THE FIRST PANTHEON

Gravity claimed me.

My vision went pitch-black the instant I fell through the void, the rushing wind instantly swallowing the distant, horrific sight of the courtyard. The space around me began to constrict, tightening like an invisible fist squeezing the last remnants of air from my ruined chest as I plunged into the unknown.

The transition was violent, yet entirely silent. The agonizing heat of my wound, the suffocating scent of lilies, the vivid image of the slaughtered children—all of it compressed into a single, agonizing point of memory before my consciousness finally faded into nothingness.

I had no concept of time anymore; there was only the before and the after.

Eventually, the heavy weight on my eyelids lifted. My vision swam, forcing me to blink against a harsh, unfamiliar glare as I tried to make sense of the realm stretching out before me.

The glare didn't come from a sun, but from the sickly, luminescent glow of a celestial horror.

This place was a cosmic slaughterhouse—a perversion of reality where astronomy and anatomy had fused into something deeply malevolent. The sky above was a vast, undulating expanse of bruised purple and raw-meat pink, stretched tight across the cosmos like skin over a skeletal universe. Swirling nebulae were not made of stardust; they were colossal, churning clouds of vaporized blood and amniotic fluid, illuminated from within by the erratic pulses of stars that looked terrifyingly like weeping, unblinking eyes.

The air was thick, heavy, and hot, smelling of copper, stagnant bile, and the sickeningly sweet scent of rotting lilies—a permanent, mocking reminder of the monster who had dropped me here. Every breath tasted like ash, coating the back of my throat with a greasy film.

Beneath my palms, the ground was alive. I wasn't resting on stone or dirt, but on an endless, calcified plain of interlocking bones and hardened, blackening marrow. Veins the size of highway tunnels pulsed violently beneath the skeletal crust, throbbing with a rhythmic, sickening heartbeat that vibrated straight through my frame. In the distance, mountain ranges of jagged, exposed spinal columns tore through the horizon, their vertebrae scraping against the bleeding sky.

There was no wind, yet the space was far from silent. A low, agonizing hum resonated through the atmosphere—the collective, echoing groan of a trillion forgotten souls, or perhaps the agonizing respiratory cycle of the world itself. Rivers of black, pressurized bile carved deep trenches through the bone-scape, bubbling and hissing as they dragged fragments of unidentifiable, twitching matter into cosmic abysses.

It was a place designed not just to discard a toy, but to systematically break the sanity of anything mortal.

Reality struck, and a sudden, violent spasm wracked my core.

I choked, a wet, guttural heave tearing from my throat as I threw my hand over my mouth. Thick, hot blood forced its way past my fingers, spilling over my knuckles and dripping onto the calcified floor. I gagged, drawing in a ragged, burning breath that tasted entirely of copper.

As I wiped the back of my hand against my lips, my gaze fell to my arms.

Branded deep into the skin of my wrists were the raw, blackened marks where the Goddess’s chains had been. The iron was gone, but the flesh beneath was charred and split open, shaped into perfect, weeping rings that throbbed in sync with the sickening heartbeat of the world. The phantom cold of her shackles lingered in my bones—a permanent receipt of her cruelty.

Through the haze of pain and blood, I forced my head to turn, my eyes straining against the erratic, weeping light of the stars.

Off in the distance, cutting through the shadows of the skeletal landscape, was a figure. I couldn't make out her face through the shifting violet mists, but her outline sent a sudden, electric jolt straight through my chest. It was a familiar posture, a familiar presence—standing defiantly against the horror of this world in a flowing, black gothic dress, her silver hair catching the sickly glow of the nebulae above.

“Kriemhild!”

I tried to yell with all my might, but the name tore out of my throat as a ragged, blood-soaked gasp.

Ignoring the phantom agony in my ribs and the raw burns on my wrists, I forced my body to move. I dragged myself forward, my fingers clawing desperately into the calcified bone floor, pulling myself yard by agonizing yard toward her.

With every inch I gained, the silver-haired figure seemed to drift farther away, slipping through the mists like a mirage.

“Wait...” I choked out, my body screaming in pain with each desperate drag. “Kriemhild, wait!”

I reached out one last time, but the solid bone beneath me suddenly gave way. The crust crumbled into dust, and before I could react, gravity dragged me downward.

A deafening CRASH echoed as I plunged straight into an underground pond.

The impact knocked the remaining breath from my lungs. The water was black as ink and freezing cold, instantly numbing the burns on my wrists and the ache in my chest. Bubbles erupted around me as I sank deeper into the dark pool, the heavy silence swallowing the chaotic noise of the world above.

“ARHHHHHHHHGGG!”

The scream ripped out of me—a raw, primal roar of pure frustration that echoed violently off the damp cavern walls as my head broke the surface. I thrashing my arms against the water, struggling just to keep my chin up.

Every part of me was screaming to let go. My body was a map of agonizing pain, and a deep, hollow hunger gnawed at my stomach like a parasite. Dark spots danced across my vision as the freezing water sapped the last remnants of my warmth.

It had been a mirage. My mind was fracturing, unable to separate memory from illusion in this twisted nightmare. I stared up at the fractured ceiling, my limbs growing heavy, completely numb. The pull of the dark water felt less like a threat and more like an escape.

Slowly, my arms stopped kicking, and I began to sink.

As the freezing water closed over my face and the dead silence of the deep took hold, I let my eyes drift shut.

Then, the water pressure changed.

A colossal displacement of water surged from the depths below, rolling beneath me like a tidal wave. My eyes snapped open.

Deep within the ink-black abyss of the pond, a massive, bioluminescent eye ignited. It was larger than the entire orphanage courtyard, glowing with a brilliant, ancient azure light that pierced straight through the darkness. A silhouette of impossible scale shifted beneath me—endless rows of iridescent scales, massive fins like underwater mountain ranges, and a shape so gargantuan it defied the laws of space.

It didn't attack. It simply drifted beneath my sinking form, its presence radiating a heavy, suffocating pressure that made my soul tremble.

My lungs burned as the last of my air slipped away. I was on the absolute verge of blacking out—and that’s when reality fractured.

FZZZZT.

In a single, violent instant, the entire underground pond evaporated into nothingness. The suffocating weight of the water vanished, but instead of plunging onto stone, I found myself suspended, weightless in thin air.

My eyes went wide. The shattered ceiling was gone, replaced by a boundless, infinite dimension of swirling dark energies. I was completely weightless, floating helpless in the center of a vast, empty void.