The silence that followed was not immediate.
First came the crack.
Then, thousands of them.
The ice that covered Skaldi—an ice that belonged to no season, no climate, no natural logic—began to break apart from the inside out.
The frozen black witches did not scream.
They did not plead.
They didn't even have time to understand.
The ice exploded from their mana cores, transforming each body into a constellation of crystalline fragments that dissolved into thin air like white dust.
And then… everything died.
The black magic vanished.
The invocations faded.
The distortions of Chaos ceased.
The sky of Skaldi, once torn by arcane lightning, became an absolute white, like a blank canvas.
Kael hovered at the highest point of the firmament.
The shadows no longer supported him—he simply existed there, as if the sky had accepted his weight.
