The Chainspire was gone.
Reduced to memory, swallowed by silence.
No more bells.
No more whips.
No more names carved into collars.
Only ash.
Yet the world did not rejoice.
It shivered.
Because when the tyrant falls
And the tower crumbles
What comes next is not peace.
But void.
The streets lay still.
The faithful of the Warden fled into holes like insects, whispering prayers to dead gods.
The nobles who'd once ruled from shadows now wandered without names, stripped of titles, stripped of fear masks.
And in the center of it all stood Nihil.
Uncrowned.
Unthroned.
And unwilling to rise above them.
He walked the ruins.
Not to rule.
But to remember.
"The world needs rebuilding," they said to him.
"The Warden is dead. The Chains are dust. Who now speaks the law?"
They looked to him.
Waited.
But Nihil only stared back.
"The law was never in words," he said.
"It was in the silence that let suffering thrive."
"We do not need kings."
"We need people who refuse to look away."
Yet for all his words, for all his silence chaos bloomed.
Without the Chain's terror, lesser monsters rose.
Ex-wardens.
False prophets.
Old gods with cracked crowns who returned to fill the void left behind.
They called themselves the Heirs of Dominion.
Each claimed to wear Nihil's will like a robe.
Each one twisted his story, his pain, into scripture.
They gathered cities beneath their banners.
Painted their faces in ash.
Declared themselves his voice.
And when they conquered villages, they did so chanting his name.
"Ash to ash. Let silence speak."
Slaves were freed, only to be bound again, under new laws.
The old gods were gone.
But the new ones looked no different.
Nihil watched.
He listened.
And when the first of his Echoes asked him what they should do
He answered not with philosophy.
But with fire.
They burned the false cities.
Crushed the prophets.
Not to reign.
But to erase the idea that he could be worn like a mask.
That his silence was something to imitate.
He returned to the people.
The broken.
The scattered.
And gave them no creed.
Only a tool:
A mark of ash carved into the stone of every city:
"Speak nothing that binds another."
"Raise nothing you would not bury."
"Remember."
Thus began the Ash Reign.
Not an empire.
Not a kingdom.
Not a rule.
But a time.
A time when the world was led by memory.
By scars.
By the understanding that no crown is ever holy, no law ever pure unless tested in silence.
And what of Nihil?
He vanished.
No throne.
No death.
No grave.
Some say he walks still, among ruins, faceless.
Some say he was never real only an echo of what the world needed to remember.
But in every place where silence is honored…
In every city that refuses to chain its poor, its different, its broken
There is always a wall.
Always a mark.
A crownless circle.
Burned in ash.