Chapter 1 — The Summoning of the Forsaken
The first thing Rin felt was weight—the kind that pressed on his lungs and whispered he shouldn't be breathing at all.
He expected nothingness after death, but instead there was heat.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling cracked like burnt glass. Fire crawled across stone pillars; smoke curled through the ruin of what might once have been a throne room.
And in the middle of that ruin knelt a king—skin the color of twilight, horns broken and bleeding, crown split clean in two.
> "...So," the king rasped, voice brittle as dying wood, "the call has been answered after all."
Rin pushed himself upright, his vision blurring. "Wh-where am I? I was—"
"Dying?" The king smiled faintly. "Yes. That is how most heroes arrive here."
Outside, through shattered walls, the world burned. Gold-armored figures descended from the sky, wings radiant, faces hidden behind halos of light. They moved like falling stars—beautiful and merciless.
Everywhere they passed, demons fled. Not monsters, not beasts—families. Small bodies clutching each other, horns glinting through the smoke.
Rin stumbled to the broken archway and stared. "They're killing them… even the children."
The king's voice trembled. "The heavens call it purification."
Rin felt the word curdle in his throat. "Purification?"
"Yes. To them, existence without obedience is sin."
He turned back toward the king. "And you—what are you?"
"Once," the king said, "I was their equal. Now I am only a king of ashes."
He reached out a trembling hand. "You, human—know loneliness, don't you? You understand what it is to live where no one hears you."
Rin hesitated. That ache—emptiness dressed as calm—was still there in his chest.
The king's cracked lips curved into something like hope.
> "Then lend that heart to us."
The king placed both his hands on Rin's chest. A warmth spread from his palms into Rin's body, heavier than the fires outside but gentler than the world he had known.
> "Take my power," the king said. "Everything I have left—my strength, my armies, my years of battle, my will. I give it to you so that my people do not vanish into the hands of gods who care nothing for them."
Rin felt a surge of energy unlike anything he had ever known. Memories of campaigns, leadership, and sacrifices folded into him, merging with the dark pulse growing inside. The void he did not yet understand stretched slightly, making room for the king's essence.
The hall shuddered. The broken doors swung open on their own as a shadow walked through the doorway—large, contained, a presence that swallowed the light. Armor black as midnight, a crown of smoldering horns. The Demon Lord moved like a storm in human skin.
He paused near the throne, looking at the king, then at Rin. He did not kneel to a dying monarch. He did not bother with courtesy.
> "So," the Demon Lord said, voice low as earth-split thunder, "this is the one you summoned."
The king smiled, pain creasing his face. "He has lived already, and unlived enough to not fear the next step." His breath came shallow now, as if time had been siphoned from him all at once.
The Demon Lord turned to Rin. His eyes—coal-bright—studied the man like someone deciding whether to burn a page or keep it. "Tell me, what do you fight for?"
Rin remembered the emptiness that had hollowed him out in his other life, the noise that had never filled his chest. He could not answer with courage; only with truth. "I don't know." The words fell flat and honest.
The Demon Lord crouched until he was level with Rin, his armor groaning like distant thunder. He reached a hand toward Rin's chest, not touching, letting the dark gift from the king pulse between them.
> "Listen carefully," he said, and his voice was a blade wrapped in silk. "We do not fight for what we want—we fight for what we have."
Rin felt those words land in him differently than any sermon ever had—practical, cold, but full of necessary gravity. The king's power—steady, resigned—beat like a second heart where their palms had pressed.
Then the Demon Lord produced something that seemed to drink the light around it: a fragment of crystalline blood, no larger than a fist but bright as a dying star. It hovered between his gauntleted fingers and thrummed with histories that made the air cold.
"This fragment," the Demon Lord said, "is what I can still spare. It holds the old law of our bloodline—the right to command, the right to protect, and the right to break oaths when the world demands it."
He set the fragment to Rin's chest—
—and the universe inside him answered.
A void opened inside Rin. Endless, silent, alive.
The Demon Lord poured his strength into Rin—not sparingly but like a river loosed from its dam. Fire, shadow, memory, command: he poured centuries of skill, all the abilities and marks of his office, into the fragment, into Rin. The void drank eagerly, swallowing power and expanding to make room, expanding more and more.
> "Impossible…" he whispered. "No vessel should be able to contain this."
The king's eyes flickered toward the doorway where light still sliced the world—angels perhaps surveying the ruin they had made. He exhaled once, a small shudder like a bell tolling.
The Demon Lord placed a hand on Rin's shoulder. "Save them. Save my kin. From this moment, you are the next Demon Lord."
The king's fingers relaxed. Ash lifted from him like a slow-swirling snow. The crown in Rin's hands was heavier than stone; the void inside him hummed with something old and enormous.
As the palace dimmed around them, Rin pressed the crown to his brow, feeling the cold bite of it turn warm. He thought of the children outside, the mothers, the exhausted faces that had not yet given up.
> "We do not fight for what we want—we fight for what we have."
And with that, the world shifted around him—and somewhere, unseen, the heavens shuddered.