Fire swallowed the world whole.
Lion fell through blistering heat, his drowning gaze reflecting an ocean set ablaze. The Blackfin twisted in the inferno, its outline warping like a dying thing. At the prow stood Selene, arms outstretched in cruciform sacrifice. Her skin fissured with golden light—not ordinary flame, but phoenix-fire ripped from her very core.
She was burning herself alive.
The icy shock of the sea stole Lion's breath as he plunged beneath the waves. Saltwater choked his lungs, his vision splitting into drowning blue and hellish red. Above, the bone-drake's tail rose for a killing strike—only for Selene's fire-chains to snare it mid-swing. Flames raced across the skeleton, turning the Tideseeker into a writhing pyre.
A deeper tremor shook the depths. Something larger than sharks arrowed upward. Lion thrashed, shadows forming webbed extensions between his fingers—
Then the current seized his ankles, yanking him into the abyss.
"Awaken, Vessel."
The voice cracked inside his skull. Memories-not-his-own flickered at the edges of vision: a sunken obsidian temple, a coffin bound in chains, the face inside wearing his features...
As oxygen fled his lungs, a scaled arm locked around his ribs. Calvin! The knight's lone eye glinted in the gloom, his greatsword severing the dark currents with one swing. They surged upward—
—and breached into Armageddon.
The sea had become a cauldron of fire. The Blackfin's wreckage spat embers into the smoke-choked sky. No sign of the crew. At the storm's heart hovered Selene, her hair now liquid gold, the split-sun brand eating into her collarbone like acid.
"She's overdrawing!" Calvin roared, shoving Lion onto floating wreckage. "That lunatic's trading years for seconds!"
Clutching scorched bone, Lion noticed the blacklight pulsing under his skin—the shadow-marks drinking the surrounding fire. A mad idea took root.
He leaped back into the inferno.
Agony. Ten thousand white-hot nails driving into flesh. Then—
The shadows detonated.
A whirlwind of darkness erupted from his pores, forming a protective cocoon. Selene's flames tore free of her control, sucked into the growing maelstrom. Gold and black spiraled skyward, a blazing column visible for leagues.
"Lion!" Selene's voice pierced the roar, frayed but lucid. "Stop... you'll be consumed—"
He couldn't. The darkness moved through him now, something ancient stirring in the marrow of his bones.
"At last..."
The stranger's voice in his mind synced with a silver flash on the horizon—dragonkin patrols. Their leader's argent wings blotted out stars, his lance aimed at the storm's heart.
Calvin's curses, Selene's screams, the dragons' bellows—all dissolved into static. Lion felt his consciousness submerged, another presence rising to the surface. When it fully claimed his hands, it performed an act that froze the blood of every witness:
It clawed open his own chest.
No blood spilled—only swirling shadow. And within that abyss, a heart darker than midnight pulsed, bound by seven golden chains.
The silver dragon-knight reared back in horror. "The Shadowheart! Fall b—"
The entity wearing Lion's skin snapped its fingers.
The first chain shattered.