The end did not arrive in fire or salvation. No golden trumpets pierced the clouds. No prophecy fulfilled. No gods returned.
It came as silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the type that follows prayer or loss. This was silence like infection—dense, consuming, unnatural. The type that folds cities into themselves. The type that stops a heartbeat not from fear, but from disbelief.
People had always assumed the apocalypse would be loud. Explosions, war. Perhaps angels descending with blazing swords. Maybe demons screaming through Hell-gates. Instead,
The world choked on its own breath.
And the sky rotted.
It began subtly. At dawn, the sun flickered. Not blinked, flickered, like a faulty bulb. Birds crashed into walls. Oceans grew still. Then, without wind or quake, the sky cracked. Thin, white lines, like fractures in porcelain, opened across the heavens.
And through those cracks came rot.
Clouds decayed mid-air, their moisture turning to ash. Air tasted like rust. Buildings bled. Rivers flowed not with water, but with thick, black ichor. Stone wept memory. Thoughts fractured. Time buckled like bruised metal. Language collapsed into shrieking tones.
Something beyond comprehension had won. Not in battle, but in essence.
The gods, if they ever were, are gone. Not slain. Not dethroned.
Erased.
And in the void they left behind, something slithered upward.
Not born. Not created.
Lucifer.
He was no fallen angel. No tragic rebel.
Lucifer was entropy made manifest. A birth defect in the fabric of existence. His essence coalesced from the unfiltered screams of dying stars, his body an amalgam of concept and collapse. He was not cast from Heaven. He was the corpse of it.
And Earth, once a cradle of divine curiosity, became his kiln.
He devoured the remnants of both Heaven and Hell. Gutted their libraries. Siphoned their relics. Splayed out their cosmology like dissection meat. He forged a throne from the nerves of angels and nailed it to Earth's crust. Planets spiralled into madness as his influence bled outward. What was left of celestial memory fractured into irrelevance.
His voice—no longer bound by vibration—rewrote laws.
Physics bowed. Souls ruptured.
Lucifer did not ascend to godhood. He mimicked it.
And in doing so, the Milky Way began to unravel.
Each breath he took was a hymn of inversion. Sanctuaries melted. Faith unravelled into mathless formulae. Even death recoiled from him.
As he consumed, he evolved.
First Order. Low-Level Lifeform.
But Lucifer would not remain there. His corruption echoed across dimensions, awakening things that should never have stirred.
The tremor reached all corners of time and form. In ancient bloodlines, forgotten temples, buried genes
Something began to rise.
Something old.
Far from thrones and cathedrals, beneath broken moons and nameless suns, a man wandered the corpse of a city.
Not a man. Not yet a monster.
"Lyriq".
He was tall—six foot one. His muscles cut by use, not pride. His skin bronzed by smoke, not sunlight. His black hair spiked naturally, uneven, like flames trying to climb. His black eyes held nothing. Not anger. Not hope. Just a haunted stillness. His clothes were remnants of another age—leather, ash-stained cloth, scavenged metal.
He moved through ruins not with purpose, but instinct.
His boots crunched bone dust. His fingers grazed walls etched in symbols no tongue remembered. He passed temples grown out of rust and marrow, monuments scribbled with forgotten alphabets, statues of saints devoured by moss and claw marks.
All around him, the wind screamed in frequencies human ears once couldn't hear. Now they could. No one thanked evolution for that.
Lyriq did not know his name until something whispered it to him in a dream. He did not recall birth, family, or faith. Only the burning in his chest. A heat that never cooled. A hunger that could not be named.
Some nights, he woke up with scars that hadn't been there. Once, he awoke with teeth in his palm. Not his. Not anyone's.
Still, he walked.
He reached what had once been a central cathedral, now a derelict of bone and rust. And there, beneath the melted cross and a sky stitched with thunder, he stopped.
Something was coming.
It dropped like a shadow made flesh.
Rathuur.
Once a man. Now,
Second Order Chaotic Being.
Its body was a twisted mass of insectile sinew, humanoid malice, and necrotic evolution. Six limbs, arched like the legs of a mantis. Bone hooks. Sagging muscle pulled taut by glistening cords. Dozens of mouths across its belly and throat, tongues twitching like drowned worms.
Eyes—too many—glimmered in wet sockets. Its spine extended beyond its skull, forming a horned crown of splintered vertebrae.
It saw Lyriq.
And screamed.
Lyriq staggered back, his breath stolen. Not by fear. By recognition.
His body dropped. Knees hit rubble.
Then agony.
His chest split—not with blood, but with revelation.
Glyphs erupted across his flesh like blooming tumours. His hair surged upward, then fell forward, tips glowing reddish-purple. His black eyes bled shadow. His jaw clenched as bone cracked, shifted, remade. His spine lengthened. His nails blackened into claws.
This was not evolution. It was reclamation.
Nyz'khalar.
Not species. Not a mutation.
A race so feared it was locked outside of time itself.
And now, he was waking.
Rathuur lunged.
Too fast.
Lyriq's arms were still reshaping when the first claw struck. It tore through his side, flesh peeling like fruit. Blood sprayed black and steaming.
Lyriq roared.
Not in pain.
In defiance.
He gripped Rathuur's limb, crushed two joints, and twisted the arm free. Bone snapped. A mouth bit his shoulder. He bit back, ripping tendon and spraying gore across his face.
They tumbled into ruins. Rubble shattered. Steel warped.
Lyriq rolled beneath the beast and drove a half-formed claw into its spine. Rathuur shrieked, vomiting maggots from its chest mouths.
It retaliated with a sweeping hook that tore open Lyriq's thigh. He fell. The wound bubbled. Muscles twitched.
Rathuur loomed, limbs clicking.
Lyriq let go.
He screamed into the sky. A wave of red-black light rippled out from his chest. Not an aura. A birthright.
He rose. Not fully healed.
But no longer weak.
He charged.
Claws met chitin. Fangs met sinew.
He gouged out eyes, crushed mouths, ripped tongues.
They collided like meteors—ruins collapsing beneath them. Each blow tore flesh. Each counter left wounds. Blood painted the earth in ritual.
Rathuur shrieked.
Lyriq drove his claw through its skull.
The beast convulsed. Twitched.
Then fell.
Silence returned.
Not peace. Never peace.
Lyriq, blood-drenched and limping, stood over the corpse.
He reached into its core—through wet organs and bile—and pulled free a pulsing shard.
It glowed in his palm.
His veins lit in response.
First Order Chaotic Being = Second.
His breath slowed. He looked skyward.
He was still starving.
"More."