darkness: road to divine

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The end did not come with sirens or warning bells. It came with cracks in the sky — shimmering fractures where reality bled, tearing open the void beyond. From those rifts came gods, ancient and forgotten, beings of impossible scale and hunger. They descended not to rule, but to war. Earth, untended and unclaimed, was left without a god of its own; a prize for the taking.

The first days were chaos. Great titans of light and shadow clashed above cities, hurling forces beyond comprehension. The radiant colossus Valnith burned continents with beams of searing light; the shadowed serpent Yssarun wrapped entire cities in coiling darkness and crushed them to dust. Oceans boiled. Mountains crumbled. Whole continents shifted as their battles carved canyons in the land. The air burned with magic older than memory. Mankind could only watch, powerless, as the heavens became a battlefield.

Then came the beasts — creations of the gods, unleashed like hunting dogs onto the world below. Monstrosities stitched from chaos and purpose, they tore through cities with a feral joy. No wall held them. No weapon stopped them.

In days, civilization fell into ruin. Nations became ash. The few who survived hid among wreckage, clinging to scraps of old order, waiting for mercy that would never come.

And amidst it all, the gods fought on, tearing each other apart.

Solace had seen it from the beginning. At sixteen, he had watched the sky fracture open above his village of Mirrowen, seen the first god-beast — Kal'Roth, the Bone Serpent — descend in a spiral of flame. By eighteen, he was alone. His black hair was matted with dust and ash, clinging to a slender, sharp-boned face. Dark eyes that had once been full of wonder now held only caution and calculation. His frame was lean, built not from strength but necessity, forged in hunger and flight. His clothes, stitched together from the dead, hung in loose folds over wiry muscle.

Now, he crept through the bones of a world undone.

The acrid stench of burnt earth and decaying flesh suffocated the air. The ground was slick with soot and fine ash, swirling in pale clouds around his ankles with every step. Ruined buildings leaned drunkenly, shattered stone and metal groaning under their own weight, threatening collapse with the slightest breath.

He paused beneath the skeletal remains of a crumbled skyscraper. High above, twisted steel girders jutted out like broken ribs, blackened and sharp. A slight tremor rippled through the ground, and a chunk of concrete the size of a cartwheel broke free, smashing into the street a few feet from where Solace crouched. Dust plumed upward. He didn't flinch. Close calls were routine now.

"I have to keep moving." He said to himself.

Around him, others skulked through the ruins. Scavengers. Predators draped in ragged cloaks, eyes gleaming with feral cunning. There was no trust left in this world. Only hunger.

He kept to the shadows, steps light on crumbling stone, breath measured and shallow. He had learned the language of silence: every shifting pebble, every whisper of dust on the wind was a word spoken. He listened.

Crunching gravel. Voices low and harsh. He pressed himself into a jagged alcove, heart pounding against brittle ribs.

Three figures emerged.

The leader was huge — a mountain draped in patched leather, a crude scar splitting his face from brow to jaw. His name was Dravik, once a mercenary captain, now little more than a predator. His eyes were pits of greed. Beside him, two smaller men fidgeted nervously: Harn and Vel, brothers from the northern wastes, clutching makeshift weapons — rusted blades and iron rods twisted into crude spears.

"There's power here," Dravik growled, breath steaming in the cold air.

Solace stayed still, muscles tight.

"Feel that?" Vel whispered. "In the air... like static."

Dravik nodded slowly. "The god-beast fell here. Its bones are in the dirt." His eyes glittered. "And its heart... its heart is still beating somewhere beneath this rot."

They passed by, footsteps crunching through ash and broken glass. Only when their voices faded did Solace exhale.

His gaze drifted toward the center of the devastation. That was where it had happened. The final battle. The place where gods had died.

He moved forward, slow and deliberate.

The world here felt... thinner. The air shimmered, vibrating faintly with unseen power. Ash drifted upward instead of falling, defying gravity, caught in silent eddies of magic.

And then he saw it.

A crater, vast and smoldering, marked the heart of the ruin. At its center, half-buried beneath shattered stone and twisted rebar, something pulsed.

Solace's breath caught.

It was small — no larger than his fist — but it radiated a darkness so dense it seemed to drink the light around it. A sphere of black obsidian, veins of crimson light pulsing just beneath its smooth surface.

Runes. Ancient and unknowable, crawling like worms across the artifact's skin.

He approached, drawn by instinct and terror in equal measure.

The ground crackled beneath his boots. The wind moaned softly, whispering in a tongue he could almost understand.

He knelt, trembling, and reached out a hand. 

The artifact wasn't a relic. It was alive. And it knew someone was close.

Being cautious at first and then His fingers brushed the artifact.

The world ruptured.

No explosion. No flash.

Inside him, everything broke.

A tidal wave of raw power crashed into his soul, dragging him under. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Darkness filled his veins, fire seared his bones.

He fell.

Tumbling through endless void, clutching the artifact with white-knuckled desperation.

Solace trembled. He felt small beneath the weight of that knowledge.

The world didn't explode in a fiery cataclysm, though part of Solace had braced for it. No blinding flash. No deafening roar. Just silence. Heavy, suffocating silence that settled over everything like ash after the fire. 

"What is this filling" he thought. Not understanding what is happening.

And yet, something had happened. Something inside him.

He felt __power like he had never felt before— raw, immense, alien — power surged through him, tearing through every fiber of his being . He gasped, falling to his knees, his body no longer his own but a conduit for something vast and unknowable. His vision blurred; the world dissolved into a swirling maelstrom of color and sound and sensation that defied reason

End of part one.