The corpse of Rathuur hadn't even cooled.
Its many mouths twitched in death, its innards exposed like a split blister, steaming as entropy clawed it apart. Lyriq stood over the remains, chest heaving, half-naked and dripping with blackened blood. Smoke rose from his shoulders. His claws twitched with newborn memory, and his voidlike eyes shimmered faintly, as if unsealing new dimensions within themselves.
He had won. Barely. But victory wasn't satisfaction.
It was permission.
The shard pulsed inside his chest. Not an artifact. Not a treasure. It was a signature of ascension—the proof that he had emerged from a kill not just alive, but evolved.
Emberling. Order II.
The air changed around him. The ground felt thinner. Reality, just slightly, recoiled. The world recognized him now—not as a man, but as a threat.
And still he was only beginning.
Long before Rathuur fell, long before the sky rotted, there was no record of Lyriq's bloodline. Not in any tomb, archive, or whispered nightmare. The Nyz'khalar were not erased.
They were never known.
Even the most ancient of Chaotic Beings, the Scribes of Decay, the Matrons of Bone, the Womb-Sworn Depths, had no runes for them. The Nyz'khalar were not just outside time.
They were outside of memory.
But evolution is the enemy of secrecy.
And Lyriq had begun to stir.
He limped through the fractured ruins. Shattered temples leaned like drunk titans over graves cracked by reality's slow collapse. The sky above wasn't blue or grey. It was blistered. Wounds in space bled lightless ichor. Somewhere distant, a star wailed.
He felt nothing. Not awe. Not fear.
Only hunger. Not for food.
For meaning.
He didn't know why his hands itched after killing. Why each victory felt incomplete. But some unspoken piece within him whispered:
There will be more.
There had to be.
And there was.
They watched him. Not gods. Not watchers.
Things.
Somewhere, in the walls between known existence and the next layer beneath it, beings without names leaned closer to the folds of space. They couldn't see him—not yet. But they felt the drag.
When a Nyz'khalar awakens, the multiverse bruises.
The Dominion Aeterna did not shatter. It had never been pure.
The Cosmo Alliance did not seek him. They didn't know he existed.
But the echoes of higher realms—entities many Orders above Supreme—flinched. Just once.
A murmur of "what was that?" slipped through twelve silent sanctums.
Back on the ashen ground, Lyriq knelt.
Not in reverence.
In preparation.
Because something else approached.
Not a Second Order.
A Third.
And Lyriq was not yet ready.
His thoughts were simple.
Not dull, pure.
His mind had not been sharpened for philosophy or conquest. It had been shaped by survival, forged in blood, edged by hunger. But now the hunger had language. Now the void inside him whispered not just more, but next.
The shard inside his chest pulsed again. Harder this time. Like a heartbeat. Like a drum.
It was guiding him.
Or calling to something.
He looked at his hand.
Still cracked from his recent change. Claws formed but not yet refined. Muscles twitching with unresolved rage. Blood from Rathuur still steamed across his fingers.
His hair shifted again. The reddish-purple ends flared slightly. Each pulse from his chest spoke of new doors opening.
He wasn't done changing.
In the distance, a screech.
Not pain.
Invitation.
The next challenger was already digging through the earth, gnawing its way through rubble and bone.
Lyriq stood, waiting.
Far beneath the ashen crust of the ruined land, something ancient stirred.
Kyrrhalith.
Third Order. Chaotic Titan.
It was not summoned. It was stirred. By Lyriq's ascension. By the shard's pulse.
It had once swallowed cities whole—not physically, but metaphysically, erasing their concepts from the continuum. Whole civilizations whose names could no longer be remembered, whose languages could no longer be replicated. It fed not on bodies, but on relevance.
And it had sensed a rising relevance in Lyriq.
Something it hadn't felt in aeons.
A threat to its obscurity.
Its body slithered up from the deep mantle. Skin of writhing glyphs, constantly erasing and rewriting themselves. Limbs like origami made from thought. Where its head should have been, a wheel of screaming sigils spun. Sound turned to shape, then back again.
It crawled into the world like a memory you were never meant to recover.
And Lyriq felt it.
Not with eyes.
With purpose.
He didn't run.
There was nowhere left to.
Instead, he pulled from Rathuur's corpse a length of bone, dense and jagged, humming faintly. It would serve for now.
He gritted his teeth. The blood on his skin boiled. His eyes flared again.
The hunger was changing shape.
No longer just for power.
For war.
Kyrrhalith emerged.
It did not roar. It unravelled.
The earth around it forgot its name. Gravity warped. Time hiccupped.
Lyriq stood his ground.
The thing screeched in a language that wasn't heard but infected. Lyriq staggered, his knees buckling as forgotten moments flooded his mind—lives that weren't his. Deaths that hadn't happened yet.
He screamed.
Then he laughed.
And lunged.
The clash was not a fight. It was a contradiction.
Claw against concept. Flesh against idea. Hunger against obscurity.
Every blow Lyriq landed burned. Every blow Kyrrhalith struck unmade. For every piece of flesh Lyriq lost, a new glyph burned into his skin. New memories emerged, visions of a battlefield larger than stars, of screaming gods devoured by shadow-things wearing his face.
He saw himself on a throne made of absence.
He saw a universe kneeling to avoid being seen.
And still he fought.
Still, he rose.
He drove the bone-spear into Kyrrhalith's core—where concept thickened. The thing spasmed. The sigil-wheel shattered into spiralling phonemes that cried like orphans. It fell—not with a scream, but with a question.
"What are you?"
Lyriq answered by tearing out its memory gland.
The world rippled.
And another shard took root in his chest.
Order III attained.
His skin cracked anew. Horns itched their way through his skull. His spine lengthened. A third eye opened—and screamed silently.
He collapsed.
And in the quiet, the hunger purred.
Not done yet.
Not nearly done.
ELSEWHERE
Across dying galaxies, in thrones made of solar marrow, gods paused.
They had forgotten the Nyz'khalar.
Now, they remembered.
But memory alone would not be enough.
Lyriq was only Order III.
And he was climbing.