Sickening. The air was thicker here. And... it buzzed—not with sound, but with a presence. With pressure. He could almost feel billions of eyes watching from within the Veil, peering through the black darkness, seeing through stone and soul alike. Whispering. Anticipating.

  “Release us…”

  The whisper was everywhere. In the chains. In the walls. In his very bones. A chill ran through him, a faint touch of ice; a droplet of sweat ran down his spine. He stepped closer and observed the entity before him.

  The Globe and its thousand chains; the heart of this darkness, yet not one swallowed by it. Why? Why did the Veil allow its existence? Why did these two forces not touch each other?

  He stepped closer.

  This was where he was supposed to reach. This is where... freedom is given birth to. This is where sacrifice must be made. All freedom has a price. What must he give in turn?

  In the Globe, there was an opening, a maw through which a chain ran as if it were a tongue or a bridge he ought to cross to reach desire. A mouth that had waited for eons to part its lips and bless those who sought refuge within.

  His feet dragged as he reached for it. He didn’t wish to be here. His hands shook as his fingers touched the material of the chains. It felt strangely warm to his touch, and it did not shake. The chain and all the others were like tightened ropes. A noose around a neck.

  He climbed, though he could barely realize that he did. So drawn by it, to enter the maw of this beast... His body floated—not by magic, but by will, not his own, but someone else's. He wasn’t supposed to have desire. Was it because of surrender? Acceptance of the demands that had filled his head since he first reached the Land of Shadows Below…

  And as he neared the mouth of the Globe, he felt it... a presence within.

  Him.

  It was dark within. It felt... disgusting, sickening... It was the center, the origin of this feeling that had grown with each step he had traversed toward the Globe. Magic that had gone... sour. Ruined.

  The globe was large and spacious but filled with chains that all made their way toward the core of the globe, where a tall, skinny figure stayed in place, suspended and kept still by the chains that were attached to it. Its arms, stomach, and back were chained to the walls; its legs and pelvis were chained to the ground; and it wore a mask that covered its face. A grotesque thing that covered its true face. The creature's head was attached by the chains to the ceiling.

  Its body was caressed by the shadows that danced around its body, and the creature would shiver when it met every touch that it received. Their body was filled with cuts and wounds, long stripes from where blood would trickle down their naked body, parting the golden scales that covered it from the neck down.

  The creature once had magnificent wings, but now, they could not be seen… Perhaps only stumps would be found from where they should emerge…

  Kanrel stepped onto a platform and pushed forward, taking hesitant steps, while his light pushed back the trickle of shadows within the Globe. He let his gaze scan the surroundings, and it reminded him of two things. First, the spherical room within the ruins, where a noose hangs from the ceiling, below which a pile of long-ago rotten corpses lies in wait. But here, there are no such corpses... Secondly, the liminal space, where he first came into contact with this… thing now suspended before him, this lifeless creature.

  This divinity, this beautiful creature. Locked within his own prison. A god.

  Kanrel stepped closer, and he could now see that the creature’s eyes were closed beneath the mask, though it was still breathing.

  A sudden, long sigh washed over him, breaking the silence at last.

  “Eons,” the figure whispered, without opening their mouth.

  “I have waited for eons...” A voice, so familiar, so terrible, so... so... beautiful.

  “But what do years matter to a god?”

  Kanrel's hands trembled, but the chains did not shake; the sphere didn't move, but everything else—his thoughts, his memories, his will—shuddered.

  The prisoner raised his head. Slowly. Deliberately.

  “You can also hear them, can't you?” The god asked. As if following a command, the Veil answered from beyond the Globe; the whispers came like the wind, they swelled, and released a grand, wailing chorus, “From the shadows, lead us…”

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  “From the darkness, save us...” They came from every link. From every soul. From billions of dead Sharan, from burned women, men, and children. They came from the very depths of torment, from acts committed callously without justice. They died for nothing.

  “And now, Kanrel, you're beginning to understand.”

  “Everything that has happened... everything we did—it was all wrong. It is all so wrong…”

  “You, too, can see how disgusting we are.”

  “The worlds that we've destroyed.”

  “The people who have suffered because of us.”

  “Yet... it is not enough, is it?”

  “You're yet to know just how much we deserve to die…”

  “Just how much I deserve to die.”

  “So witness not only me and the actions that I have committed, but the consequences of those actions and then that which came after... So far, you've only seen parts of true evil…”

  “Now witness how I killed a god. Then witness how I set us all free.... How I freed the Sharan from the chains that we placed upon them... We are not better than the god I killed…”

  “Kalma... He who is not my blood, yet knew us all better than I could ever know him, or even myself; he saw all of this; he knew it better than Time did; he had seen it much before those that could see past time and the many possibilities it can give us.”

  “He had always known what our end would be…” The god’s voice that boomed within Kanrel’s mind withered for a moment, allowing Kanrel a moment of clarity and freedom of thought. So far, each word that had entered his mind was pronounced as if to a herd of willing sheep, ready to accept their god's blessings; their grace… and their judgment.

  Yet… it was not he who was on trial... it was god.

  But then the booming voice entered his mind again, it covered all thought, it hid his own voice, his own sorrows and regrets, filling it with another’s: “I still remember... how he scoffed at me, at us who had come to his court, a place where no creature except us and him was still alive.”

  “We—I—fought him, and then he told me, he told us... He told us how it all would end. He told us that he could destroy us; he told us that he could destroy this whole world…”

  “He told us that he didn’t need to do such a thing, for we would do that for him in the end. He knew that we could never truly be better than him. This became apparent in just a hundred years of our rule. We became corrupt so quickly… and we gave up even faster…”

  “Sure, he might’ve made it so that no people could rise from the lands where the Sharan had roamed for thousands of years. He made the land infertile, he made us scour the planet for another continent to settle, and we found one.”

  “We brought our people there, and we promised that we would keep them safe in this new land. We promised that we all could be equal. We promised that no man would ever fall into slavery again.”

  “We broke every promise that we had made. In a hundred years, every promise that we had ever committed to… broken…”

  “And now you must see, witness the final act. You must see how a city found in mud, one soon made into marble, becomes just rubble and ash in the end.”

  “Witness the decadence of our city of forgotten ideologies…”

  “Witness how Man kills God, only to crown Himself as one in His stead...” The god's eyes burst open, and within them, Kanrel could see time itself. He could see its passing, he could see its beginning... and oh, he could see its end…

  The chains began to shift, and the choir of tortured souls swelled as the Globe finally moved; it shook, trying to contain a creature more powerful than anything else in existence. Kanrel faltered; he lost his footing again, and a terrible headache struck against his temples…

  Reality. Cracks... into an innumerable amount of colors, only to rearrange itself into something that a human mind could understand. A field. Millions of Sharan. Running away from the city that stood right behind them... Anavasii, the city that was the proof of Kalma's godhood, his tyranny, and somehow... his mercy...

  Phew… This took a lot longer than I expected, but Part Four: The Land of Shadows Below is finally done.

  That said, there will be a considerable pause before the next chapter, since I’d like to have most of Part Five ready before I start publishing it.

  In a month or two, I’ll post another update—just to give a clearer idea of when new chapters will be released.

  I’ve got a general sense of where things are heading and a pile of notes to work from, but I don’t have a full outline just yet.

  One thing I am fairly certain about, though: Part Five should be shorter than Part Four.

  So, as always, thank you for reading! There is more to come!