The void was not empty. It was full—an ocean of crushing silence and absolute hunger. Before it, shattered stars bled their last light into the abyss, their cosmic death cries absorbed without a ripple. At the heart of this unraveling reality floated a throne made of solidified despair, and upon it sat a being that was both an entity and a concept: the Primordial Abyss.
It did not have eyes, but it watched. It did not have a mouth, but it consumed.
Facing this cosmic end, a lone figure stood on a fractured shard of what was once a world. His armor, forged from starlight and sealed with oaths, was cracked and weeping streams of golden mana. His breathing was a ragged storm in the suffocating quiet. One arm hung limp at his side, useless, while the other gripped a sword that pulsed with a faint, defiant glow—the last ember of hope in a dying universe.
He could feel the gazes of worlds upon him, the silent prayers of civilizations he had sworn to protect. He had surpassed myths, slain gods, and rewritten destinies written in the very fabric of existence. He had defied the script he was born into, clawing his way from the role of a disposable shadow to become a beacon.
But the Abyss was not a character in a story. It was the end of the book.
The figure lifted his head, his eyes reflecting the swirling chaos before him. He felt the threads of his own existence fraying, his Mana Core, a star in its own right, threatening to collapse under the sheer pressure of non-being.
He had fought the heroes, saved the villains, and united the races against the encroaching darkness. He had done everything right, everything the original story had failed to do.
Yet, here he was. At the precipice of everything.
A whisper, ancient and cold, slithered into his mind, not with words, but with a feeling—the crushing certainty of inevitability. It is over. All stories end.
The man smiled, a grim, bloody curve of his lips. He had heard that before. He had read it on a page, in another life, a lifetime ago. The world had told him he was destined to die as a footnote. Fate had told him his path was already written.
He had proven them all wrong. He would do it one last time.
He raised his sword, pouring the very last dregs of his soul, his memories, his love, and his rage into the blade. The faint ember erupted into a defiant supernova, a final, singular scream of light against the all-consuming dark.
"My story," he rasped, his voice echoing in the nothingness, "ends when I say it does."
The light lunged forward. The darkness surged to meet it.