Chapter 3: 3 The demonic realm

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3: The demonic realm 3: The demonic realm Descend.

Beyond the Human Realm, beyond the thin veil that separates what is real from what should never have been real, the Abyss opens.

Do not call it Hell.

Hell is a human idea ordered, structured, governed by its own rules and circles.

The Abyss has no rules.

It is what remains when everything is stripped away: light, time, hope, even death.

A place where the boundary between reality and nothingness is as thin as a veil of mist, and where even a veil of mist can kill you.

** It was there, millions of years ago, that two figures emerged from the darkness.

No one had called them.

One moment, they did not exist.

The next, they stood upon a vast expanse of smooth stone stretching endlessly in every direction, beneath an empty black sky without a single star.

Their presence was like a fragment of shadow, the reflection of a universe that had only just been born and was already condemned.

Their names were Kharmul and Vezareth.

Twin brothers.

At that moment, they were not yet the monsters the world would one day learn to fear.

They were two frightened, solitary beings, cast into a place that resembled nothing they had ever known.

Because they had known something.

Something luminous.

Something they had later lost.

“Vezareth.” Kharmul’s voice cut through the silence like a blade.

It was fierce and impassioned, with the slightest tremor beneath it.

“Where do you think the Creator has brought us?

This place…

it resembles nothing.” Vezareth raised his gaze toward the endless expanse.

His dark eyes reflected the stillness of one who searches for answers within the shadows, even while knowing that the shadows will never answer.

“I don’t know.

It feels as though we were torn from the very fabric of existence and cast into a point of convergence between what is and what is not.

A place beyond time.

Perhaps.” Kharmul clenched his fists.

His fiery breath condensed in the frigid air, forming reddish clouds before his face.

“If this is where the Creator has cast us, then it must have a meaning.

A meaning greater than our blood, greater than our fall.” At the word fall, both fell silent.

As though speaking it aloud made real something they still refused to accept.

The two brothers began to walk.

They walked for days.

There was no way to measure them in a place without a sun, but their bodies measured time through exhaustion and hunger.

Yet those were not days of peace.

The Abyss was inhabited.

The first creatures attacked them on the third day.

Lesser demons, deformed and ravenous, emerged from cracks in the ground like insects crawling from a carcass: twisted bodies, mouths far too wide, eyes glowing with an ancient hunger.

They descended upon the two brothers by the dozens, then by the hundreds, drawn to the only living, warm things within that dead desert.

It was then that Kharmul and Vezareth discovered what they had become.

Kharmul raised one hand.

The air condensed into an invisible weight that hurled one of the creatures into the ground, crushing it beneath an unseen force as its bones shattered with a wet crack.

A second burst sent another creature flying through the air, hurling it for miles before the darkness swallowed it whole.

Beside his brother, Vezareth barely moved.

A single glance was enough.

Any creature that met his eyes froze in place, trembling, before collapsing to the ground, emptied of every trace of will.

It was not learned magic.

Nor was it a practiced technique.

It was something that flowed within them, natural and terrifying as the beating of a heart.

When the last creature lay motionless, the two brothers looked at one another.

For the first time, their eyes held something more than fear.

A flicker of understanding.

“Did you feel that?” Vezareth asked, his voice low.

“We didn’t even have to try.” Kharmul stared at his own hands, as though seeing them for the first time.

“In this place…

we are gods.” They resumed their journey, and the lesser demons no longer dared approach.

They followed from a distance, lurking within the shadows, watching with the same reverent terror with which mortals regard a storm.

Until, on the horizon, a glow appeared.