The fall did not feel like movement.
It felt like surrendering to a verdict already pronounced.
Tartarus swallowed me without resistance. There was no wind, no rush of air only heat rising to meet me, a colossal breath exhaled from the bowels of existence. The walls of the abyss slid past in slow procession, layers of reality peeled open like scar tissue. Stone gave way to iron. Iron to runes. Runes to scars burned directly into the fabric of the world.
The deeper I fell, the heavier my obsidian body became, as if Tartarus itself were calculating my weight, judging whether I deserved to reach its heart.
Below me, the glow intensified veins of molten light pulsing through black rock like exposed nerves. The heat was unbearable, yet my glass flesh did not melt. It sang. A low, resonant hum vibrated through my frame, harmonizing with the red pulse of the lycoris heart locked within my chest.
Then I struck.
The impact was absolute.
I crashed into the ground with the force of a falling star, my obsidian body shattering the surface of the abyssal floor. Stone exploded outward, molten fissures spiderwebbing from the crater I carved. The shockwave rolled through Tartarus like a muted thunderclap, answered by distant groans ancient, colossal, half-asleep.
I rose slowly from the crater.
The ground beneath my feet was not earth, but a fusion of basalt, bone, and metal compressed layers of punishment piled over eternity. Chains as thick as towers ran through the terrain, half-buried, half-exposed, glowing faintly with divine runes that bled heat and hatred.
This was not a prison built in the world.
It was a prison that was the world's foundation.
And at its center
I felt him.
The pull that had guided me across the desert, through the fall, now locked into focus. Not a direction anymore. A presence.
I turned.
At the far end of the abyssal plain, something colossal was bound to the rock face itself. At first, it looked like a mountain torn open and nailed back together with chains. Then it moved.
The chains tightened.
The mountain breathed.
Siegfried.
He was vast—far larger than any god I had imagined. His body was a ruin of divine anatomy and ancient violence, fused into the cliff by six colossal chains of ether-silver, each one driven through flesh, bone, and something deeper. They did not merely restrain him; they defined him, rewriting his existence into a fixed equation of suffering.
His skin was scorched gold and blackened steel, cracked like cooling magma. His wings—what remained of them—were shattered, skeletal frames pinned uselessly against the rock. His head hung forward, crowned by tangled hair burned white by centuries of heat and rage.
Yet he was not unconscious.
One eye opened.
It was the color of a dying sun.
The moment his gaze found me, Tartarus reacted.
The ground trembled. Chains screamed. Runes flared violently, flooding the abyss with blinding sigils of suppression. The prison recognized an anomaly.
Siegfried did not roar.
He laughed.
It was a dry, fractured sound, like a blade dragged across stone.
"So," he said, his voice echoing directly inside my skull rather than through the air,
"the Styx finally learned how to forge instead of erase."
I did not answer.
I took a step forward.
The heat intensified instantly, pressing against my obsidian form like a living thing. The lycoris heart flared, its red light burning brighter in response to Siegfried's presence. The resonance between us was undeniable—two anomalies vibrating on the same impossible frequency.
Siegfried watched me with open fascination.
"You're not dead," he continued. "Not alive either. That puts you in a very exclusive category down here."
Another step.
The chains groaned in warning.
"You should stop," he said calmly. "Tartarus does not tolerate witnesses."
"I didn't come to watch," I replied.
My voice was no longer hollow.
It carried weight.
That made him smile.
"Good," Siegfried said. "Neither did I. Once."
The runes along the chains ignited, reacting violently to my proximity. Waves of suppressive force rolled outward, attempting to crush my will, to reduce me to inert matter. The same pressure that had erased gods pressed against me now.
It failed.
My obsidian feet dug into the fractured ground. Red lightning crawled across my body as the lycoris heart answered the assault with feral defiance.
Siegfried's remaining eye widened—not in fear, but in recognition.
"Oh," he murmured. "They made you wrong on purpose."
I stopped a few meters from him.
Up close, I could feel it: the structure of Tartarus woven through his body. He was not merely imprisoned here. He was part of the lock. A living keystone of punishment.
"What are you?" I asked.
Siegfried was silent for a long moment.
Then he spoke, and the abyss listened.
"I was the solution," he said. "To a problem the gods were too afraid to solve cleanly. I killed what could not be allowed to exist… and learned too late that obedience is just another crime."
His gaze burned into me.
"And you," he said softly, "are what happens when the system fails."
The pull in my chest intensified, painful and insistent. The lycoris was screaming now, its red light bleeding through the seams of my obsidian body.
I understood.
I hadn't been summoned here to fight him.
I had been summoned because he was the only one who could tell me what I had become.
Siegfried leaned forward as much as the chains allowed.
"If you are here," he said, "it means you chose pain over oblivion."
I nodded.
A slow, savage grin spread across his ruined face.
"Then listen carefully," he said.
"Because Tartarus is about to notice you."
The abyss trembled.
And far above us, something ancient began to wake.