Vorun—the Monarch of Darkness—lay in the center of a gravity-suspended bed, breath steady, body relaxed. His wife was curled beside him, her presence warm against the cool air of the room. The darkness around them was total, absolute—curtains drawn, the world outside sealed away.
For once, there was no tension in his jaw, no weight in his chest.
Just silence.
And sleep.
Until now.
Something snapped.
A tremor, sharp and sudden, like his soul was yanked from the flow of time.
Vorun gasped and sat up—but his bed was gone. His room was gone.
He was standing barefoot in a void.
Not just blackness.
Not absence of light.
Pure, malignant darkness—the kind that devoured reality. It was suffocating, endless, alive. No stars. No ground. No direction. Every inch radiated a pressure like ancient chains constricting the very concept of being.
A cold breath slid down the back of his neck.
Then… he felt it.
Pressure.
Not just weight—but presence. Vast, immeasurable, suffocating. Like standing before a god. Ancient, unknowable, and utterly beyond comprehension.
His breath caught. Every instinct screamed.
His heartbeat kicked like a trapped animal. Slowly, painfully, Vorun turned his head.
And he saw them.
Floating in the suffocating void—two crimson eyes. Not glowing. Not burning. Just there, bleeding menace without motion. They stared without blinking, without expression, with a stillness that made the stars outside time feel infantile.
"Wh…what… is this?" Vorun whispered.
He raised his hand—trying to summon his darkness element.
Nothing.
No dark aurora wrapped his fingers.
Just skin. Trembling. Mortal.
A sick feeling rose in his chest.
"I… I feel—ordinary?"
Then, the voice came.
No echo. Just vibration through bone.
"I am the first. The whisper before creation. The shadow beneath all light."
A pause—then a deeper, more thunderous echo:"I am Knull."
The darkness pulsed.
"God of the Abyss."
Another beat.
"And you... are in my presence."
Vorun's breath caught. His lips parted, but sound refused to come.
Knull's presence pressed closer. The eyes didn't move, but the darkness shifted with each syllable.
"You wear shadows like toys. You speak of control, but know nothing of submission. The veil you command is the hem of my will."
Vorun's knees buckled. He barely stayed standing.
He finally choked out, "What… do you want from me?"
The air twisted.
"Life on your planet is rich. Wild. Arrogant. Its force, its dreams—I will shape it into something perfect. But this shell… this prison I inhabit... is weak. I need a vessel."
Vorun gritted his teeth, eyes wide. "Why me? I'm no gate."
Knull's laugh was like distant thunder in a graveyard—dry, low, infinite.
"Because you hunger. You yearn to be more. Power… is what you seek, is it not?"
Vorun froze.
Those words crawled into his spine like a whisper from the grave.
And then—memories.
A flash of a clenched fist. His father's voice, sharp and spitting, calling him weak. The cold nights in the cellar where he wasn't even worth a candle. Faces that looked past him. Nobles who sneered. The empty silence that followed him even among crowds.
Loneliness.
Humiliation.
Insignificance.
His fingers trembled.
But now…
Now he stood in the presence of something eternal. And it was offering him a piece of itself.
A fragment of power that could silence every voice that ever doubted him.
A fraction of a God.
Vorun stared at the eyes, heart hammering, body paralyzed.
His thoughts turned chaotic, a thousand doubts splitting his reason apart.
A deal with the abyss. The devil himself. The death that dreams.
But…
"…What the hell," he whispered to himself.
He raised his chin.
"I accept."
Knull didn't nod. Didn't glow.
He laughed.
A slow, monstrous, rising echo that swelled and crushed the void around Vorun.
Then—silence.
---
The night was quiet, wrapped in the cool hush of wind-brushed trees and the silver glow of distant moons. Inside the grand spire of his estate, Vorun lay in bed, his wife nestled peacefully at his side. Curtains swayed gently, undisturbed. Shadows curled in their usual corners.
Then—
The sky screamed.
A soundless roar—like pressure itself ripping in half—echoed across the continent.
A beam tore through the heavens.
Not light.
Not fire.
Blackness.
But not a black the eye could comprehend. It was deeper—a black that devoured stars, drowned sound, obliterated meaning. It slammed into the spire directly above Vorun's chambers with titanic force. A thunderclap shattered the clouds. Cracks spiderwebbed across the sky. Storms formed from nothing—lightning twisting in reverse, thunder moaning in unnatural echoes.
The impact cratered the estate's central tower. Entire wings trembled. Trees miles away snapped at the trunk. The continent groaned.
And from within that chasm of godlike pressure—
Vorun rose.
Lifted into the air, no longer bound to the laws of what he once was.
His body shifted—taller, towering near seven feet, shoulders broader, frame sheathed in swirling layers of sentient black cloth that looked stitched from shadow itself. His hair, once neat and dark, now flowed long and gloss-black with streaks of deep crimson running like veins of war through obsidian silk. His skin glowed faintly—not with light, but with the suggestion of an eternal eclipse.
And his eyes—
No longer purple.
They were pitch. Black irises ringed by molten red, and in their depths, stars died quietly.
Below, the estate was chaos.
Archeon soldiers—the most elite of the Monarch Guard—stood frozen in defensive formations, their eyes locked skyward, hands gripping weapons that suddenly felt insignificant.
Vorun's wife stood among them, trembling, eyes wide with terror. Her voice cracked as she screamed his name—
"Vorun!!"
But the storm above did not answer.
Not yet.
Because Vorun… did not care.
Not in that moment.
High above the ruin of his own estate,
floating in the air like a blade held by divinity itself, he was basking.
His head tilted back. Arms spread.
Breathing slow.
And around him, the sky twisted.
The Abyss pulsed through his body like a second heartbeat. Even if it was only a fraction—even if this was merely the edge of what lay beneath that endless dark—it was more than power.
It was truth. And it was his.
The wind dared not touch him. The thunder silenced itself.
As Vorun slowly descended, he passed through clouds that parted for him, like the world feared to brush against his aura. Each step he took downward reshaped the air—pressure folding reality like wet parchment.
When his feet finally touched the shattered stone of the courtyard—
Everything stilled.
No one dared move.
Because the man who stood before them was no longer a man.
Vorun, the Monarch of Darkness, now radiated an aura that didn't pulse—it consumed. It blanketed the estate in a silence so thick it choked the lungs, silencing breath, thought, and defiance. The torches lining the spire walls guttered out as if snuffed by invisible hands.
The aura radiating from Vorun wasn't just overwhelming—
It was crushing.
The pressure that bled from his transformed body felt as though the world itself had grown heavier, like unseen hands were pushing down on every soul present. It was cosmic in weight—like standing before a singularity wrapped in flesh, something not meant to exist within the realm of mortals.
The Archeon soldiers, hardened by war, trained to endure psionic storms and void-born terrors, nearly collapsed on the spot. Their weapons clattered from hands gone numb. Breath stolen. Will shattered.
Some dropped to their knees entirely, sweat streaking down their temples, as if their very cores were being pressed upon by something older than time.
And Vorun's wife—
Even she staggered under the pressure, her legs trembling violently as if every muscle had turned to glass about to shatter.
But she didn't fall.
She clenched her fists. Dug her heels into the broken stone. Her breath came ragged, her chest tight—but she held her ground, eyes locked on the man descending from the heavens.
Even as tears welled, even as terror clawed at her mind…
She stood.
Because whatever this power was—
This wasn't her husband.
This was a God in mortal form.
Vorun finally looked at her—his new eyes, those abyssal irises ringed in glowing crimson, locking with hers.
He placed a hand gently on her shoulder. A whisper of comfort… beneath an ocean of weight.
His voice, when it came, was calm. Measured.
"I'm alright."
He looked to the storm above, still crackling with strange, inverted lightning.
"…Just had a breakthrough."
She couldn't speak. Neither could the guards.
The courtyard was silent, scorched and still.
Vorun stood beside his wife, calm amidst the ruin, the power of the Abyss still humming in the air around him.
Then came footsteps.
Out from the haze stepped Kaleus, his father—followed by Vorun's five siblings, each one stopping dead at the sight before them.
Kaleus stared, eyes wide. "Vorun…"
No response.
Vorun took a step forward.
Kaleus stiffened.
And then he saw them—those eyes.
But they weren't Vorun's anymore.
It was the Abyss staring back.