The herald was only the beginning.
Three weeks after Lunaros's birth, the sky over Eldoria cracked open like old porcelain. This time the rift did not bleed shadow. It *sang*.
A low, endless note of pure absence—sound turned inside out, making teeth ache and hearts stutter. Every unmarked soul in the capital fell to their knees, weeping blood from ears and eyes. Only those who carried Lunaros's blood-mark or Selene's silver crescent remained untouched.
Kairos stood on the highest balcony of the palace, Remorse drawn and glowing white-hot. Below, the city burned with cold black fire that consumed warmth itself.
And from the heart of the rift stepped the Emperor's true herald: a woman.
Or what had once been a woman.
Tall, regal, skin like polished obsidian veined with starless night. Hair that moved like living smoke. Eyes that were simply holes—endless, hungry, ancient. She wore a crown of broken moons and a gown woven from the screams of devoured worlds.
Once, she had been Queen Aeloria of the First Kingdom—the very first realm the Voidborn ever swallowed. Now she was the Emperor's Voice, its favored pet, its promise of what awaited those who resisted.
She spoke, and every marked soul heard her inside their skulls.
**"The child,"** the Voice crooned, voice like silk dragged over broken glass. **"Give me the child born beneath the moon's jealous gaze. Give me the echo's seed. And I will let your little world linger a century more."**
Kairos's answer was to leap from the balcony.
He fell three stories, landed in a crouch that cracked the marble, and charged.
Remorse sang as it met her shadow-blades—each clash sending ripples of light and void across the sky. The Voice laughed, delighted, dancing with him in a deadly waltz that carved craters into the palace grounds.
His lovers fought below: Seraphine's greatsword cleaving lesser Voidborn, Lyralei's arrows trailing starlight, the twins weaving coral shields that turned shadow to seawater, Isolde commanding the palace guard with a queen's fury, Selene standing over Lunaros's cradle in the throne room, moonlight pouring from her like a living shield.
Kairos and the Voice were evenly matched—his regression-fueled skill against her endless hunger—until she whispered the one thing designed to break him.
**"I tasted her, you know. Your first Amara. In the old timeline. She screamed so beautifully when we unmade her soul thread by thread. Would you like to hear the recording?"**
Rage blinded him.
He overextended.
The Voice's shadow-hand punched through his chest—literal void, unraveling flesh and memory alike.
He fell.
For one heartbeat, the world went black.
Then Lunaros cried.
A single, furious wail from the throne room.
The sound of a child who had never known fear.
Moonlight exploded outward like a supernova. Every marked soul felt it: a silver tide that poured strength into their veins, turned despair into diamond-hard resolve.
Selene rose into the air, cradling Lunaros, goddess-light pouring from mother and child both. She spoke one word in the true language of creation—a word that had never been uttered since the stars were born.
The Voice screamed.
Her obsidian skin cracked. Void bled from the fissures like black blood.
Kairos rose—wound knitting backward, flesh rewoven by his son's distant cry. Remorse blazed in his hand like a fallen star.
He drove it through the Voice's heart.
She shattered into a thousand shards of screaming night, sucked back into the closing rift with a sound like a dying god's sob.
The sky sealed.
Silence fell, broken only by Lunaros's soft, satisfied cooing as Selene lowered him back into his cradle.
Kairos staggered into the throne room, covered in his own blood and someone else's void-ichor.
His lovers surrounded him—tears, kisses, desperate hands checking for wounds that were already gone.
Selene placed Lunaros in his arms.
The boy looked up at him with those impossible silver-gray eyes and reached out one tiny hand to touch the blood on his father's cheek.
The blood vanished.
Lunaros smiled—a small, fierce thing—and for the first time spoke.
Not in words.
In the language of silence that only the Void understood.
A promise.
A threat.
A beginning.
Kairos held his son close and felt the future shift beneath them like a tide turning.
The Emperor had sent its favorite toy.
Next time, it would come itself.
And father and son would be waiting.
Before there was an Eternal Maw, before the Void had a name, there was a woman who loved too fiercely and ruled too well.
Aeloria was born in the First Kingdom (called Aetherion in the oldest songs), a realm that existed when the stars were still young and the gods walked openly among mortals. She was the only child of the Star-Crowned King and the Moon-Heart Queen, inheriting both her father's crown of living flame and her mother's eyes that could see the threads of fate.
At nineteen she was already legend: tall and terrible in beauty, hair like molten gold, skin pale as dawn over snow, voice that could calm storms or call them down. She rode to war in armor of white dragon-bone, wielded a spear forged from a fallen star, and loved with a passion that burned kingdoms.
Her husband, King Consort Maelor, was her perfect mirror: gentle where she was fierce, wise where she was reckless. Together they held back the first whispers of the Void for a hundred years, sealing minor rifts with blood and song, believing love could outshine any darkness.
They were wrong.
The betrayal came from within.
Maelor, tempted by promises of immortality for their unborn daughter, opened the final gate. He thought he could control it. He thought the Void would bargain.
It does not bargain.
It *consumes*.
Aeloria found him in the throne room, half-dissolved into shadow, still reaching for her with a hand that was no longer flesh. The last thing he ever said, through a mouth already unraveling, was her name.
She fought.
Gods, she fought.
For three days and three nights she held the throne alone, spear blazing, voice cracking the sky as she sang the old binding hymns. She killed a thousand lesser Voidborn with her own hands. She sealed her daughter's soul into a shard of starlight and hurled it beyond the veil, praying some future world might catch it.
On the final dawn, the Emperor itself descended.
Not as shadow, but as a mirror.
It wore Maelor's face—perfect, unmarred, smiling the way he had on their wedding night.
**"Come willingly,"** it whispered in his voice, **"and I will let the memory of your love endure forever inside me."**
Aeloria lowered her spear.
She walked into the darkness of her own accord.
The First Kingdom fell in a single heartbeat.
For ten thousand years her soul was stretched across the Void's core—neither dead nor alive, feeling every world the Emperor devoured, every scream it tasted. Her love was the first chain that bound lesser Voidborn to its will. Her grief became its hunger refined.
She became the Voice because she was the only thing the Emperor ever truly *wanted* and could never fully possess. Aeloria's will, even shattered, resisted total dissolution. So it shaped her into its herald, its lure, its promise that surrender could feel like mercy.
When she appeared above Eldoria wearing Maelor's face beneath the crown of broken moons, it was not cruelty.
It was longing.
She remembers everything.
She remembers loving fiercely enough to burn worlds.
She remembers the moment she chose to walk into the dark to spare her people one more instant of suffering.
And somewhere, in the endless silence between devoured stars, a tiny shard of her still hopes.
Hopes that the child born beneath the moon's jealous gaze—the boy with eyes that shift like tides—might one day look upon her with pity instead of hate.
Because only pity can kill what love could not.
And only love, twisted beyond recognition, keeps Queen Aeloria of the First Kingdom screaming eternally inside the Emperor's favorite mask.