Chapter 57 — Abyss of the Unwritten

The cathedral was gone.

Kael gasped as the chains dragged him downward, his body tearing between fragments of light and shadow. Then—silence.

When he opened his eyes, he stood on a plain of shattered mirrors. Each fragment reflected a different world: some burning, some thriving, some empty. All impossible. All real.

The Sovereign emerged across from him, her veil gone, her form unstable—flickering between divine elegance and monstrous formlessness. Her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere.

“This is the Abyss. The place where stories die. Where gods are stripped to lies. Where forgotten things rot.”

The girl clung to Kael’s back, trembling. Her reflection in the mirror shards did not match her movements—sometimes older, sometimes broken, sometimes gone.

Kael’s breath came ragged. His chains were still wrapped around the Sovereign, but each link corroded, eating through his own arm.

She smiled faintly, not in mockery, but in recognition.
“You should not have been able to reach this place. And yet… here you stand.”

Kael spat blood, his crimson eyes blazing.
“Then I’ll drag you down here with me. If this is where forgotten things rot, then rot beside me.”

The mirrors cracked. From their splinters crawled silhouettes—heroes, kings, even monsters, all eyeless, all erased from history. Forgotten legends, bound to nothing.

The girl screamed. “Kael—! They’re… they’re like you!”

The Sovereign’s laughter shook the fragments into a storm.
“Yes. The Forgotten. But unlike them, you refuse silence. That defiance… is why you terrify even me.”

For the first time, her smile faltered.

Kael clenched his bloodstained fist, chains writhing around him.
“I don’t need eternity. I don’t need their belief. I’ll carve a truth that can’t be erased.”

The Forgotten closed in, silent and endless. The Abyss itself stirred.

And the duel of anomaly and Sovereign began anew—
in the place where gods themselves are nothing.