The air around the rift screamed in silence.
Oscar stood at its edge, the abyssal power coiling around his limbs like serpents of shadow. The Interstice an impossible space between worlds yawned open before him. There was no ground. No sky. Just shifting fragments of forgotten time, flickering lights like dying stars, and the whisper of something ancient stirring in the dark.
Selene stepped beside him, her crimson eyes glowing. "This place… it hates everything."
Darius arrived next, his boots crunching against crystalline shards that hadn't existed a moment ago. "No. It doesn't hate. It remembers. Us. The world. The gods. Everything."
Oscar smiled faintly.
"Then let it remember who we are."
He stepped forward and the world changed.
Inside the Interstice
Time collapsed the moment Oscar crossed the threshold.
One heartbeat, and he stood beneath a sky of shattered halos.
The next, he was falling through oceans of flame, where dying titans whispered regrets in a thousand languages.
Another blink, and he was back on solid ground… or something like it. A platform of bone and light, suspended in infinite void.
Selene and Darius landed beside him with a flicker of spatial displacement, their bodies adapted by the abyss to endure.
Behind them, the gateway shivered barely stable.
"Too long in here and we lose more than sanity," Selene muttered. "We lose selves."
Oscar nodded. "We won't stay long. Just long enough to make our mark."
He reached into his coat and pulled forth the fragment of the divine seal a sliver of celestial law he'd stolen from the ruined cathedral back in the Holy Kingdom.
He pressed it to the platform.
The Interstice screamed.
Not aloud, but through thought and memory. His ears bled. Selene staggered. Darius clenched his fists until his gauntlets cracked.
But then… something happened.
The fragment melted into the ground and the Interstice responded.
A Throne Awakened
Far away, in the divine plane known as the Sanctum of Origins, a throne that had long stood empty began to stir.
The Gods noticed.
"The Interstice stirs," one of them whispered.
"The Forsaken Gate… someone has found it."
Panic rippled through divinity.
Because that gate, once opened, could not be closed.
Back in the Interstice
Oscar stared at the anomaly forming before him. A spiral of burning equations, swirling runes etched from the language of creation. It rose from the platform like a monument a Key.
"The Gate is forming," Selene gasped. "Oscar, if you open this there's no going back."
"I know."
Darius unsheathed his sword. "And what lies beyond?"
Oscar's voice was low.
"A path to the Thrones of the Gods."
And then… the first seal cracked.
Not just in the Interstice but across the world.
A ripple spread through reality.
Priests screamed in temples.
Prophets fell to their knees, eyes rolling white.
The sky bled for seven seconds.
And deep within the Interstice, Oscar whispered the forbidden name again.
The one that should never be spoken.
The one the gods themselves feared.
And the Key responded
Opening the path to divinity's undoing.
The Thrones of the Forsaken
The gateway pulsed like a dying star slow and labored, yet inevitable.
Oscar stood at its heart, the shadows of the Interstice folding around him. The Key had responded to his voice, and now the gate long sealed by divine decree groaned as it began to unlock.
Selene's crimson eyes narrowed. "That name you spoke... It wasn't just a trigger. It was the key, wasn't it?"
Oscar didn't answer immediately. He watched the runes spiraling in the air, ancient words too old for any mortal tongue. His voice came like the echo of forgotten thunder.
"It was a name that predates the gods. The first sin. The first betrayal. The being that even the Light dared not destroy."
Darius tensed. "And now you've summoned it."
"No," Oscar corrected, his voice calm. "I've reminded the world that it still exists."
A wind blew through the Interstice sourceless and full of screams. The platform beneath them cracked and twisted, reshaping into a stairway that reached into the endless dark above.
The Thrones were waiting.
Elsewhere The Seraphim Stir
High above the Holy Kingdom, in the sacred floating cathedral of Sol Ascendant, the Seraphim Knights stood assembled for the first time in a thousand years.
Their leader, Seraphiel, a being of light and burning judgment, watched the sun eclipse unnaturally.
"The seal is weakening," he said, voice like divine bells tolling across eternity.
One of the lesser Seraphim stepped forward. "Should we strike now?"
"No." Seraphiel's wings spread wide seven of them, each a blade of radiant judgment. "We wait for the Gate to open fully. Then… we cleanse the world of the abyss and its puppet."
He raised his flaming spear toward the heavens.
"The heretic who speaks That Name will be undone."
Back in the Interstice — Ascent Begins
The staircase rose before Oscar like an invitation and a challenge. Each step trembled with divine pressure. Only those worthy could ascend and the unworthy would be erased.
He stepped forward.
The first step cracked beneath his boot.
A surge of memory his death, his rebirth, the moment he first touched the abyss all flashed through his mind.
But he held firm.
Selene followed. Darius behind her. Each step they took bled history from their souls, fed into the Interstice like a tax of identity.
But they kept climbing.
At the top, a throne came into view.
But it was not golden.
It was empty.
Cracked.
Chained.
Abandoned.
Yet alive.
It pulsed once.
A voice boomed, deep and old.
"WHO DARES SEEK THE SEAT OF GODS?"
Oscar stood tall.
"I do."
Silence.
Then laughter low, broken, ancient.
"THEN SIT, MORTAL. AND CLAIM WHAT NONE DARED."
Oscar moved to the throne but it wasn't made for flesh. The moment he touched it, the shadows wrapped around him, the abyssal core inside him igniting like a black sun.
The Interstice screamed.
Reality trembled.
And as Oscar sat upon the forsaken throne, a shockwave of abyssal divinity exploded across all realms.
The first of the Thrones had been claimed.
And the gods could no longer pretend he was not real.
The Throne That Dreams
The moment Oscar sat upon the Forsaken Throne, time fractured.
Not broke fractured.
His senses expanded beyond the flesh. He no longer saw through eyes. He perceived through existence itself. Every breath of wind, every heartbeat across the abyssal domain he felt them, as if the world whispered its secrets directly into his mind.
Selene staggered back, shielding her eyes. "He's merging with the Throne!"
Darius instinctively reached for his blade, then paused, trembling. "No… it's not consuming him. He's… becoming it."
The air rippled with echoes of forgotten languages. The stone beneath their feet now bore inscriptions etched in flame and shadow, a dialect of creation and ending.
Oscar's voice, now layered with something more, resonated through the space.
"This Throne remembers…"
Visions flashed in his mind:
A time before the Light.
Before the gods.
Before names.
A being shapeless, vast sat where he now sat. It dreamed the multiverse into being. A creator… betrayed by its own progeny.
Seven gods tore it from its seat.
Seven Lights sealed it away.
Its memory faded.
Its name was erased.
But now, Oscar knew it.
The Name That Could Not Be Spoken he was it now.
And the throne dreamed again.
A World Begins to Shift
In the Holy Kingdom, all the holy statues cracked simultaneously. Priests screamed as divine relics shattered in their hands. Bells rang without touch. The sky bled crimson for exactly seven seconds.
In the Elven Realms, ancient trees groaned in unison, shedding leaves that turned to ash midair. The elder druids fell into deep trances, whispering of the New Dreamer.
In the Black Wastes, the monsters ceased their eternal howling. Even chaos knew to be still.
The world was no longer balanced.
The dreamer had awakened.
In the Void Between Worlds
A being clothed in shifting threads of starlight stirred.
Its face was hidden behind a mirror.
It leaned forward, watching Oscar.
"It has begun," it murmured.
Another voice, hollow and vast, replied, "The Thrones were never meant to be touched again."
"And yet, he sits."
A third cold and mechanical whispered, "Then we return. One by one. As it was foretold."
They turned.
Seven Thrones.
Only one was claimed.
The others would not remain vacant for long.
Back in the Interstice
Oscar stood, now taller not in form, but in presence. When he turned, even Selene averted her eyes, not from fear… but reverence.
"Oscar?" she whispered.
He smiled. "No. Not just Oscar anymore."
He descended the stairs with slow, sovereign steps.
"The world forgot the first truth. That divinity can be reborn through rejection."
He placed his hand on Darius's shoulder. "The Light taught us to kneel. The Abyss teaches us to rise."
And with that, the Throne behind him burned itself into the void.
It would remain part of him now.
For he was the Dreamer once more.
And the dream was far from over.