Thalion stumbled out of the collapsing portal and onto solid ground that felt wrong beneath his boots. The air was different. The sky was different. Everything around him carried the familiar weight of the world he had once known, yet none of it felt real. He had been expelled.
That much he understood, of all those who had entered that strange realm with him, he alone had been allowed to leave.
The rest were gone.
He took two unsteady steps forward before dropping to one knee. His hands trembled as he pressed them against the dirt, something fundamental was missing.
He reached inward out of long habit, searching for the familiar weight of the souls he had carried for years—the remnants of those he had consumed, the fragments that had sustained his power and his sanity in equal measure.
There was nothing.
The space inside him where those souls had resided was hollow.
