"What is…!?" I froze, every muscle coiling as if some invisible hand had stopped time. From the yawning tear in the sky, creatures that had once laid waste to our borderlands fell like a storm of black rain — grotesque shapes tumbling through the rift and slamming into the earth below. The air tasted of iron and old smoke. The very thought made my stomach drop.
"Don't tell me… it opened itself again. The Land of Chaos?!" someone breathed behind me.
There was no time for hesitation. I felt the old impulse — the urgent, familiar weight at the back of my throat that had carried me across battlefields and into the jaws of ruin.
"Elowen, stay here," I ordered without looking. I hugged her tightly, feeling the small, stubborn warmth of my sister press against my chest. "Wait for me here." The words were more a command to myself than to her. I let her go, pushed into motion, and ran from the barracks toward the rift. I shouted for the Barony to evacuate — to retreat to the citadel — even as voice after voice answered in panicked compliance.
I ran for miles in a single breath, covering distances that should have taken days. The world blurring around the edges, I reached Veylandria at last: the kingdom of Darius Veylan, the Warlord King, incarnation of Solgryn. It was here the rift's heart had cleaved the sky, and here the other Heroes had gathered.
"Aiorel, you're finally here!" Sariel called, relief in his tone.
"It's the same as before," Darius said, eyes fixed on the fissure above. He had the cold nobility of a man who expected the world to bend to his will. He had never liked uncertainty.
"We must enter and kill whatever bastard commands it at once!" My voice cut through the tense air. The words were a blade and a promise folded into one.
"Are you crazy?" Orrick's voice was calm but sharp. Orrick Veythar — Archmage, scholar of runes, the eleventh Hero and incarnation of Aurelith — had always preferred knowledge to rash action. He did not step forward.
"The Land of Chaos is an unknown land even to us. We would be putting our lives at stake if we enter," Selric warned, the assassin's voice flat and unconcerned with heroics. Selric Duskbane, the moonlit shadow and fifth Hero, had always weighed risk like a merchant weighs coin.
Seraphine stepped forward then, as she always did. The Holy Knight exuded the unquestionable authority of someone who had been carved from doctrine itself. "It's worth a try, don't you think?" she asked simply.
When the others nodded, their agreement small ripples in a greater tide, we crossed the threshold together. The rift swallowed us and spat us into the unreality of the Land of Chaos — a place whose name was rumor and nightmare. They said it was where the seventh Demon King hid, where the primordial beast of Chaos, Manevel, had once writhed. They said things there answered only to lawless impulses.
The landscape was strange: an endless plain of sand beneath a pall of dark sky, yet a light burned there — neither sun nor moon — that allowed us to see with unpleasant clarity. There were no spatial promises. Dungeons offered corridors and ends; Chaos offered no such comforts. It behaved like a question that refused to be answered.
"Sariel, stay here. Do not let a single chaos spawn pass," Seraphine commanded, voice absolute.
"Understood," Sariel replied.
We pressed on. Voices traded petty boasts, bartered threats, and thinly veiled schemes for reward.
"After this, don't even think of cutting me out, Aiorel. The rewards for the kill will be ours," Valdrin said smoothly, face already planning victory's spoils. Valdrin Kael — Flame Warlord, fourth Hero, and incarnation of Ignara.
"Take it all you want. I'm cutting my connections with you all after this," I replied and moved ahead. I could have spared the words; they were tinder for something that would soon catch.
"We'll get a fortune if we return with Manevel's head and the Demon King's crown, right?" Thalindra asked, eyes glittering. Thalindra Moirae's voice was airy with hope; she was the Ocean Sage, sixth Hero, incarnation of Thalora.
"Since this is Chaos, we should score at least a million gold, no?" Mirae smirked. Mirae Luneth, the eighth Hero, an illusionist tied to Lunaris, could always make greed look like wit.
I heard them but did not join the laughter. Heroes, I thought, had become merchants with swords.
Eventually we reached a ruinous mound, and at its center sat a throne carved from stone and shadow. Upon it crouched a figure of humanoid proportions and monstrous magnitude — tall as towers, crowned in ruin and malice.
"The seventh Demon King," Seraphine whispered, draw of sword metal on leather audible in the stillness.
The Demon King rose and summoned a blade from nothing. The sound it made was like a promise of ruin. The desert trembled. Shadows condensed into teeth and claws; black-graded monsters surged forward like a living storm.
"Everyone, prepare for combat!" I shouted. The instinct to fight was a drumbeat in my chest.
The ground convulsed and an uncountable tide of creatures rushed us. Elandra cried out in alarm — Elandra Faewyn, Beast Tamer and tenth Hero — and the line faltered. We began to retreat toward the entrance where Sariel stood vigilant.
Mirae's voice cut like a knife through the chaos. "Garruk! Now!" she laughed.
"On it!" Garruk Stonehide replied. The seventh Hero, the Stone Guardian, swung Titan's Hammer as if the world itself were a forge. The impact sent a shockwave that threw sand into the air and shoved me backward — closer to the writhing horde.
I propelled myself forward, teeth bared, feet flying. We neared the exit — salvation in the form of Sariel's guarded stance — when Seraphine turned. For a moment her face was not only the face of a leader; it was the face of a judge. Her voice, cold as an edict, cut through me.
"Order shall return. Curse of the Morningstar Barony."
I had a heartbeat of confusion. Then light flared from Seraphine's sword, Radiant Aegis, a brilliance that seared my vision and stole the world from me.
When the light died, the entrance was gone. The rift's mouth had sealed. The others — the eleven I had trusted — were gone.
I remained. The Land of Chaos closed like an oubliette around me.
The sound of a million predators closing in was a low, hungry chorus. There was no time for the hate to soften into despair. I turned and fought.
"RAAAH!" My sword sang between my teeth. I cut and cut until the motion became a machine and the world a smear of movement. I could not afford to stop; to pause was to be torn apart. Their smiles — the grotesque, taunting expressions of monstrous faces — were my fuel. Rage was a warm, sustaining thing. I told myself that I would survive; that I would rip their heads off and carve my name into the world.
Days bled into nights that did not distinguish themselves. I lost track of time the way a man might lose track of a wound. The Land of Chaos did not grant seasons. Years passed and carved me down. Scars embroidered my skin; hair turned to silver and then to snow. I survived on hunger, on violence, on the cruel arithmetic of a blade.
Ninety-nine years later — ninety-nine years that should have been an echo swallowed by sand — the Demon King quivered before me. The creature that had once cast me into an abyss trembled and hid behind the rubble of its throne. Its roar was pitiful now, like an aging god pleading for mercy that would not come.
My body was ruin. I wore the skull of Manevel, the Chaos Dragon, as a macabre helm. My clothing had become tatters, bound around my waist as crude garments. The man they had once called Aiorel Morningstar was a shadow stitched to the bones of something else.
"Die," I said, the word a blade as much as the sword I raised. I heaved the weapon down with everything my broken body could offer. Then I sank to the sand, the world dimming at the edges.
"Is it… finally over?" I wondered aloud, the question a brittle thing that snapped in the dry air.
The Land of Chaos shuddered. Darkness threaded through the sand and wrapped around me like a lover or a tomb. Something ancient and indifferent accepted the end; my lungs filled with sand, and I slipped beneath it.
A mechanical voice, cold and impossible, cut through the silence: [Chaos Lord system requirements have been met.] The words did not belong to any language of men, yet they embedded themselves in my bones.
[Skill: Godly Regeneration activated.]
Then nothingness swallowed me.
[...]
Somewhere far from the desert I had drowned in — in a valley-shaped dungeon carved into the skirts of the world — Elowen Morningstar crouched beneath a tumbled arch and cried out. "If only elder brother were here… none of these monsters would exist today." She fought through tears and fear, a spear of stubbornness pinned to her ribs. Her hands trembled. The disciples of Ignara closed around her like hawks.
"Give up, Elowen Morningstar," called Saint Pyrrha Volcrest, voice oily with the promise of favors. "Come under Ignara's protection. Support for your small nation will follow."
"Never!" Elowen spat. "I will never abandon the nation my brother raised!"
Pyrrha's twin ember sabers hummed, a casual threat. "How disappointing," she said. "You could have been a great worshipper."
Before Pyrrha's blades sang, all eyes snapped upward. Cracks peeled open in the sky above the valley. For a moment the disciples faltered — even religious certainty can be startled. Then a man fell.
I fell. I fell through fractured air and screaming wind, and only one thought held: I had been hollowed and remade by Chaos, and I would bring that same chaos to the ordered faces of the gods. The blade in my hand felt different now — heavy with years and hunger, with power and promise.
As I plunged toward the world that had once betrayed me, I had no illusions left. I would not be the boy they remembered. I would be the storm they had invited and the ruin they had feared. Chaos had not only kept me alive; it had given me a name to wear as armor.
Aiorel Morningstar returned from the abyss — not as the hero they had betrayed, but as the thing that would unravel their certainties.