He shook his head, "Not long now. Maybe another two days? I don't know if we'll be slowly swallowed or sucked in like by a giant vacuum cleaner…" he drifted off.
I hugged myself, too scared to even chuckle at the thought ofdeath by vacuum cleaner.
The summons strucklike a blade of light through my mind—blinding, merciless, impossible to ignore. Pain flared behind my eyes as the command pulsed through my skull; the voices of my brothers crashed through the walls of my mind. I clenched my teeth, fighting the invasion, but there was no resisting the call of the Hall. The harder I pushed them out, the deeper their demand sank until resistance became agony.
Korvath looked up from the war map, his amber eyes narrowing. “Everything all right?”
“No,” I ground out. “The Hall commands my presence.”
His aura flared, deep brown streaked with black frustration. “Now? The battle begins in a heartbeat.”
“I must go,” I said, already feeling the drag of their collective pull. “You’ll take command.”
Korvath inclined his head, though his voice carried thebitterness we both shared. “Do they even know what we do here?”
“They know,” I replied, my jaw tightening. “They just don’t value it.”
His snarl followed me as the world around me dissolved. A single heartbeat later, I stood within the Hall of Seven. Tension seeped from every seam of my armor like molten ichor. Outside, the war pressed in on me from a billion fronts—a symphony of dying stars and shattering continents—yet here I stood, bound by rites older than this fading cosmos. The others could never grasp what they’d summoned me from: they fancied war a game of titans, a mere chess match.
They underestimated it. We were on the brink of a storm that might uproot our entire future, and I’d been forced to leave my armies half-formed, floundering, so my brothers and I could argue while darkness gnawed at our heels. Six pairs of eyes bored into me, black burning orbs—gateways to infernos and frozen voids—each reflecting a different facet of power. They pinned me in place like spikes.
Thyros halted his pacing the moment I entered; his crimson-and-gold aura, the hues of ancient suns, flared as if to ignite the very stone. He fixed me with a look sharp enough to cleave marble.
“You kept us waiting,” he growled, his voice grated like steel on stone. “While the Abyss hungers, you stroll in as if we’re your servants.”
I tried to let the barb slide across my temper,but the unending demands of war stoked my fury as much as Thyros’ pretentiousness. I would not give him the pretense of politeness this time.
“The Abyss?” I echoed, sweeping my gaze around the obsidian table where six demigods hovered like loaded blasters. “The Abyss? Is that why you called me here?” My head swiveled from one to the other. “By the drekken eclipse, you dragged me from a warfront because the Dark Abyss feeds?”
Thyros snorted in dismissal. “Always another battle, brother. To you, they blur like drops of blood in an ocean. What matters is what we decide here.”
A black aura, the shade of dried blood—my only honest color—crackled around me in strobing flashes against Thyros’ fire. “Those drops of blood are the only things holding the Mmuhr’Rhong back from devouring us all.”
A deep voice from the shadows mocked, “Careful, Praetor,” Dravok warned, slipping in my title to sting. “If even the great Zapharos quakes, what faith can your legions hold?”
I met his derisive gaze without a flicker of amusement. He never used my title of Praetor unless to torment me. I stepped deeper into the hall; the air grew heavier, charged by my anger. Thyros and Dravok shifted in unison, warping the room’s balance toward violence. Beneath us, the ancient stones hummed with the promise of catastrophe.
“Enough.” Vaelion’s voice cracked through themounting tension like an alarm bell. His white-gold light steadied the room. “We’ll bring down the Hall before we remember why we’re here.”
From the far side, Nythor laughed—a sound too thin, too eager. “Oh, let him burn. Blood spilled here would make legend.”
“Sit,” Vaelion ordered quietly. His voice held weight enough to still even Nythor. “This isn’t about pride. Rotodex falls today. It’s your turn, Zapharos.”
My temper snapped. “My turn?” The words came out in a snarl. “Do any of you understand what I carry? The Mmuhr’Rhong don’t die; theylinger.They whisper through the blood of every fallen Arkhevari while you debate semantics like priests.”
Selkaris raised his gaze, his expression calm, his voice quiet enough to silence the storm. His face was a palimpsest of eons, every line written and rewritten by memory. “Better your shattered bones than the silence of oblivion,” he said. “If Rotodex falls unkept, its memory vanishes with it. We swore to bear witness.”
I held his gaze. The anger burned, but reason flickered beneath it. He was right. He always was. The seven of us took turns bearing witness to the death of billions of beings on any world that was unlucky enough to enter the Dark Abyss' path. If neither my brothers nor I paid witness, the Mmuhr’Rhong would come and feed on the misery and death of Rotodex, and it would grow their numbers in perpetuity. They already had the advantage of thelarger count. They grew in numbers with every heartbeat, while ours dwindled to nothing.
“I will go,” I said at last, my voice flat as forged iron.
Outside, the war waited. So did the end.
I was doomed to play witness bearer once again to a world condemned to be the Dark Abyss' next victim. Within a heartbeat, Nox Eternum yawned before me, endless and hungering, its horizon a roiling lip of nothingness where even the Arkhevari light bent and vanished. The maw’s pull gnawed at my aura, dragging it into fine, electric threads that snapped and spat along the perimeter. I hung suspended at the edge, where the oldest stars had long been devoured and time itself bled thin as water. For mortals, oblivion would have been instant, their souls torn and atomized before their bodies even perished, scattered like chaff across a windless waste. For me, it was just another day at the rim of annihilation, another round in the ritual deathmatch between brotherhood, hunger, and the will to survive.
Rotodex, the condemned world, drifted closer, unable to resist the event horizon’s inexorable drag. Its surface shone faintly against the void, a pale blue ring around an orange core, still clinging to the memory of sunlight. I glimpsed its mountains and rivers, the tangled web of forest and city lights—every living thing, every hope or horror, pouring headlong toward the dark. Ready to be devoured and claimed by the Mmuhr’Rhong, those ghouls of the deep who waited for the lost and the damned. Icould almost feel their anticipation, just out of sight but nearby, hoping for scrapes.
My brothers viewed this as a sacred duty—an honor. To them, the voices that rose from every soon-to-die world were a hymn, proof that we were needed, that the universe cared enough to assign us a purpose. But I knew better. I heard the voices as they truly were: no chorus, only a cacophony, a tide of panic and grief and all the unfinished business of the dead. They didn’t uplift, they dragged us down, buried us beneath centuries of regret, until even the strongest of us staggered under the weight. I doubted my brothers loved this part, but they wore the mask better than I ever could. I hated it, loathed it, and yet here I was again, condemned by the Council to be the one who took it all in.
