earth, soaked in the blood and void-taint of her comrades. The scattered, empty armor, Bron's scale mail, Thorn's shattered maul, Marik's gloves, marking the graves of men she had led, laughed with, and sworn oaths to protect. The larger, darker pile of gritty slag that was all that remained of Garret, the unyielding mountain, the man whose steadfast presence had been her anchor. And Finn's simple, empty robes, a silent scream in the twilight. And at the center of this abattoir stood the architect of the ruin. The Void Herald. Naked, scarred, and silver-traced, his body a testament to violence and unnatural rebirth. The fractured Sigil pulsed with a devouring hunger that made her renewed light recoil instinctively. And at his feet, used, broken, and debased, was Silk. The rogue's posture, the angle of her body, the glistening evidence on his flesh and her face, it spoke of a violation that went beyond rape. It was a systematic deconstruction of a soul, a act of ownership so absolute it polluted the very air.
The two images, the perfect healer and the perfect defilement, slammed together in Lyra's mind. The divine power flooding her veins curdled, poisoned by the context of its delivery. This perfection, this healing, had been born in the same moment as this ultimate sin. It had been wrought by Faith, her sweet, gentle Faith, who now stood transformed into a blazing icon of alien, dispassionate gold. Her eyes, returned to their familiar blue but burning with a new, terrible light, fixed on Faith. "What have you done?" Lyra's voice was a low, trembling thing, stripped of its earlier strength by sheer, doctrinal horror. "This power… this is not a blessing. This is… overwriting. You have scarred the template of your soul!, You have touched the sacred and twisted it into something… efficient!" The word was a curse. The Church taught that Blessings were gifts, to be nurtured and understood, their limitations and costs a part of their sacred mystery. To strip away the cost, to perfect the form without the struggle, was an affront to the divine order. It was the path of the apostate, the sorcerer-king, the heretic.
Her gaze then swept back to Doom, and the zealot's fury found its true focus. The Void was the ultimate enemy, the anti-creation, the hunger that sought to unmake all light. And this… this thing was its herald. He had not just killed her friends, he had defiled one of their own in the shadow of a perverted miracle. He had turned this ground into a temple of desecration. "Abomination!" The word erupted from her, laced with a purity of hatred she had never known. Her Dawnblade flared, not with the wild, unstable fury of before, but with a focused, searing radiance that pushed back the lingering void-chill. "You spat in the face of Creation itself! You feast on life and defile its vessels! Your very existence is a blasphemy that must be scoured from this world!" She took a step forward, the ground firm beneath her feet. "The Church's Doctrine is clear! There is no redemption for the Void-touched! No mercy for the Herald of the Devourer! Only PURGING FLAME!". Her eyes blazed with absolute conviction. This was no longer a tactical battle. It was a holy war. And she was its newly forged, perfect weapon.
---
The world dissolved from wet, warm, sucking darkness into a searing, silent blast of white-gold.
For a few, fleeting moments, the constant, gnawing cold of the void within Doom had been held at bay. Not by power, not by slaughter, but by a simpler, more primal heat. The tight, living warmth of Silk's throat, the frantic, wet friction of her mouth, the shuddering release that had momentarily eclipsed the endless hunger, it had been a grounding. A tether to the flesh he wore, a fleeting echo of the base pleasures Kael had sometimes allowed after a particularly brutal job. Ainar had been right. The cold could recede. There was warmth to be claimed.
And now, this… light.
It wasn't Lyra's purifying blaze, which was a weapon he could understand, a force to be met and broken. This was different. It was a silent, surgical correction of reality itself. It didn't burn the void. it simply asserted its own perfect, sterile order, pushing the chaotic darkness back like an unwanted guest. The Void Sigil on his chest flared in a reactive, pained violet pulse, not in defiance, but in protest, like a raw nerve exposed to salt. The sated lethargy in his muscles evaporated, replaced by a familiar, coiled tension. The pleasant, heavy warmth in his groin curdled into a sharp, irritated throb. The unwinding was over. Shattered. 'The light! My blade, the LIGHT!'. Ainar's voice was a shriek in his mind, but it was not the battle-cry of before. It was laced with something new, something raw and sharp that Doom had rarely heard from the spectral ghost of his mother: genuine, panicked disbelief. 'It's… wrong! It's not mending, it's sculpting! It's carving a new template over the old, burning away the flaws like a smith purging dross from ore! This is not the magic of this world! This is… an imposition!'
Her spectral presence, usually a cool, calculating pressure, felt frayed, frantic. The perfect, brutal logic of Kael's world, break your enemy, take your prize, claim your pleasure, had no answer for this. This was a power that rewrote the rules of the game itself. Doom's obsidian gaze, the stellar pinpricks within them narrowing to slits, tracked from the sobbing, broken form of Silk to the blazing figure of Faith. The transformation was an obscenity against the natural order of strength and weakness. The weak healer was gone, replaced by this… construct of furious, optimized light. And in that moment, the gnawing fatigue he had been suppressing for hours, since the Ashen Gulf collapsed, since he saw Kael's final, triumphant smile as the life left his eyes, crashed down upon him. He hadn't grieved. He hadn't rested. He hadn't processed. He had simply moved, killed, consumed, and evolved, a weapon hurtling through a world he did not understand, guided by a dead mother's whispers and the demands of a chained god. The brief, degrading respite with Silk had been the first crack in that relentless momentum. A chance to feel something other than the void's chill or the heat of violence. A chance to be a conqueror enjoying his spoils, not just a herald on an endless march.
And Faith had stolen it.
The dawning horror on Lyra's face, her doctrinal fury, her screams of "abomination" and "purgingflame", it was all just noise. Background static. The only thing that mattered was the source of the interruption. The one who had broken the fragile, hard-won moment of peace. A cold, pure fury, colder than the void itself, ignited in Doom's chest. It was not the hot, possessive rage he'd felt towards Garret. This was different. This was the icy, focused anger of a predator whose meal has been spoiled. Silk, sensing the shift, tried to pull away, a mewling sound of terror escaping her bruised lips. His hand, still tangled in her hair, didn't tighten in warning. It simply held. A casual, almost absent-minded act of possession. She was irrelevant now. A tool that had been put down. His gaze remained locked on Faith. On the perfect, golden marks branding her skin. On the alien, dispassionate light in her eyes as they took in the carnage, the defilement, and finally, the truth. 'She sees it all,' Ainar hissed, her voice regaining some of its sharpness, now honed by a venomous fear. 'She sees the ashes of your harvest. She sees the rogue's shame. And she will link it. She will see you. That power… it is unstable, my son. Raw. Newborn. But it is potent. It fixed the Judicator. It did not just heal her, it made her better. Stronger. Cleaner. They are an unknown variable. A threat we cannot yet calculate.'
Doom processed the warning, but it only fueled the icy fire. A threat. An unknown. Born from his asset. Fueled by the light he had allowed to persist because it was useful leverage.
A mistake.
Lyra was screaming her doctrines, her Dawnblade blazing with a purity that now felt sterile and hollow. Faith was crumbling, the divine star fracturing back into a grieving, horrified girl. The perfect moment for a tactical strike. To eliminate the new, unstable power before it could coalesce. To punish the interruption. Doom's free hand, which had been resting on his hip, dropped. His talons slid from his fingertips with a soft, lethal shink. The Ossuary Blade, planted in the earth beside him, hummed in anticipation, its crimson veins pulsing in time with his rising fury. He ignored Lyra. Her words were the buzzing of a gnat. Her renewed power was a problem for later. The primary target was clear. The one who had dared to shine a light into his darkness. The one who had ripped him from the first semblance of peace he'd known since his father died. Faith's eyes, wide with the horror of understanding, met his. In them, he saw the ashes of Bron, of Thorn, of Garret. He saw Finn's empty robes. And he saw himself, reflected in her golden gaze, a monster standing over his broken, debased prize. With a wet, final sound, he pulled himself from Silk's mouth, letting her collapse into a sobbing heap. He took a single, deliberate step forward, his bare foot fell upon a fragment of Thorn's shattered maul embedding it into the mud.
The message was silent, but absolute. The unwinding was over. The killing was about to begin again. And the first soul to be harvested would be the one who had just learned the cost of interrupting a god's herald.
He would break this new sun before it could even finish rising.
---
The silence after Doom's step was more deafening than any scream. It was the quiet of a drawn blade, the stillness before an execution. The very air seemed to fracture under the weight of the three opposing forces: Lyra's righteous fury, Faith's nascent, terrible power, and Doom's absolute, icy wrath. Lyra saw only the heresy. The Void made flesh, standing defiled and defiler amidst the ashes of the righteous. Her Doctrine provided the script, the only possible response. "In the name of the Solar Throne and the Unconquered Sun," she intoned, her voice ringing with a clarity that had been absent in her previous, desperate battle. Her Dawnblade rose, no longer a blazing torch but a focused, searing lance of light. "I enact the Fourth Edict of Purity. For the crime of existence, for the sin of defilement, for the taint of the Void upon this world, I sentence you to oblivion." Faith saw only the graveyard. Her mind, reeling from the influx of power and the horror of its cost, was a storm of grief and confusion.
The golden marks on her skin burned, feeding her a cold, analytical understanding of the scene. She saw the molecular breakdown of the ashes, the residual psychic agony in the soil, the brutal, efficient damage done to Silk's throat. And she saw the Void Herald, not as a monster from doctrine, but as a nexus of devouring cold and limitless hunger. Her new, optimized power recoiled from it, not with fear, but with a pristine, absolute need to sterilize the infection. Her hands rose, the mark on her left glowing with that surgical silver light. There were no words. Only the hum of a scalpel powering up. Doom saw only the interruption. The spoils of his victory, the hard-won moment of primal release, shattered by this blinding, sterile light. Ainar's voice was a razor's edge in his mind, frantic and sharp. 'The Judicator is refined! Stripped of her weaknesses! She will be faster, stronger, her light more potent against you! And the healer… she is the true variable! That power is not of this world's making! It is a clean fire that seeks to burn away all imperfection, all chaos… all that you are! You must break her first, my blade! Shatter the lens before it can focus!'.
He moved.
Not towards Lyra, who was chanting a prayer of condemnation. Not with a roar, but with the silent, terrifying efficiency of a landslide. He triggered [Void Dash] -8% VOID ENERGY | VOID ENERGY 76%. It was not the pained, straining burst of before. It was a seamless, thought-made-action. A violet-tinged afterimage blurred at his origin point as he reappeared not in front of Faith, but at her flank, his talons already sweeping in a vicious arc aimed not to kill, but to cripple, to sever the arm bearing the silver, surgical mark. Faith reacted not with speed, but with prescience. Her amber-marked forehead flared. She didn't see his movement, she saw the intent a microsecond before it manifested. Her body flowed sideways with an unnatural, liquid grace, the talons whistling through empty air. Simultaneously, her right hand, bearing the jagged, white-hot sun mark, snapped forward. "[SOLAR LANCE]!" A spear of condensed, blazing heat, sharper and more focused than any of Lyra's previous attacks, screamed towards his chest. Doom didn't block. The Void Sigil flared, and he phased, using a micro-Void Dash to shift a foot to the left. The lance grazed his side, searing a line of blackened flesh across his silver-traced ribs. The pain was immediate and clean, a cauterizing burn. [HP: 100% -> 98%]. It was a negligible wound, but the nature of the damage was new. It didn't just burn, it sought to unmake the void-tempered flesh on a cellular level.
'See?! It resists consumption! It seeks to delete you!' Ainar shrieked. Doom outstretched his right hand as Lyra was upon him, summoning The Ossuary Blade. Her perfected form moved with a speed that eclipsed her previous best. Her Dawnblade came down in a perfect, golden arc, humming with a purifying frequency that made the Void Sigil vibrate uncomfortably. Doom met it with the Ossuary Blade.
CLANG-SHRIEEK!