For a single, fragile moment, there was peace.
The surviving godslayers stood among the ruins of heaven, their armor reflecting the dying light of a broken sun. Some wept. Others fell to their knees, unable to comprehend what they had done. The air was silent, save for the soft hum of fading divinity.
And then the sky began to bleed.
Black ichor spilled from the corpses of slain gods — thick, glimmering with sparks of gold, as though even their hatred carried beauty. The divine realm groaned, its once-pure soil rotting beneath the weight of its creators' deaths.
That darkness was not mere decay. It was wrath.
The black essence poured downward, seeping through the cracks between worlds, falling to the mortal plane like a rain of shadow. Where it struck, the earth screamed. Mountains buckled. Rivers turned to pitch. From the depths of that corruption rose obsidian gates — jagged, pulsating, alive.
And from within those gates, the first monsters crawled forth.
They were not born of nature nor magic, but of vengeance itself. Their bodies twisted, their eyes hollow, their every breath dripping with divine hatred. They consumed light. They devoured everything living.
The people called them Dungeons.
Each one was a wound in the world — a scar left by the dying breath of gods. They spread across continents like a plague, swallowing cities whole, turning temples into tombs.
The godslayers, weary yet unbroken, took up their weapons once more. They fought not for glory, but survival — battling creatures that had once been divine. For every dungeon they sealed, three more emerged.
This was no longer a war of rebellion. It was retribution.
Inside the dungeons, reality itself faltered. Magic unraveled. Time bent. Even divine power — the source of their victory — was suppressed, drained into the heart of the darkness. The moment a godslayer crossed the threshold, the dungeon fed.
And one by one, the heroes who had toppled heaven began to vanish.
Their names faded into legend. Their swords turned cold. The light of defiance that had once burned across the world dimmed to embers.
And among the last to fall… was Rion Valeheart.
No one saw his end — only the aftermath. A shattered sword, still pulsing faintly with divine light, half-buried at the entrance of a dungeon that no one dared enter.
The man who had slain the gods was gone.
And from that day on, humanity lived beneath the shadow of their own victory.
…
In the years after the fall of heaven, silence became Seraphina Valeheart's only companion.
She wandered from ruin to ruin, a ghost among mortals, her divine aura sealed beneath layers of wards and whispers. The once-feared Witch of the Crimson Dawn now lived as a shadow — a widow, a mother, a fugitive.
Her days were simple but haunted. At dawn, she would watch the mist crawl over the valley from the cracked window of their hut, her eyes distant, her hands resting on the child asleep beside her. At dusk, she would draw runes across the doorframe — invisible to mortal sight — to keep away the creatures that hungered for divine scent.
And at night, when the wind howled like the ghosts of the fallen, she would hold her son close and whisper lessons that were never meant for children.
"Never speak your name in the dark," she told him.
"Never trust the light that doesn't cast a shadow."
"And if you ever see wings in the sky… run."
She taught him silence, the kind that saves lives.
She taught him caution, sharper than any blade.
She taught him how to survive a world built from the bones of gods.
Adrian Valeheart grew up beneath the weight of secrets he didn't understand — a boy with silver eyes who was never allowed to dream too loudly.
But fate has no mercy for the careful.
It began one night with a sound — soft at first, like rain on stone. Then came the flash. A burst of blinding white tore the darkness apart, followed by a crash that shook the walls of their home.
Adrian woke to the smell of burning air. The wards on the door were gone — melted like wax. His small feet stumbled through the hall, the silence thick, his heart hammering in his ears.
"Mother?" he called.
The door to her room hung half-open. Inside, the air shimmered with golden mist. The floor was cracked, glowing faintly as if the world itself was bleeding light. And on the wall — seared deep into the stone — was a sigil shaped like a pair of wings, black and burning at the edges.
She was gone.
Only the blood remained — not red, but gold, pulsing faintly as though it refused to die. Adrian reached for it, and when his fingers brushed the glowing liquid, warmth flooded through him — a memory not his own. His mother's voice, soft and fading: "Live, my son. The light will hunt you. So become the shadow."
The killer was never found. No god descended to claim it, no mortal dared to question it. The world moved on, but the boy did not.
Thus ended the last godslayer — not on the battlefield, not amid glory or flame, but in silence.
And her son was there to watch the light fade from the world.
…
Time flowed like ash carried on the wind.
Years turned, kingdoms rose and fell, and the story of the godslayers faded into myth. The Golden War became a cautionary tale told around campfires — of mortals who reached too high and burned the sky for it.
But the scars of that war still carved the world. The Dungeons remained — vast, living labyrinths that pulsed with the heartbeat of dead gods. They grew like infections beneath the soil, spewing monsters and madness.
Humanity adapted the only way it knew how — by fighting back.
From the ruins of divine cities came scholars who studied forbidden relics. Blacksmiths learned to forge weapons using fragments of celestial metal. And scattered warriors gathered into something new: Hunter Guilds.
These were not armies of conquest, but of endurance — mortals who ventured into the Dungeons to reclaim what little of their world remained. They mapped the impossible, catalogued the unnatural, and built cities around the very wounds that once destroyed them.
Through blood and loss, they learned to live with the curse of their own victory.
But even as civilization healed, the old power slept uneasily beneath its surface. There were whispers — of children born with strange marks, of eyes that glowed under moonlight, of voices that could silence monsters. The gods' hatred had not died. It had simply changed shape.
And somewhere among those whispers walked a boy with silver eyes.
He was quiet, unassuming, carrying only a rusted pendant that once belonged to his mother. In the crowded streets of rebuilt kingdoms, he passed unnoticed — just another orphan of the old world. But within him stirred something ancient and dangerous: the echo of divine blood, the wrath of godslayers long dead.
His name was Adrian Valeheart.
The world believed the godslayers had vanished.
History said their line was broken.
But blood remembers what the world forgets.
And soon, the heavens would remember, too.