The obsidian chamber trembled under the weight of ten lords gathered in a perfect circle, their auras weaving storms of shadow, flame, frost, and ethereal brilliance. Yet even their combined power felt small—fragile—before the hollow wound carved into the half-step Ethereal Realm lord kneeling at the center.
His breath was ragged. His aura flickered violently. The empty space where his left arm once existed seemed to swallow light, a silent abyss that refused to be healed.
And at the head of the circle stood the Lord of Murder.
Eight-step Ethereal Realm.
Ancient.
Primordial.
His presence coiled through the chamber like a living void, threads of black mist rising from his form, whispering secrets older than the heavens.
> "Begin the Severing Ritual," he commanded.
The air shuddered. The ten lords raised their hands, their essence forming ten pillars of light that converged above the wounded lord. The runic circle beneath him ignited, symbols—ancient, forbidden—awakening after hundreds of thousands of years.
The Lord of Murder extended a single finger.
A thin line of shadow peeled open the void.
Silence became suffocation.
Light dimmed.
Reality bent.
The half-step lord screamed as the ritual touched the hollow in his soul.
Not pain.
Something worse.
A feeling of being unwritten.
The runic circle pulsed, absorbing his cry. His remaining essence surged violently, smashing against the edges of the ritual, desperate to escape.
But the Lord of Murder tightened his grip.
> "Still yourself. If you resist, the void will swallow what remains of you."
The other lords watched, breaths tense, backs rigid. Even they—who could annihilate mountains with idle gestures—felt a primal fear crawl up their bones.
For the first time, the alien nature of Raphael's wound was being exposed.
A dark mist rose from the hollow.
Not energy.
Not soul.
Something older.
Something that did not belong to this realm.
The Lord of Murder's eyes narrowed. "There… behold. His Reaper Arts sever not flesh, nor spirit alone. They sever potential. A wound that reaches into all timelines—past, present, and future."
The lords gasped.
One spoke, voice trembling: "Impossible… only Ancients could—"
"NO."
The Lord of Murder cut him off.
"Only Raphael could."
The wounded lord writhed as the hollow expanded, reacting violently to the ritual. The ten beams of essence flickered, nearly collapsing.
The Lord of Murder raised both hands and slammed his shadows into the hollow.
A sound tore through the chamber—
Not a roar.
Not a scream.
But a cosmic rip—as if the universe itself protested being opened.
The ritual backfired.
Energy exploded outward.
Six lords were flung against the walls.
Two coughed blood.
One's ethereal projection shattered entirely, his physical body collapsing miles away.
The runic circle cracked.
The air sizzled with unstable laws.
And at the center—
A vision burst forth from the hollow.
Not a memory.
Not an illusion.
A glimpse of Raphael's comprehension.
The chamber filled with frost motes and silver-black scythes dancing through the dark. A colossal silhouette appeared—neither god nor demon—its form blurred by laws too ancient to name. Eyes of pure silver gazed through the ritual directly into the ten lords' souls.
One lord collapsed immediately, sobbing like a mortal child.
Another vomited blood.
A third screamed as his knees buckled, aura shaking uncontrollably.
The half-step lord at the center fainted instantly, his consciousness shattered by the vision.
And the Lord of Murder—
Even he stepped back.
Just one step.
But for someone who had never retreated in 500,000 years, it was the equivalent of falling to one knee.
The cosmic silhouette faded.
The frost motes remained.
The chamber dimmed.
Silence returned—but it was a different kind of silence.
A silence carved by fear.
A silence forged by truth.
The Lord of Murder spoke, voice strained yet absolute:
> "He saw us."
The remaining lords froze.
> "Raphael—he saw our ritual. He saw our chamber. He looked into our souls… through a fragment of essence we dared to probe."
A single frost mote drifted down, landing on the cracked obsidian floor.
A mark glowed faintly where it touched—
A symbol none had seen for hundreds of thousands of years.
A reaper's sigil.
Simple.
Elegant.
Absolute.
One lord whispered, trembling:
> "Does this mean… he is coming for us?"
The Lord of Murder stared at the sigil, shadows tightening around him.
"No."
A pause.
"But know this…"
His eyes glowed with cold, ancient dread.
> "Raphael does not need to come."
"He does not need to walk across realms."
"He does not need to lift a hand."
He looked at the ten lords—each now wounded, shaken, or terrified.
> "Raphael already knows your essence."
"He already knows your threads of fate."
"From this moment on—any of you may fall simply because he wills it."
The chamber shook as the truth settled in their marrow.
The Severing Ritual had not revealed Raphael.
It had revealed how utterly insignificant they were before him.
And the chapter closed with the Lord of Murder whispering:
> "We have not studied the Reaper."
"We have provoked him."
The chamber lay drowned in ashlight, its pillars groaning beneath the weight of forgotten hymns. Ten blackened high-seats circled the hall like a ring of ancient gravestones, and upon the cold stone floor knelt a maimed figure, steam rising from the place where his limb had been erased. The Cinder-Throned Requiar raised a gauntleted hand, his voice a low ember within the dark. "Bar the doors. Let no whisper nor wandering breath flee this sanctum. What was witnessed beyond these walls must perish within them."
The Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper stepped forward, mantle torn by the scars of thunder. "We marched ten-strong beneath decree and banner… yet one returns riven from soul to sinew. Speak, kin-in-ruin. What unholy severance found thee?"
The kneeling lord trembled as though his spirit hung half outside his flesh. He was now the Sundered Shade-Baron, and his voice broke like a dying bell. "It was no blade. No mortal wounding. My limb did not fall — it was unmade. As though the world no longer remembered it ever was."
A dreadful stillness settled upon the circle. The Stone-Weald Grave Marcher struck his iron staff once against the floor, the echo hollow. "This is no craft of man nor sect. This reeks of sorcery wrought before mortals learned to name the dark."
From a pillar's shadow stepped a figure marked with slumbering red sigils. Some flinched, for few dared speak to him unbidden. He was the Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal, and his presence dimmed the torches.
The Cinder-Throned Requiar turned slowly. "Thou knowest this doom, Marshal. Speak it plain."
The Marshal bowed his head. "Aye. I have known the hand that wrought it."
The Gale-Scourged Wroth-Keeper's voice cracked like distant thunder. "How long hast thou carried this knowing?"
"Five hundred thousand years, give or bereave."
The circle shifted, old sentinels of dread stirred from long slumber. The Nightborne Maw-Reeve hissed from beneath his veil of shadow. "Name the being. End this shrouding before we choke upon it."
The Marshal's eyes burned like red lanterns in a mausoleum. "Khaldron is not his truth. His mantle before this age was not mortal. His true name… is Raphael."
The torches faltered as though fearing the syllables.
"That name," whispered the Stone-Weald Grave Marcher, "is carved upon tombs older than empires and sung in the laments of realms swallowed by dust."
The Marshal gave a single, grave nod. "I beheld him in the Ruins Beyond Dawn. One man, one shadow… and an army swallowed in silence. Black flame. Hollow eclipse. No cry escaped those taken; their souls were swept clean as chalk."
The Cinder-Throned Requiar stepped closer to the wounded lord. "Why then is our brother yet among the breathing? Why spare the Sundered Shade-Baron?"
"Because Raphael is shackled," said the Marshal. "Bound by an oath wrought in antiquity. He may not unmake wholly any who do not cross him with willing heart. He spared this one not for mercy, but that his chains remain unbroken."
The Shade-Baron bowed his head, trembling. "Then my survival… is but the echo of his prison?"
"Aye," murmured the Marshal. "Thy breath is not thine own; it is a courtesy of his bindings."
The Nightborne Maw-Reeve leaned forward. "Then tell us: can such a being be faced? Parleyed with? Bound to accord?"
"There is one road," answered the Marshal, voice hollow as an open grave. "And none who tread it return the same."
The circle listened, scarcely daring to breathe.
"To meet Raphael, one must endure the threshold of the Deeping Quietus — the grave between worlds where sound itself goes to die. Shouldst thou enter without perishing, he shall sense thee. Step deeper, and he shall behold thee. Step further still…"
He trailed off.
"Then thy soul shall join the choir that forever weeps therein."
The Gale-Scourged Wroth-Keeper clenched his mantle. "Then to seek him is to wager breath and name against eternity."
The Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal lowered his gaze to the steaming stump of the Shade-Baron. The other lords followed his stare, unease crawling like frost across their bones.
"Aye," he whispered. "And know this well — the Quietus hath already tasted us."
He stepped back into the dim.
"And once it tastes… it hungers."
The torches guttered. The hall fell into a silence so absolute it felt alive, closing over them like a tomb that had waited half a million years to seal.
The lords remained in the obsidian hall, silence thick as frozen smoke.
The half-step lord — the one who had lost arm and fragment of soul — still knelt, shivering under the weight of his hollowed essence.
The Cinder-Throned Requiar's gauntlets tapped against the table like the echo of falling gravestones.
Cinder-Throned Requiar:
"This is no mere wound… no ordinary strike.
He does not fight with blade or spell, but with the unraveling of existence itself.
One glance, and a limb, a fragment of soul… even potential is erased."
Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper:
"Aye… and yet, he restrained his hand.
He could have unmade us all in a heartbeat.
We are fortunate… or cursed, that he did not."
Stone-Weald Grave Marcher:
"Fortune? Nay. This is knowledge too terrible to bear.
We have glimpsed the edge of a power that dwarfs even ten of us,
and lived. Yet our survival is hollow, like bones picked clean by unseen crows."
Nightborne Maw-Reeve:
"There is more. The whispers of frost and shadow speak of an oath,
ancient as the stars themselves… buried beneath the frozen lake.
It is said only the Archivist, keeper of the Deeping Records,
can tell what binds him. One who has lived for untold millennia,
whose vigilance has never faltered, who remembers the birth of worlds."
Sundered Shade-Baron:
"My soul is hollow, my arm unmade… yet you speak of oaths?
What use is such lore to those who have already tasted his Reaper Arts?"
Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal:
"Use? Perhaps none.
Yet understanding the oath may reveal the thread that restrains him.
If we know the thread, perhaps we can act before it frays… or break it."
Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper:
"Do you dare risk the frozen lake, and the Archivist whose vigil spans two million years?"
The Marshal's eyes glowed with cold fire.
Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal:
"Dare? We do not choose dare. We choose knowledge.
The Archivist is the only one who remembers before the age of men,
before Raphael took up the mantle of True Death.
If the oath beneath the ice is broken, the realm dies.
If we fail to understand it, the realm dies anyway."
Cinder-Throned Requiar:
"Then let it be so.
We shall seek the Archivist of the Drowned Epoch,
even if we step into the frost of two million years.
May the shadows hold our courage, lest we become ghosts before the lake's edge."
The lords rose as one. Frost clung to their mantles, frost motes spiraled like silent witnesses.
Even in the gloom, their fear was palpable, for the path ahead led not to battle, but to ancient memory itself, where the oath and the lake had waited for eons, and where Raphael's restraint was older than time.
The lords remained in the obsidian hall, silence heavy as gravestones pressed by time. The half-step Shade-Baron — his arm gone, his essence hollowed — still knelt, shivering under the weight of his lost potential. The Cinder-Throned Requiar's gauntlets tapped against the blackened table, the echo ringing like distant death bells.
"This is no mere wound… no ordinary strike," he said, voice low and grave. "He does not fight with blade or spell, but with the unmaking of existence itself. One glance, and a limb, a fragment of soul… even potential is erased."
"Aye… yet he restrained his hand," said the Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper. "He could have unmade us all in a heartbeat. We are fortunate… or cursed, that he did not."
"Fortune? Nay," said the Stone-Weald Grave Marcher, voice like rolling stone. "This is knowledge too terrible to bear. We have glimpsed the edge of a power that dwarfs even ten of us, and yet we lived. Our survival is hollow, like bones picked clean by unseen crows."
"There is more," said the Nightborne Maw-Reeve, voice whispering like ice across marble. "The frost and shadow speak of an oath, ancient as the stars themselves… buried beneath the frozen lake. Only the Archivist, keeper of the Deeping Records, can tell what binds him. One who has lived for untold millennia, whose vigilance has never faltered, who remembers the birth of worlds."
"My soul is hollow, my arm unmade… and yet you speak of oaths?" croaked the Shade-Baron. "What use is such lore to those who have already tasted his Reaper Arts?"
"Use?" murmured the Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal, eyes glinting with cold fire. "Perhaps none. Yet understanding the oath may reveal the thread that restrains him. If we know the thread, perhaps we can act before it frays… or break it."
"Do you dare risk the frozen lake, and the Archivist whose vigil spans two million years?" asked the Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper.
"We do not choose dare," said the Marshal, voice a rasp of frost. "We choose knowledge. The Archivist is the only one who remembers before the age of men, before Raphael took up the mantle of True Death. If the oath beneath the ice is broken, the realm dies. If we fail to understand it, the realm dies anyway."
"Then let it be so," said the Cinder-Throned Requiar, rising. "We shall seek the Archivist of the Drowned Epoch, even if we step into the frost of two million years. May the shadows hold our courage, lest we become ghosts before the lake's edge."
Frost clung to their mantles, motes of silver ice spiraling in the dim torchlight, as the lords departed the hall and made their way to the frozen wasteland where the Lake of Buried Oaths slept beneath its glacier of ten thousand sorrows. The ice lay vast and unbroken, blackened beneath a canopy of frozen stars, whispering secrets older than kingdoms.
From the depths of the glacier emerged a single figure, moving across the ice with the weight of a million centuries. He was the Kyreth-Lorn Archivist of the Drowned Epoch, a half-step True Immortal, keeper of forgotten memory and frozen oaths, eyes glimmering with two million years of remembrance. His robes trailed like shadows frozen in mid-fall, and frost motes coiled around him like obedient spirits.
"You awaken old names… and older graves," he intoned, voice rasping like ancient ice grinding over stone. The lords bowed in fear and respect, for even the Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal had once knelt before this being, leaving humbled and hollowed.
"We seek truth of Raphael," said the Cinder-Throned Requiar, voice steady despite the cold, "and of the oath bound beneath the lake."
The Archivist's lips cracked into something resembling a smile, yet it carried no warmth. "Raphael…" He let the name hang, tasting it as though it were forbidden scripture. "The only Reaper whose shadow once reached my archives… yet left no footprint upon the snow."
He raised a hand, and frost spiraled into sigils older than memory. "Beneath the Glacier of Ten Thousand Sorrows, within this frozen mirror, sleeps a pact older than sects, older than empires, older even than my vigil. He swore upon the lake's heart, upon the Ice of Unbroken Memory, that he would not unleash annihilation upon the mortal planes unless invoked by a force equal to his own dominion."
The Shade-Baron shuddered, whispering, "Then his restraint… his mercy… the sparing of my arm…?"
"It is not mercy," the Archivist said, eyes glowing like frozen suns. "It is oath-binding. As long as the Frozen Lake remains unbroken, Raphael cannot release his full dominion of True Death."
The Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper's voice trembled. "And if… if the lake were shattered?"
A long, dreadful silence. Then the Archivist whispered: "Then the chains of heaven and earth would fall away. Raphael would walk unshackled. And the stars themselves… would learn fear."
The frost thickened on the lake, the wind moaned like the dirge of a thousand lost eras, and the lords understood the weight of the truth: Raphael's power was not rising — it was merely restrained, bound by the oath that had slept beneath the frozen lake since time itself was young.
The lords remained in the obsidian hall, silence heavy as gravestones pressed by time. The half-step Shade-Baron — his arm gone, his essence hollowed — still knelt, shivering under the weight of his lost potential. The Cinder-Throned Requiar's gauntlets tapped against the blackened table, the echo ringing like distant death bells.
"This is no mere wound… no ordinary strike," he said, voice low and grave. "He does not fight with blade or spell, but with the unmaking of existence itself. One glance, and a limb, a fragment of soul… even potential is erased."
"Aye… yet he restrained his hand," said the Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper. "He could have unmade us all in a heartbeat. We are fortunate… or cursed, that he did not."
"Fortune? Nay," said the Stone-Weald Grave Marcher, voice like rolling stone. "This is knowledge too terrible to bear. We have glimpsed the edge of a power that dwarfs even ten of us, and yet we lived. Our survival is hollow, like bones picked clean by unseen crows."
"There is more," said the Nightborne Maw-Reeve, voice whispering like ice across marble. "The frost and shadow speak of an oath, ancient as the stars themselves… buried beneath the frozen lake. Only the Archivist, keeper of the Deeping Records, can tell what binds him. One who has lived for untold millennia, whose vigilance has never faltered, who remembers the birth of worlds."
"My soul is hollow, my arm unmade… and yet you speak of oaths?" croaked the Shade-Baron. "What use is such lore to those who have already tasted his Reaper Arts?"
"Use?" murmured the Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal, eyes glinting with cold fire. "Perhaps none. Yet understanding the oath may reveal the thread that restrains him. If we know the thread, perhaps we can act before it frays… or break it."
"Do you dare risk the frozen lake, and the Archivist whose vigil spans two million years?" asked the Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper.
"We do not choose dare," said the Marshal, voice a rasp of frost. "We choose knowledge. The Archivist is the only one who remembers before the age of men, before Raphael took up the mantle of True Death. If the oath beneath the ice is broken, the realm dies. If we fail to understand it, the realm dies anyway."
"Then let it be so," said the Cinder-Throned Requiar, rising. "We shall seek the Archivist of the Drowned Epoch, even if we step into the frost of two million years. May the shadows hold our courage, lest we become ghosts before the lake's edge."
Frost clung to their mantles, motes of silver ice spiraling in the dim torchlight, as the lords departed the hall and made their way to the frozen wasteland where the Lake of Buried Oaths slept beneath its glacier of ten thousand sorrows. The ice lay vast and unbroken, blackened beneath a canopy of frozen stars, whispering secrets older than kingdoms.
From the depths of the glacier emerged a single figure, moving across the ice with the weight of a million centuries. He was the Kyreth-Lorn Archivist of the Drowned Epoch, a half-step True Immortal, keeper of forgotten memory and frozen oaths, eyes glimmering with two million years of remembrance. His robes trailed like shadows frozen in mid-fall, and frost motes coiled around him like obedient spirits.
"You awaken old names… and older graves," he intoned, voice rasping like ancient ice grinding over stone. The lords bowed in fear and respect, for even the Red-Harrowed Penitent Marshal had once knelt before this being, leaving humbled and hollowed.
"We seek truth of Raphael," said the Cinder-Throned Requiar, voice steady despite the cold, "and of the oath bound beneath the lake."
The Archivist's lips cracked into something resembling a smile, yet it carried no warmth. "Raphael…" He let the name hang, tasting it as though it were forbidden scripture. "The only Reaper whose shadow once reached my archives… yet left no footprint upon the snow."
He raised a hand, and frost spiraled into sigils older than memory. "Beneath the Glacier of Ten Thousand Sorrows, within this frozen mirror, sleeps a pact older than sects, older than empires, older even than my vigil. He swore upon the lake's heart, upon the Ice of Unbroken Memory, that he would not unleash annihilation upon the mortal planes unless invoked by a force equal to his own dominion."
The Shade-Baron shuddered, whispering, "Then his restraint… his mercy… the sparing of my arm…?"
"It is not mercy," the Archivist said, eyes glowing like frozen suns. "It is oath-binding. As long as the Frozen Lake remains unbroken, Raphael cannot release his full dominion of True Death."
The Gale-Scourged High Wroth-Keeper's voice trembled. "And if… if the lake were shattered?"
A long, dreadful silence. Then the Archivist whispered: "Then the chains of heaven and earth would fall away. Raphael would walk unshackled. And the stars themselves… would learn fear."
The frost thickened on the lake, the wind moaned like the dirge of a thousand lost eras, and the lords understood the weight of the truth: Raphael's power was not rising — it was merely restrained, bound by the oath that had slept beneath the frozen lake since time itself was young.
A single lamp hung from the vaulted ceiling, its flame a weak pulse against the cathedral-like darkness. As the lords approached the obsidian pool, the flame flickered violently, as if breathing in time with the ice itself. Shadows leapt from the walls, writhing like serpents caught between thought and reality, coiling around pillars, shelves, and the very air.
The Kyreth-Lorn Archivist extended a gnarled hand, pale as frozen marble, and the shadows obeyed, flowing like black rivers along the contours of the chamber. "Behold," he intoned, voice rasping through centuries, "the memory of the Deeping Records does not merely observe. It shapes the world around it. Every flicker of flame, every ripple of shadow, is an echo of what was and what shall be."
The Frost-Scourged Wroth-Keeper's mantle shivered as the shadows gathered, pooling at his boots like living ink. "It… it moves with intent," he whispered. "Not wind, not spell… but thought. Consciousness older than us all."
The Archivist's eyes glimmered like frozen suns. "The lamp is but a conduit. The shadows, the flickers, they are threads of comprehension. Look too long, and they will weave themselves into your mind, unbinding secrets you may wish had remained buried."
The blackened light of the flame pulsed in waves, sending ripples across the obsidian floor. The shadows responded instantly, rising like smoke made solid, curling around the lords, brushing against their mantles, their arms, whispering in voices too faint to catch yet heavy with meaning. Even the Frost-Marked Shade-Baron recoiled, sensing memories and echoes that had no right to touch him, his hollowed essence trembling like a candle in a storm.
The Archivist gestured to the obsidian pool, and the shadows converged, drawn like moths to flame. "See now," he whispered, "the environment itself bends to the will of the archive. Every corner, every surface remembers, reacts, and waits. The lake beneath the glacier speaks through these shadows. The oath resonates, and all that surrounds it answers."
Frost motes swirled faster, spiraling into the shadows and the lamp's flame. Waves of blackened light pulsed outward, and the air itself seemed to thrum, vibrating in resonance with the ancient vow beneath the ice.
The Shade-Baron stammered, voice ragged, "I… I feel it… the shadows… they speak of the oath… they… they watch us, even here."
The Archivist's smile was a thin crack across frozen stone. "Not watch, child. They do more than watch. They focus. They concentrate the memory of two million years into the environment itself. Every breath you take, every flicker of this lamp, is a reminder of what binds Raphael. And every shadow is a herald of what will awaken if the oath falters."
The torches along the cavern walls dimmed, swallowed by the growing darkness, leaving only the lamp flickering in rhythm with the spiraling shadows. The lords felt the cold press into their bones, not as temperature, but as weight, an invisible force bending the air and their very souls toward the obsidian pool.
The Archivist leaned closer, whispering, "The oath is alive. The lake remembers. The shadows obey. And here, in the marrow of the archive, the world itself is compelled to answer. Step carefully, for one false move, one miscomprehension, and the archive will not merely reject you… it will claim you."
The lords remained frozen, frost motes circling their boots, shadows lapping at their mantles, and the single lamp's flame wavering like a heartbeat, pulsing with the weight of memory, power, and the unbroken oath beneath the frozen lake.