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.