He shouldn’t be breathing.

  Draven’s lungs were collapsed, his spine torn, his ribs jagged ruin. The battlefield was quiet now, just wind moving through dead grass and shattered armor. The silence didn’t feel like peace. It felt like the moment before something wakes up.

  Then it moved.

  The air buckled. Like gravity shifted.

  Something was approaching—but there were no footsteps. No sound. Just a pressure. A presence that made the ground exhale and the light dim.

  It stopped in front of him.

  He couldn’t see its face. He wasn’t sure it had one. The shape looked wrong. Like a smear of shadow trying to mimic form but forgetting how bones worked.

  It crouched.

  He tried to move, but nothing responded. His blood pooled beneath him, warm and useless.

  Then it spoke.

  Not into his ears—into his marrow.

  “You are broken.”

  His eyes trembled open. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t scream.

  “And that is why you are empty enough.”

  It raised a hand.

  Just a finger. Pale. Too long. Not quite skin. Not quite anything.

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  It hovered above his chest, where his heart should be.

  He didn’t know what was about to happen.

  But every part of him knew it shouldn’t.

  The finger didn’t touch.

  It pressed through.

  There was no wound. No blood.

  The entity’s hand sank into his chest like smoke seeping into old wood.

  And something deep beneath his ribs—something ancient, buried—shuddered awake.

  A snap echoed. Not in the world, but inside him.

  A seal. Cracked.

  Then a sound ripped through him—a sound like stars screaming underwater.

  Draven’s body convulsed.

  His back arched so violently his bones popped from the sockets. His mouth tore open in a ragged scream as light surged from his chest.

  Not warm.

  Not holy.

  Violent.

  The Divine Eos wasn’t a gift.

  It was a trapdoor opening under his soul.

  It erupted through his veins like molten steel. His skin blistered in seconds. His eyes burned white. He screamed until his voice shredded, until only choking remained.

  The ground split beneath him. The dirt recoiled. The trees bowed backward, leaves shriveling in their branches.

  His heart stopped.

  Then it restarted with a different rhythm—one that didn’t belong to him.

  The light inside him kept growing. It didn’t settle—it raged.

  The entity watched without moving.

  As if it had just opened a door and was letting the storm come through.

  Draven’s skin split at the forearms, golden fractures glowing beneath. The light pulsed in jagged waves—each beat worse than the last.

  “Make it stop—” he gasped, but there was no answer.

  He wasn’t meant to contain this.

  But he was never meant to be anything else.

  The entity whispered again, in that terrible voice that didn’t need air:

  “It was locked away for a reason. But you… were abandoned. No one is guarding you anymore.”

  His fingers clawed at the earth. Blood ran down his face. His bones cracked inward, then outward again. His spine distorted. His body wasn’t holding. His body wasn’t enough.

  He was breaking open.

  Then the sky reacted.

  A scream of light carved across the heavens—a vertical tear, blinding and furious.

  The light of Eos poured through, not gentle or divine—

  But wrathful.

  It saw what had been done.

  And it recoiled.

  The divine above twisted. You could feel it—an immortal revulsion pulsing down from the heavens.

  “NO.”

  The word wasn’t heard.

  It was felt in every cell.

  A beam of holy fire struck down from the split sky, targeting not Draven—but the heart of the power inside him.

  The Divine Eos.

  It struck—and it cracked.

  He felt it inside him, something sacred breaking in half.

  His body seized, convulsing into a twisted arc. His mouth opened again—but no sound came out this time.

  Just light. Just fire. Just pain.

  It didn’t kill the power.

  It just broke its harmony.

  Draven fell back into the mud, light pouring from his chest in shattered pulses.

  His breathing was shallow. His veins glowed. His eyes were unfocused, flooded with too much.

  The entity stood, its task finished.

  It looked at him—not with pity.

  With certainty.

  “Now the world can begin to end.”

  And then it vanished.

  No sound. No trace. Just a hollow stillness in the air where it had stood.

  Draven lay there, shaking, the cracked Divine Eos beating unevenly in his chest. His body smoldered. His soul… something else now.

  Whatever he had been was gone.

  And whatever he was now—

  Shouldn’t exist.