Chapter 206: The Gods’ prison.
Location: The Gods’ Prison – a hell designed to punish demons.
The pain he’d been suppressing clawed its way up, and had his jaw tight with each ragged breath. His clothes were worn away. A searing heat wrapped around his body like a curse, blistering his skin, while sweat and blood slicked every inch of him.
Kai opened his eyes. His arms were stretched wide, shackled to twin obsidian pillars etched with runes so old they pulsed with a cruel, foreign power. He couldn’t read the script, perhaps it was the language of gods, a dialect forged to bring demons to their knees.
His wrists burned where golden dust leaked from the chains, the same divine residue he had seen around the Spike–The immortal weapon– they stole from Deagara’s castle. His lips were cracked and bleeding. His limbs were numb. The sheer weight of exhaustion tinted his vision blue.
He stood upon a circular stone platform, suspended in a land that was no land at all, an endless desert scorched by rivers of fire, hemmed in by groaning volcanoes that bled ash into a molten sky.
"Reneira!" he cried out, hoarse, broken, her name the last light clutched in the abyss of his memory before the void gate swallowed him whole.
The heat bled from the sands in the distance, warping the horizon like a fever dream. The sky churned with dark clouds, and the entire world seemed reduced to just four colors, deep orange, blood red, ashen black, and a lifeless grey.
The air was thick, too heavy to breathe without choking. Kai tried to summon Shadow, desperate for even a flicker of the presence that had once shared his soul. But there was nothing. It was as if a wall had been raised between them, severing the bond.
He wanted his demon side to rise, the very part of himself he had tried to cast out for decades. He had fought it, buried it, cursed it. And now, in this pit of divine torment, he pathetically craved its return. But there was no trace. Not even a whisper.