King Alderen the Fourth was a good man, which in the arithmetic of power, often equated to a weak one. He believed in the covenant of rule—that peace was maintained by justice, and justice by consensus. He stood before his throne, his hand resting on the cool, polished marble of the lectern, speaking of harvest yields and border treaties. His words were reasonable, prudent, and utterly meaningless.
From the shadow of a great marble pillar, Zyane Valfin observed it all. To the court, he was a foreign scholar, a purveyor of rare antiquities and forgotten lore. His attire—a tailored coat of ash-gray wool over a high-collared black shirt—was just unconventional enough to mark him as an intellectual, just fine enough to suggest patronage. He was a ghost at the feast, present but unaccounted for.
His eyes, the colour of winter ice, did not glaze over with boredom. They catalogued. The slight tremor in the hand of the Treasury Minister, a man drowning in debt. The way the Captain of the Guard's gaze lingered a moment too long on the Queen's neckline. The minute fissures in the façade. This was not a kingdom; it was a system under strain, and Zyane understood systems. All of them, from the cosmic to the corporeal, were built upon a single, brutal principle: efficiency. And by that measure, Lysandria was terminally inefficient. It was a beautiful, overgrown weed, choking itself on its own complexity.
"They believe the Powerstone protects them," Zyane had murmured to the King in a private audience days prior, his voice a model of respectful conjecture. "But does a shield not also imply a threat? Your Majesty's peace is legendary, but legend often forgets the cost of its making."
He had spoken of historical cycles, of the quiet decay that precedes collapse. He had not lied. He had merely selected truths that served his purpose, weaving a tapestry of concern that mirrored the King's own dormant fears. The hook had been set with the precision of a surgeon's suture.
Now, as the ceremony drew to a close, the King's eyes found Zyane's in the crowd. There was a gratitude there, a trust painfully earned. Alderen saw a confidant. A steady hand in a shifting world. He gave a nearly imperceptible nod.
The trust of a king is the most potent of currencies, Zyane reflected, his face a mask of humble deference. And like all currency, its value lies only in what it can be traded for. He saw not a man, but a key. Not a soul, but a resource. Morality was a quaint superstition, a story societies told themselves to make the inherent brutality of existence seem like a choice.
The King dismissed the court with a final benediction. The nobles departed, their chatter filling the hall with the sound of hollow things. Alderen descended from the dais, his movements weary with the weight of a crown he had never desired.
"Walk with me, Zyane," the King said, his voice low. "The stone… its light seems dimmer tonight. I would value your eyes."
Zyane offered a shallow, perfect bow. "The night often reveals what the day conceals, Your Majesty."
He fell into step beside the King, the two of them moving toward the private western balcony that overlooked the capital and the dark, sleeping countryside beyond. The guards at the arched doorway stepped aside without a word.
The night air was sharp and cold, carrying the scent of pine and distant rain. The full moon hung like a polished coin in a vault of black velvet, its light bleaching the colour from the world. Below, the city of Ebonhold was a constellation of scattered lights, a mirror to the cold stars above.
The King leaned against the balustrade, his shoulders slumped. "They speak of legacy," he said, his breath misting in the air. "But what is a legacy but a hope that memory will be kind? I fear I have built a house of reeds."Zyane stood beside him, silent for a moment, his gaze not on the city, but on the King's exposed back. The man's vulnerability was a palpable thing, a warmth in the cold air.
"A house of reeds can stand for a century," Zyane said, his tone gentle, almost sorrowful. "Until the flood."
His hand moved, not with violence, but with a serene, inevitable certainty. The knife was a sliver of darkness, already there, as if it had always been meant to be in his hand at this exact moment. There was no anger in the act, no hatred, only a profound and absolute pragmatism.
The King stiffened. A soft, wet gasp escaped his lips, a sound of pure, uncomprehending shock. He did not cry out. He looked down, confused, at the blade's tip that had emerged just below his sternum, dark against the fine white linen of his tunic.
Zyane held him close, like a lover, his voice a whisper beside the King's ear, calm and precise. "The flood is not coming, Alderen. It is here."
He lowered the king's body to the cold stone floor with a strange, almost reverent care. The entire act had taken less than three seconds. The only witness was the impassive moon.
Zyane stood, wiping the blade clean on a fold of the king's own cloak. He looked from the dead man to the Powerstone, its pulsating light now seeming to stutter in time with the fading heartbeat of its master. The first move was complete. The key had been turned.blood pooled darkly on the moon-washed stone, a stark counterpoint to the pale marble. Zyane did not look at it again. Sentiment, even of the morbid kind, was an inefficiency. His attention was already elsewhere, fixed upon the great Powerstone at the heart of the citadel. Its light, once a steady, golden heartbeat, now flickered erratically, a frantic arrhythmia echoing the death of its master. The stability of Lysandria had been a delicate fiction, and he had just pulled its narrative thread. The entire tapestry was now unraveling.
He stepped over the king's body, his movements economical, his mind a vortex of cold calculus. The citizenry below, in their homes and taverns, remained oblivious. They trusted in stone and ceremony to protect them. It was, he reflected, the fundamental error of all mortal constructs: the belief that order was a permanent state, rather than a temporary anomaly between cascades of chaos.
He descended from the balcony into the main chamber, approaching the pulsating Stone. The air crackled with unreleased energy. He placed a hand upon its warm, vibrating surface, not to steady it, but to feel the discordance. It was perfect.
His will extended, not with a shout, but with a silent, imperative thought. A single word, applied to the fabric of reality itself.
Erase.
It began not with fire or quake, but with a profound and spreading silence. The distant murmur of the city below ceased mid-breath. The flickering torchlight in the sconces simply winked out, not as if extinguished, but as if they had never been. The very stone of the citadel began to lose its substance, not crumbling to dust, but sublimating into nothingness—walls, tapestries, the throne itself—all fading into a great and absolute void. The world was not being destroyed; it was being edited out of existence.
Zyane stood at the center of the storm, an island of calm in the erasing tide. He watched as streams of light—the essence of everything that had been Lysandria, every soul, every memory, every stone—coalesced around him. They swirled in a complex, silent vortex, a galaxy of stolen potential, before compressing into a single, perfectly smooth gem that settled into his palm. It was cold and heavy, pulsing with a captive, sun-like energy. The World-Heart. The refined potential of a nation.
The void around him was now total. No light, no sound, no up or down. Only a perfect, empty blackness and the cold light of the gem.
It was time for the next phase. The gem's energy was immense, but raw, unshaped for its final purpose. It required a catalyst, a specific key to turn the lock on the door he needed to open. He focused his will, channeling a sliver of the World-Heart's power. He did not shout an incantation. He simply reached into the metaphysical strata of the infernal, his intent a hook, and pulled.
The air before him tore open with a soundless shriek of ruptured reality. From the rift stumbled a figure of shifting darkness and smoldering embers—a demon, its form sleek and humanoid, its eyes burning with ancient, arrogant intelligence. Malzareth. It straightened, gathering its power, its voice a grating harmony of scorn and curiosity that echoed in the void.
"Who dares to summon—?"
Its words cut off. Zyane's will was already upon it, a force of absolute mental dominance, cold and sharp as a surgeon's lance. There was no struggle, no contest. A demon's will was a chaotic, fiery thing. His was a glacier—inexorable, single-minded, and infinitely heavier.
Pakhi 78.
The technique was not a request. It was a fundamental rewriting of command. Its definition was simple, absolute: hypnosis. The total overwriting of a conscious will with his own.
The demon's burning eyes flickered, its defiant posture slackening. The intelligence in its gaze did not vanish; it was simply hollowed out, its autonomy erased and replaced with a silent, waiting void. It stood perfectly still, a weapon awaiting its user's hand.
"You are a tool," Zyane stated, his voice calm and precise in the overwhelming silence. "Your knowledge is mine. Your purpose is to obey."
The demon offered no argument. It could not.
Zyane now held two powers: the refined soul of a world and the enslaved will of a hellspawn. He raised the World-Heart Gem. Using the demon's innate connection to the infernal as a guide and the gem's energy as the fuel, he applied his will once more.
Before him, the fabric of reality did not tear but unfolded, revealing a jagged, geometric portal. Through it, a landscape of burning spires and rivers of magma stretched into a crimson horizon. The air that washed through carried the scent of ash and eternal anguish.
He glanced back only once, not at the nothingness he had created, but at the path he had taken. It was merely the first step on a longer road. Without a word, Zyane Valfin stepped through the gateway, the hypnotized demon moving silently at his heels. The portal sealed behind them, leaving only the perfect, empty dark.silence of the void was replaced by a symphony of anguish. The air, thick with the taste of ash and molten stone, pressed in with a physical weight, a stark contrast to the absolute nothingness he had just departed. Heat radiated from the ground beneath his feet—a hard, glassy crust over a deeper, burning bed of eternal fire.
Zyane's senses, sharper than any mortal's, calibrated instantly. The first breath he took was an analysis. The chemical composition of the atmosphere, the gravitational pull, the resonant frequency of the dimension itself—all were data to be processed and filed away.
Before him stretched a landscape of nightmare geometry. Jagged obsidian spires clawed at a bruised, swirling sky where distant comets of soul-fire traced endless, despairing arcs. Rivers of magma cut through plains of cracked, scorched earth, and the echoes of distant, tormented screams formed a constant, discordant chorus. This was not a place of chaos; it was a realm of ordered, institutionalized suffering. A refinery of pain.
Malzareth, its form now more substantial in its native realm, stood motionless beside him, a silent, obedient statue awaiting its next command. Its hypnotized state was a bubble of perfect stillness in the seething tumult.
Zyane's expression did not change. He felt no awe, no fear, no revulsion. Hell was merely another system—older, more brutal than Lysandria, but a system nonetheless. And all systems could be understood, manipulated, and ultimately, broken down into their component parts.
His icy blue eyes scanned the horizon, not looking for a path, but for a weakness. A fault line in the reality of this place. A place to begin.
He had not come to survive Hell. He had come to own it.