Lothien fell in a single night. The screams of the capital city's inhabitants could be heard for kilometers around. That same night, the mad tyrant Igfrid Severe D'Tyr ascended to the throne.
Shrouded in his darkness, he could hear them... and with him, his acolytes. It was the perfect opportunity: to infiltrate a shattered heart, a nation charred by the vengeful desires of its new ruler.
The Twilight Cultists were reborn, bringing with them the promise of resurrecting the dead through the destructive power and corruption of Lothien's land. Here, blessings had vanished by the divine will of the gods themselves as punishment, and the soil was drenched in blood and rot, transformed into barren gray ash.
Igfrid was seduced by them, by the knowledge of gods devoured by the universe's beyond and reborn in corruption... those who slumbered at the world's edges. He stole their secrets, performed blasphemous rituals, and studied ways to bring Canaria back. Nothing else mattered to him.
Arakbamel Amon, the sole foreign and primordial god of the beyond, appeared to him inhabiting a human vessel. With a corrupt and decaying face and body, he offered power and knowledge beyond human comprehension, tempting Igfrid's already wavering and furious heart.
And Igfrid listened… while busying himself with pursuing the elusive Silvine, who darted frantically across the continent, shielding herself with the child who —as he had confirmed through torturing the castle servants —was his and Canaria's son.
Igfrid could hear the whispers of the fallen god so clearly and so loudly that he sometimes mistook them for his own thoughts.
So deep, so insistent, so hopeful.
The tipping point of his resolve came with Silvine's capture.
Her rose-colored eyes blazed with fury and frustration as, within the ruined castle of Arbos Citadel —located in Eregar, the country east of Lothien —he had finally cornered her.
Gone were the days when Igfrid was Lothien's savior prince; blinded by rage and a thirst for vengeance, fueled by the cultists' blasphemies and heresies, his armies —the Revolutionary and the Imperial —rose behind him like lifeless puppets bound to his will.
The magic he acquired had transformed him into the tyrant of the land of the dead, the Necromancer Emperor.
The living succumbed to the terror of the revived soldiers, silent and putrid, like their emperor's heart, as they fled and died to join his ranks, in an empire where all were now equal.
Nobles, demihumans, commoners, children and elders marched united under a single will, their bodies corroded by time, some with barely any flesh clinging to their frozen bones.
The undead army ravaged everything in its path. Anyone who dared stand between them and Silvine was extinguished and absorbed…
Until she was finally overtaken, and Igfrid, after so many years, beheld his son's face.
"The boy bore Canaria's beautiful features."
The boy trembled, clinging to Silvine's skirt.
"Do you think this is over? That everything I fought for will end like this?!" she snarled, refusing to accept defeat. She grabbed the child like a doll; the boy was terrified of Igfrid, but also seemed frightened by Silvine's sudden shift as pressed a dagger to his throat. The kid began to cry.
"Release him, and I may grant you mercy," Igfrid warned. His voice was icy, even as rage consumed him. His appearance had changed so drastically since Canaria's death that he truly resembled the Necromancer Emperor.
"Mercy? Ha… You and I both know that doesn't exist…" Silvine's angelic demeanor had vanished. Her face twisted into a mask of desperation and anguish. Her trembling hands pressed the dagger against the child's neck as he continued to sob.
She now possessed nothing but her wit. She didn't know how Igfrid had nullified magic within the citadel, but that wouldn't stop her. Surely, he wanted to keep his son alive.
Yes, this was her chance.
Escaping with the child—after all, the brat wouldn't miss a finger or two if needed… she just had to prove she was serious…
The sound of a sword slicing through flesh drowned out the child's cries.
Igfrid had severed Silvine's arm, heedless of harming his own son.
The force of the blow hurled her backward, and the boy tumbled across the floor like a discarded object.
It took her a moment to comprehend. Her mind, clouded by arrogance and her divine delusion, finally registered the truth:
She had lost her right arm, and the child bore a shallow wound on his shoulder.
His pitiful sobs forced her to face reality as the undead, who had surrounded her moments earlier, seized the terrified, injured boy and carried him away.
The metallic bite of blade meeting flesh echoed again.
Igfrid's fury claimed her left arm. She hadn't even noticed him approach.
Was this how her life would end? It couldn't be!
"I am the gods' chosen!" she muttered in shock, as if trying to awaken herself. Then, rage surged. "This world was made for my
happiness! You cannot do this to me!"
Igfrid stared down at her with contempt, watching the crimson blood of the woman at his feet snake across the rosy marble floor like tiny rivers.
"I hurt our son, Canaria."
That was all he could think.
He approached the furious, maimed Silvine calmly. The rage that once consumed him had vanished abruptly, as if his capacity to feel had died.
Step by step, he closed the distance as Silvine tried to flee, pushing her armless body with her legs, unable to rise.
She didn't get far. Igfrid finally gripped her long hair with his right hand, yanking her upright with brutal force.
Silvine screamed in pain, but far from bringing Igfrid joy, he simply ignored her.
He ignored her shrieks and threats as he dragged her toward the citadel's dungeons, leaving a bloodied trail behind.
"I'll grant you the same hospitality you showed Canaria. Don't die." Igfrid uttered this as he flung her into a reeking cell, where one of the cultists who had joined him began tending to her wounds.
After capturing Silvine, Igfrid realized the child not only feared him—he hated him. The boy didn't speak, didn't look at him, as if he were a corpse among the living.
The cultists were the only humans left at the tyrant's side, and they were also the ones tending to his son—the boy who bore Canaria's face. Igfrid didn't even know his name.
"He's as small and fragile as Canaria…"
If he could revive his wife, could the three of them ever be happy? Silvine had caused so much ruin that it seemed nearly impossible...
The child didn't recognize Canaria or him as family. That bitch had warped his mind, making him believe she was his true mother.
Thus, Arakbamel Amon's proposition became his only path.
Igfrid no longer cared if Amon sought to destroy the world… He truly didn't care if everyone died, though a sliver of his soul still urged him to annihilate the god. Yet Amon, the deity from beyond the cosmos, had made an irresistible offer:
"Give me your body, and I will grant you power over time."
The foreign god's human vessel was frail and unstable, incapable of containing the overflowing mana he offered. Its gaunt frame and sunken eyes, ringed by perpetual shadows, barely hinted at the truth of the human who had served as his avatar since childhood. This vessel lacked will, strength, and—despite latent magical potential—a fractured mind made it volatile. A child corrupted so thoroughly was far from ideal, yet serviceable.
A descendant blessed by the usurper gods would have been the perfect vessel, but Amon couldn't seize one by force. Weakened by millennia of imprisonment and oblivion—punishment from the false arcane gods—he had resigned himself to slumber, waiting for a crack in reality, sustained only by offerings from those who hadn't forgotten him in the eternal cycle he was doomed to repeat every five thousand years. This time, however, two cycles had been skipped. When he awoke, he rejoiced that the Great Champion, death's avatar, was absent. He believed the dormant titan—corrupted by the Jailer's influence—would finally rise to bring eternal darkness. The world needed to be prepared.
Yet Amon was stunned to find his siblings still trapped in endless slumber, even as the false gods themselves waned, their sword and shield discarded before fulfilling their purpose.
The false gods had altered the balance, for traces of other Primordial Ones—reborn through the Beyond like him—had faded with time. What had happened in the last cycle he'd participated in over ten millennia ago? He didn't know. Amon had been sealed long before his divine form matured, shattered by the Jailer's relics and crown of domination.
Now, in this borrowed, feeble body, he realized Igfrid was too strong to overpower. So he offered a pact: full access to his power to resurrect the mortal woman Igfrid mourned, in exchange for his perfect vessel.
"Give me a month to prepare," Igfrid replied, calm as if his body and soul weren't at stake.
In the dungeons of Arbos Citadel, the grim tyrant of desolate Lothien began marshaling living humans for a dark purpose. Using stolen Twilight Cultist lore and necromantic knowledge, he carved out every memory tied to his beloved. The agonizing process tortured both victims and himself. With each extraction, Igfrid's already twisted soul edged closer to what the self-proclaimed god desired:
A powerful, corrupt body seething with rage and hatred toward the world and the gods who'd stolen his love. Could Amon ask for a better vessel? Igfrid's poisoned mind would soon succumb to madness, his will crumbling the moment Amon claimed him.
The last to be tortured was none other than Silvine. Once the champion of the arcane gods, now stripped of their protection, she was merely another mortal woman. Amon watched as, with each passing moment, Igfrid's fate became immutable.
On the day Igfrid condemned her, Silvine resembled a corpse. Her legendary beauty had withered under the physical and mental torment of imprisonment, forced to fight vermin and beasts for the rotten scraps Igfrid mercifully provided.
Silvine's defiance and arrogance had long since crumbled, eroded by every living soul—human or otherwise—who vented their rage
upon her.
Chained and violated by hundreds over months, was it not a feat that she still drew breath? Amon, at least, harbored a grim admiration for the resilience of the gods' fallen chosen.
He witnessed her final hours as Igfrid bound her to a crude wooden table and split her skull open with routine indifference.
Amon knew Igfrid possessed a gift for probing minds, a skill many cultists had endured. Few were immune—Silvine among them. Perhaps divine shielding spared her, or perhaps, as Amon suspected, her soul and mind belonged to another realm.
Yet Igfrid found a way to extract her deepest memories…
Direct neural contact.
He'd discovered this by experimenting on hordes of enslaved elves, whose demi-human minds resisted mental intrusion. Igfrid could have forced Silvine to speak, but he distrusted her words—a logic Amon endorsed.
Igfrid's bare hands combed through Silvine's exposed brain, electric sparks flickering from his fingertips. Soon, her life and thoughts flooded into him—every day, every hour, every shattered fragment of her existence.
Upon returning to the ruins of Lothien's palace—Canaria's resting place—the day of the pact arrived. The mortal body housing the god-demon Amon lay in tatters. Unable to withstand his magic and corruption, its skin had blackened, its eyes swollen into blood-filled orbs on the verge of bursting. In short, it was a sack of bones and blood, awaiting
liberation to the realm of shadows and death.
Igfrid had long forgotten the child who might have been his son, leaving him to wander the ghostly palace under the escort of two cultists, like a noble prisoner.
The Necromancer Emperor spent endless days in Canaria's chamber, gazing at her as though she were the only thing left in the world. At night, he roamed the crypts, losing himself in labyrinths of statues and tombs, as if the dead could offer solace.
Amon wondered whether Igfrid had surrendered his will or succumbed to madness, his obsession with Canaria eclipsing all else. Regardless, the preparations for the pact were soon complete.
In the main hall of the once-white palace—now stained with smoke and blood—the scene resembled a transaction more than a ritual. A crimson magic circle, the hue of clotting blood, rose from the floor, devouring the mana stones Igfrid had placed around the room. Their hands clasped, but Arakbamel Amon sensed something amiss.
Igfrid rarely wore the crown of his ruined empire, preferring mourning garb in dark and red hues, his sole royal adornment the enchanted sword at his waist. Yet here he stood, regal as a king. Amon assumed this was homage to him—a petty reward for restoring his beloved wife through time's manipulation and safeguarding her and the child.
The corpse encased in magical crystal rested on a pedestal, the sole witness to their pact. Pleased, the god watched Igfrid bid farewell to Canaria before stepping forward to seal their bond.
"As long as she is safe, nothing else matters..." Igfrid declared, gripping Amon's hand.
Their magics merged into swirling black smoke. Arcane thunder cracked the sky as Amon realized the deception:
The gilded crown Igfrid wore—crafted from shards of the Jailer's blade—was an artifact he knew too well… and feared. How had Igfrid obtained it? Why hadn't he sensed it?
A guttural laugh pierced the chaos.
"I could never trust you," Igfrid sneered, his iron grip forcing Amon, for the first time since awakening in this era, to feel genuine dread.