There is no such thing as "death" in the Abyss.
Not in the way mortals understand it. In the mortal world, death is an ending — a door slammed shut, a body rotting into nothing. In the Abyss, death is simply displacement. Essence does not vanish; it is claimed.
But what claimed Veyrith was not of the Abyss.
He fell. Not through space, nor time, but through concepts — through the bones of reality itself. His body had been left behind, scattered in molten chunks across the battlefield. What remained was the true Veyrith: a storm of molten silver and shadow-fire, a consciousness woven from hunger, dominion, and endless will.
The Current took him.
At first, it was a river of light, pulling him forward. Then it was teeth — gnawing at his edges, stripping away his armors of power. He roared, but here sound had no meaning. His voice rippled through the Current as thought-light, as echoes in the minds of things he passed.
And there were… things.
Shapes drifted beside him — some were other fallen abyssals, shrieking as they were dragged along. Some were alien souls, nothing he had ever seen even in the multiverse's war zones. Others were mindless, little more than motes of awareness waiting to be devoured by something greater.
Veyrith devoured what he could reach.
He lashed out with tendrils of essence, drinking in fragments of memory and strength. A thousand mortal lifetimes of terror. The whispered secrets of a dying god. The smell of oceans he had never walked upon. These things clung to him, slowing the erosion, but not stopping it.
The Current was… merciless.
It peeled away his titles, one by one. The Lord of Nine Throats — gone. The Devourer of Saints — gone. The Unmaker of the Fifth Choir — gone. Not because they no longer were true, but because the Current refused to acknowledge them.
What it left behind was… smaller. Still vast compared to mortal minds, but stripped of the suffocating weight of an Abyssal Lord's presence.
It burned his name next.
Not just the sound, not just the shape of it — but the truth of it. In the Abyss, names were living things, bound to the soul. His name, Veyrith, was devoured, shredded into meaningless syllables. He would not be able to speak it. He would not be able to remember it unless he clawed it back through conquest.
That wound hurt more than the dragon's bite.
Then came the visions.
The Current was not just a river. It was a judge. It dragged every soul through a thousand possibilities, a thousand reflections of what they had been, could be, or would be.
Veyrith saw himself in a thousand worlds — a crowned emperor leading armies of light; a nameless assassin killing kings in the night; a child choking on the mud of a slave pit. Each version felt real, as though he were living them all in parallel. Some he tore free from instantly. Others… lingered.
He lingered longest on one vision — a boy with black hair, standing in the ruins of a burning library, holding a blade carved from the bones of something divine. His eyes — mortal eyes — burned with the same cold silver flame as Veyrith's.
The Current laughed at him.
Not in sound, but in feeling — a low, mocking rumble through his soul.
He snarled. You will not choose my shape. I will choose it.
But the Current did not care.
The flow twisted, tightening around him. He felt it press — not physically, but like an idea forcing itself into his being. His form was compressed, condensed, folded down until his infinite awareness strained inside something tiny.
The pressure built. Every fragment of power he had hoarded screamed in protest. His essence wanted to tear apart, to explode and burn everything around him.
Then —
A snap.
The Current flung him out.
For an instant, there was nothing but a blinding flash of warmth — not the hellfire of the Abyss, but something soft, wet, and strangely fragile. Sounds returned, muffled and chaotic. Voices. Screams. The crash of something heavy.
He could not see yet.
His body — his new body — was small. Weak. Flailing on instinct. His lungs drew in air that tasted of wood smoke, blood, and… fear.
Fear not his own.
The voices sharpened — words now, though crude and human:
"Push! The babe's crowning!"
Another voice — a woman's, ragged with pain: "No… gods, it's too early—!"
The sensation hit him like a curse. He was being born.
A roar built in his mind, but the body could not form it. Instead, a newborn's cry split the air — shrill, pathetic, human. He hated it instantly.
Light stabbed into his eyes. Shapes swam — blurry, but already his mind was pulling them into focus. A dim room of stone walls, lit by guttering candles. The smell of sweat, blood, and incense. A woman on a bed, pale as parchment, eyes wide with exhaustion and fear.
The midwife held him up, red and wrinkled, still slick with birth-blood. "A boy," she said softly, almost reverently.
The woman on the bed — his mother — exhaled in a shudder, relief and sorrow mixing in her gaze. Her lips moved, shaping a name.
Not Veyrith.
Something human.
The syllables burned.
He was lowered into her arms, and for a brief moment, her warmth surrounded him. His mind, sharpened by millennia of conquest, calculated instantly: this body was pitiful, but it could grow. The Abyss had not erased him completely. He would rebuild.
He would devour this fragile world until his name was carved into its bones.