Chapter 1
The Abyss had not known the sound of silence for centuries. The endless war between Abael’s legions and the demoness Lilia’s hordes had turned the desolate plains into an ocean of carnage and pools of molten obsidian. Lilia was cunning, lethal, and possessed a dangerous arrogance: she genuinely believed her chaotic magic was enough to usurp the throne of the Lord of the Abyss.
At the center of the battlefield, the thick air reeked of sulfur, rusted metal, and exposed viscera. Demons of every caste tore one another apart in a blind frenzy. Razor-sharp claws shredded scaled throats, heads were ripped from shoulders with spinal cords left dangling, and the wet, visceral sound of punctured flesh echoed endlessly beneath a sky eternally drowned in darkness.
But the true epicenter of the slaughter followed wherever He stepped.
Pushed to extreme fury by the advancing enemy troops, Abael had abandoned his contained humanoid guise and unleashed his Demonic Form. He was the very incarnation of absolute terror. Gigantic and deeply intimidating, great, jagged black horns thrust from his skull, piercing the heavy smoke. Colossal demonic wings, dense as the void’s own darkness, beat against the air, shattering the sound barrier. His impossibly pale skin fractured across his chest and neck, and through the fissures pulsed an unstable, abyssal energy, glowing like veins of incandescent lava. In the center of his forehead, a red sigil resembling a vertical eye tore open, bleeding pure, murderous intent.
One of Lilia’s generals, a brute encased in bone spikes, roared and vaulted toward him, wielding a massive war axe. Abael’s expression did not shift; it remained a monolith of ice and disdain. With a single, fluid motion of his left arm which in his true form was entirely sheathed in a living armor of dark, demonic scales Abael cleaved the brute in half. Black ichor and entrails rained onto the limestone floor, yet the Demon Lord did not so much as break his stride.
Then, his sharpened senses caught her.
Lilia watched the slaughter from atop a shattered cliff, a mocking smile curving her blood-stained lips.
With a thrust that caved the earth beneath his boots, Abael cleaved the air like a black comet. Before the demoness could conjure her defensive circle, he seized her by the throat in mid-air. The momentum of his flight dragged them both downward with doubled gravitational force. Abael crushed her into the ground, the deafening impact carving a massive crater that launched blocks of razor-sharp rock like deadly shrapnel into the surrounding armies.
Lilia spat a thick pool of black blood, her bones cracking beneath the lethal pressure of Abael’s grip. The Lord raised his other armored hand, poised to rip the heart from her ribcage, but the demoness’s cunning prevailed. The body beneath his claws dissolved into a veil of illusion and venomous smoke. She reappeared dozens of yards away, gasping for breath, yet already dropping into a combat stance.
Abael advanced, transforming into a relentless hurricane of blades and brute force. Every strike he delivered fractured the very fabric of the landscape, but Lilia evaded by millimeters, slipping through the shadows, weaving distortion spells to blind his peripheral vision. In a rare instant of arrogant pragmatism, Abael assumed her speed was compromised by her prior injury. It was a marginal slip, a millisecond’s flaw in his guard.
Exploiting the breach with lethal precision, Lilia channeled the collective energy of her hordes and hurled a condensed spear of corrupted flame. The spell slammed directly into Abael’s fractured chest. The blast shoved the Demon Lord’s titanic mass backward, leaving a smoldering tear in his immortal flesh.
He stopped. The pain brought no retreat; it brought a silent, cold, and absolutely devastating fury.
He did not scream. The sigil on his forehead flared with blinding light, and the temperature across the battlefield plummeted until the fresh blood on the ground froze solid. He was not merely going to kill her; he was going to obliterate Lilia’s existence from the history of the Abyss. Abael surged forward with impossible speed, his claws a breath away from decapitating his rival.
Realizing she had crossed the threshold of her own demise, Lilia crushed an ancient spatial crystal in her palm. Reality shattered like glass between them, erecting a barrier of dimensional folds that repelled Abael’s claws by a hair’s breadth, tearing them temporarily apart.
Protected behind the warped space, Lilia raised a trembling hand, her arrogant smile finally yielding to calculated desperation.
— Enough, Abael! — her voice echoed, sharp and breathless, through the barrier. — We both know this stupid war is only draining us. While we slaughter each other for possession of these stones, the other realms remain weak and untouched. A truce. I propose a temporary truce, Lord of the Abyss.
Abael narrowed his piercing red eyes, his jaw clenched so tightly his teeth could have shattered obsidian. Primordial instinct roared for him to tear down the barrier by force and finish the execution, but his hyper-calculating mind overrode the hatred. Lilia was right. He needed to conquer wider territories and seek a greater power.
Noting the Lord’s deadly yet receptive silence, Lilia issued the final command. With a snap of her fingers, her legions ceased fighting in unison. The grotesque creatures twisted and melted, morphing into black smoke that seeped into the fissures of the earth, abandoning the battlefield.
The Abyss returned to a sepulchral silence. In the center of the ruined plain, enemy blood evaporated from Abael’s scaled arm as his great black wings folded, his demonic form yielding once more to his flawless, humanoid guise. The truce was sealed.
The centuries that followed the truce with Lilia brought no peace, only a frigid, calculating quiet to the Demonic Fortress. Abael, the merciless Lord of the Abyss, ruled from his obsidian throne with an iron fist and a lethal boredom. The cold war demanded patience, but his hyper-calculating mind remained ten steps ahead, searching for the definitive trump card that would annihilate not only his rival demoness, but any future resistance.
It was in the forgotten dungeons of ancestral libraries, torturing long-maddened oracles, that the first whispers reached his ears.
A legend concerning the High Witch.
Magical echoes claimed that the pure blood of this witch was the only key capable of unleashing an Ancestral Weapon a primordial force dormant in the bowels of the world, sealed before the Abyss even had its name. Abael did not know the exact nature of this weapon. He did not know if it was an army of fallen generals, a curse of mass obliteration, or an artifact of immeasurable destruction. And, to him, the form was irrelevant. He hungered only for the absolute power it promised.
Long years of fruitless searching followed. Abael scattered his scouts through the filthiest corners of the realms, dissecting false mages and burning entire covens who dared lie about possessing such a lineage. The High Witch appeared to be nothing more than a ghost, a myth to feed the false hope of the weak.
Until tonight.
The temperature in the great hall plummeted as the massive black iron doors groaned open. A lackey, its grey skin scaled and its body trembling in reverence, dragged itself across the polished marble floor until it stopped at the foot of the obsidian throne’s steps.
Abael did not move. His red eyes, glowing like embers in the dark, pierced the creature with cold impatience.
— Speak, — the Lord of the Abyss cut through the silence. A lethal whisper that made the lackey’s spine pop. — And pray this is not another waste of my time.
— M-My Lord, — the lackey stammered, its face pressed against the freezing stone. — News from the Black Market. A merchant... a greedy worm of the underworld... claims to have captured the legend. He has the High Witch. Or, at least, the bearer of the Scarlet Cloak, who exudes the pure magic of the lineage.
Abael’s jaw locked. The air around him seemed to vibrate with a crushing pressure.
— And why are this merchant’s head and the witch not at my feet this very moment? — he asked, every syllable laden with a silent threat.
The lackey swallowed hard, fearing for its own life.
— He refuses to offer her as tribute, My Lord! The insolent fool knows the value of what he holds. He has placed her in a secret auction tonight. He said that whoever desires the key to the ancestral weapon... will have to fight for it.
A low chuckle, entirely devoid of humor and heavy with scorn, escaped Abael’s perfect lips. The audacity of a black-market rat attempting to extort the Lord of the Abyss was almost an insult worthy of amusement, were it not so pathetic. His first instinct was to descend into that filthy hole, incinerate the merchant from the inside out, and take the witch from his charred remains.
But he was a Lord, not a cheap scavenger. It was beneath him to soil his own boots in the scum of the underworld merely over the insolence of a worm. The blood mattered more than the offense.
Abael leaned forward, the long cascade of his platinum hair spilling over his shoulders.
— Krok. Zikral, — Abael called out, and instantly two of his strongest scouts—colossal demons armed with scythes and malice—emerged from the dense shadows of the hall.
— My Lord, — the two growled in unison, bowing heavily.
— Take the black gold. Enter that rat’s nest and buy the human plague, — Abael ordered, his pragmatic, dictatorial tone leaving no room for failure. — Pay whatever the merchant demands; let him savor his false victory. And then, bring the witch to me alive. If you fail, or if a single drop of her blood is spilled before she reaches my hands, there will be no hole in the realms where you can hide from my fury.
The two lackeys nodded furiously, terror gleaming in their eyes before they backed away, vanishing into the vortices of a dark portal bound for the Black Market.
Alone in his frigid fortress, Abael leaned back against the obsidian throne. The red sigil on his forehead pulsed softly in the dark. After centuries of waiting, the key to his absolute triumph was finally on its way.
