The Abyss was not silence.
At first, Azraelion thought it was. He floated — or perhaps he fell — through endless black, weightless, thoughtless, a hollow shell of the man who once carried entire armies with his name alone. But soon, he began to hear it: the distant grinding of stone on stone, the faint drip of water that wasn't water at all, a rhythm like a dying heart.
He could not move. His body had been broken beyond mortal repair when he struck the Abyss. The power of a god's betrayal coursed through his veins like poison — a venom designed not to kill, but to erase.
Time, if it even existed here, slithered by.
And then — a sound.
It was not a roar, not a whisper. It was something deeper, like the world itself taking a breath.
"Azraelion Veyl…"
The voice did not echo; it vibrated. It wasn't heard through ears, but through bone, through soul.
He tried to speak but found no strength. Only a rasp left his lips — a defiance that refused to die.
"Who…?"
"A question," the voice said, calm, heavy, older than any god Azraelion had ever known. "Good. Questions mean you have not yet broken."
Light — or something pretending to be light — crawled along the edges of the black, forming shapes that did not obey logic: serpents of shadow, claws of flame, rivers that bled upward.
"Do you wish to rise again?" the voice asked.
Azraelion closed his eyes. He saw the god who betrayed him — the strongest among the Nexus pantheon — the god he had sworn to serve, the one whose armies he had led across realms, the one whose throne he had guarded with his own blood.
The betrayal burned hotter than any wound.
"…I wish," Azraelion rasped, "to kill them all."
Silence. Then — a slow, deliberate sound, like a chain tightening around a star.
"Then you are mine."
Pain ripped through him — not pain of flesh, but of existence. He felt something carve itself into his soul, branding him with a power that was not divine, not demonic — something older, darker, hungrier.
"Your body is ruined," the voice said. "Your heart hollow. But your hatred… ah, your hatred is pure."
Azraelion screamed — not from agony, but from the weight of what was being forced inside him. He felt strength return, unnatural, corrosive, infinite. His broken bones snapped back, reforged not in blood and marrow, but in something black and metallic, thrumming with a rhythm that was not a heartbeat but a war drum.
"You will crawl from this Abyss," the voice murmured, almost tender. "You will gather the strength to break the gods. And when your blade reaches the throat of the one you hate most…"
The shadows swirled, forming the faint outline of a door — vast, ancient, covered in runes no mortal tongue could name.
"…then, Azraelion Veyl, you will learn who I am."
And then — the light returned.
Or perhaps the Abyss simply swallowed him whole again, leaving only the echo of his ragged breathing — and a single truth burning in his chest:
He had power again. And with it, a purpose.