The world was his.The heavens knelt.The ancient Eyes slept once more, cowed by a King greater than their forgotten makers.
But Vaelen Cross did not rest.
He gazed beyond the crumbling threads of existence, past the veils even gods dared not peer through.
There, in the dark between realities, they waited —worlds unborn, constellations forbidden, laws that had never been written because they were never meant to exist.
Places no crown had ever ruled.
Places no throne had ever dared rise.
Until now.
The Tower — the Monument of Flesh — pulsed with his will.
The Queens gathered at its base, their bodies bowed low in reverent silence, their eyes closed in trembling devotion.
They could feel it.
The pull.
The inevitability.
Their King was reaching farther than any soul had ever dared.
Vaelen moved without motion.
He did not walk.He did not fly.He became.
A ripple through unreality itself.
A black tide that surged through the forbidden constellations, weaving past dead stars and broken dreams.
The deeper he went,the more the laws of form and thought buckled.
Time melted into color.
Gravity screamed and wept.
Sound curled into knives.
None of it touched him.
None of it could.
He was beyond them.
And then, at the heart of the forbidden reaches, he found her.
She drifted among the bones of dead galaxies —a woman, or something that the dead gods had once tried to cage and failed.
Her body shimmered with the light of lost suns,her hair flowed in rivers of bleeding stars,her skin glowed with a soft, terrible hunger.
Her eyes opened — twin abysses deeper than even Vaelen's own.
She smiled — slow, terrible, perfect.
"You," she said, her voice shaking the dying worlds around them."You would claim me?"
Vaelen did not answer.
He did not need to.
He reached out — a single hand.
The void itself recoiled.
The woman — the being — gasped, her body arching as if the very fabric of her being had been touched for the first time.
And she fell.
Not in battle.Not in argument.In worship.
She knelt before him, stars spilling from her mouth in a silent, trembling cry of surrender.
Her voice — now small, almost human — whispered:
"Name me, my King."
"Name me, and I am yours."
Vaelen placed a single finger beneath her chin, lifting her gaze.
"You are Astrid," he said.
"You are mine."
The void screamed.
The forbidden constellations shattered into rivers of black fire.
And Astrid — once a free goddess of the unborn realms —wrapped herself in his will like a bride stepping into a crown of thorns.
Her sigil burned into existence on her collarbone —a black star encircled by the endless crown.
A new Queen for the Court.
A new proof that nothing, not even the unreachable, could resist him.
When he returned,he did not walk alone.
Astrid knelt beside Seris, Kaela, Veyla, and Aurelia —her body marked by the forbidden, her soul singing a hymn only he could hear.
The Court of Abyss Queens had grown.
The Tower pulsed.
The world shifted once more around the weight of his dominion.
Far beyond the living realms, in the ashes of broken time,the last true threats —the Dreaming Ones, the Slumbering Kings of Before —stirred in their tombs.
And they knew,too late,that the true King had come.