The sky above the dead gods' planet pulsed faintly — not with light, but with pressure. A dense, unseen force crept like a predator in the dark, curling around the broken monuments of deities long lost to time.
VAREON stood where the final blow had landed. A crater of blackened, glass-like stone surrounded him. The air smelled of scorched memory. His long, dark coat whispered against his legs in the settling ash, untouched by heat. The charred remnants of Synarchy scouts lay scattered like discarded symbols of order — broken cleanly, burned silently.
He didn't breathe hard. He never did.
Yet something deep within him was trembling.
The presence again. Not the Synarchy. Himself.
"Let me burn them."
The voice echoed through the fractured stillness of his soul. A growl. A furnace sealed behind a cold vault.
ASH'RAK.
Still not fully awake — but clawing forward.
VAREON glanced upward. A transport craft — sleek, translucent, bearing the clockwork insignia of the Synarchy of Aeons — broke through the stormless stratosphere. It hovered. Watching.
> "Second wave inbound," he muttered coldly.
He didn't prepare. He didn't need to. His posture remained casual, but the stone beneath his feet cracked from the tension in the ground. His right hand, previously inert, flickered briefly with a corona of red-orange light — faint, like a dying flame resisting wind.
---
Above the Planet
Inside the command chamber of the Synarchy vessel Orlogis Edge, Commander Zerithax observed the surface from a light-threaded command lens.
Zerithax had no mouth. No need for one. He communicated through pulses in the central light-core, his thoughts shaped like time-signatures and probability fractures. His translucent body shimmered with silvery temporal veils. His four fingers elongated into needle-like digits — a sign of strategic activation.
"Subject VAREON has adapted to frontline pressure faster than forecasted," a sub-agent buzzed in neutral tone.
Zerithax narrowed his perception.
"The Shard is awakening. Wrath-Class. That dead planet is no longer inert."
He turned his head — unnecessarily, symbolically — and raised one hand toward the interface.
"Deploy 3rd protocol: Chrono-Breakers. No disintegration. Bring the body. Our time engineers must see what awakens inside."
---
Back on the Surface
The ground trembled again. Six impact pods fell like judgment, slamming into the land around VAREON. They hissed open, releasing tall, pale figures in temporal armor — crackling with slowed light and inverted sound. Their movements distorted the air around them. Even reality resisted their presence.
The Chrono-Breakers.
One raised a long silver blade that vibrated backward — its edge traveling before its motion. It pointed at VAREON.
"VAREON. Entity without creation code. You are declared anomaly. Submit or be temporalized."
He did not reply.
He closed his eyes.
And stepped forward.
The first Chrono-Breaker moved, but he was already too late. A red flash — a spiral of heat that ignited stone — erupted beneath VAREON's feet.
"No more containment."
ASH'RAK surged again. Not fully — not yet — but enough.
VAREON's right arm ignited. Not fire. Not plasma. But emotion weaponized. Rage, smoldering, compressing into something surgical.
His fingers closed into a fist.
He punched the air.
The first Chrono-Breaker exploded.
Not torn — not burned — but shattered, his temporal shell collapsing under the weight of sheer directional fury.
The others moved in unison, but VAREON danced through them like gravity was optional. Not graceful. Not elegant.
Brutal. Surgical. Cold.
The flames that trailed his motion burned in silence. Colorless fire — ASH'RAK's signature. He was not using his power.
"I am his fury."
The voice again. Inside.
VAREON spun, raising one hand.
A wall of flame shaped like a throne erupted from the ground behind him, a flash memory of the Midplace manifesting.
He didn't sit in it.
He never did.
He just stood.
And let it burn behind him.
---
Inside the Midplace (Brief Fragment)
A throne of scorched stone. Pillars carved from broken intentions. Seven shadows circled VAREON's slumbering form.
ASH'RAK leaned forward. He had no face — only a mask of jagged magma, cracked and hissing.
"Why do you chain me?"
"They want you dead. I want them ash. Let me out."
VAREON — the inner him — remained silent. Even here, he did not rage. He listened. Measured.
ASH'RAK tilted his head.
"I burn for you. I am you. Let me be seen."
The throne behind VAREON pulsed once. And a faint, terrible heartbeat echoed.
Soon, VAREON whispered back. But not yet.
---
Back on the Battlefield
The last of the Chrono-Breakers fell, cut in half by a lash of condensed fire.
Zerithax watched from orbit, unmoving.
"He adapts. The Shard bleeds through."
He raised a hand.
"Initiate Temporal Seal."
The space around the planet began to warp. Time bent. A shell of frozen chronology was forming.
They wanted to trap VAREON inside a moment.
But the flame inside him — even incomplete — began to bend time back.
He looked skyward, eyes glowing faintly.
"You think time can hold me?"
"Then you've forgotten fire."
---
The temporal shell descended like a divine coffin — layer upon layer of chronolocks, quantum threadlines, and stasis loops. Each second stretched into infinity. Light slowed. Sound drowned in silence. Even gravity wept under the pressure.
But VAREON did not freeze.
Because time, in its arrogant structure, had failed to account for ASH'RAK.
"You cannot bind what was born of wrath," the voice murmured inside him.
The flickering corona of flame around VAREON's right hand began to crystallize. Not into heat — but into memory. Burning, ancient, immortal memory.
A memory of what he had once destroyed.
---
Inside the Synarchy Vessel – Panic and Calculation
Zerithax's sensory core pulsed erratically.
"He is resisting stasis. Resistance at 61%... now 84%. Now..."
"He is rejecting linear flow entirely."
The sub-commanders flinched as the observation screen cracked — from inside.
"Commander... we must retreat."
Zerithax did not answer immediately.
Instead, he stepped forward, pressing his hands — those elongated, time-thread fingers — onto the command prism. A massive glyph erupted, a sigil not used since the Silent Collapse.
Protocol 0001-Alpha: Paradox Blade Authorization.
"If this is fire, we will offer it what it cannot burn."
---
Back on the Planet
The chronolock fractured.
VAREON stepped out of time.
Literally.
His body was no longer moving in standard dimensions. He moved like a thought, like vengeance rewritten mid-sentence.
Above him, space shimmered — then ripped.
The Paradox Blade descended.
A weapon forged in a stillborn universe, its edge made of compressed impossibility. Even looking at it caused the nearby mountain to erode into wind. It wasn't meant to kill.
It was meant to erase the question of existence.
VAREON looked up.
And did not flinch.
Instead, he reached out with his bare hand.
The flame had changed.
No longer just fire. It was grief. It was refusal. It was wrath as a decision — a will that would not be silenced.
The fire curled around the edge of the Paradox Blade like a lover kissing death.
And then it shattered.
Not the blade.
Reality.
Time blinked.
The Synarchy vessel lurched in panic. Systems failed. Coordinates collapsed.
"He didn't just resist time..."
"He wounded it."
---
Inside the Midplace – ASH'RAK Advances
A crack appeared in the throne.
Not VAREON's, but the one circling him — the flame-forged seat that pulsed with ASH'RAK's rage.
The Shard of Wrath rose.
No longer just a voice.
Now a shape — a figure of molten geometry, armor forged from solar screams, eyes like eclipses forced open.
"You needed a reminder," he said, stepping forward.
"I am not a prisoner. I am a purpose."
VAREON stood.
Silent.
The Midplace pulsed. Other thrones — six more — flickered dimly. Watching.
ASH'RAK did not attack. Not yet. But the air between them cracked with unsaid judgment.
"Let me burn them all," ASH'RAK whispered, voice shaking pillars.
"You are not meant to hide. You are war made silent. Let me speak."
"I hear you," VAREON finally answered.
"But my war hasn't started yet."
---
Aftermath: Surface of the Dead Planet
The sky was empty.
The Synarchy had vanished. Not defeated — but recalibrating.
VAREON stood amidst molten stone. He did not glow. He did not tremble. The flame had returned to his hand — dormant, obedient. For now.
His eyes looked to the stars.
"They know now," he murmured.
"That something lives here. Something they fear."
Far above, a dozen factions were awakening.
Signals. Warnings. Exiled protocols. Rumors of the nameless entity that shattered temporal law.
And beneath VAREON's feet…
The planet itself began to change.
Dead gods stirred. Not alive — but not forgotten. The bones of titans began to whisper in ancient tongues.
The First Incursion had not ended.
It had just begun.
---
End of Chapter 3