Chapter 549: Abyssal XII
Roman spat blood and barked laughter that shook his broken ribs. "Hah! I knew it. You rattled the whole nest, Leon. Now they’ll swarm us!"
Liliana’s silver threads thrashed wild as if resisting the oppressive weight. She gritted her teeth, voice breaking. "No—this isn’t a swarm. This is a council. They come not as soldiers, but as rulers. Together."
Naval slammed his molten fist against his chest, dragon-light boiling from his scales. "Then let them sit their council. We’ll burn it from the marrow up!"
Roselia, her emberblade trembling in her grip, shook her head. Her eyes held the tremor of awe and dread both. "No, Naval. You don’t understand. To break one Throne was unthinkable. To break two... impossible. But if they come together..." She swallowed. "This is not battle. This is reckoning."
Milim only grinned, fire writhing violet madness around her. "Reckoning tastes good."
The rift screamed.
And then—they came.
Not in flesh, not in singular descent, but as a convergence. Thrones layered upon Thrones, each a dominion incarnate:
A figure of chains, each link a prison of a soul that had once tried to climb.A throne of glass, refracting reality into endless prisms, where truth itself was dissected.A shadow of crowns upon crowns, faceless, voiceless, yet commanding.A furnace of commandments burning endlessly, every ember a rule made eternal.And behind them—greater still—something vast, unseen but felt, a pressure that turned marrow to quake and flame to shiver.
Their voices did not speak separately. They converged, a discordant choir of absolutes.
"You break law.""You shatter judgment.""You dare song where silence ruled.""You tread not as climber, but as heretic.""You will not ascend—you will be undone."
The stair itself buckled, folding inward as the Thrones descended together, their dominions entwining into a storm of absolution, verdict, command, and chains.
For the first time, even the chorus wavered. The erased faltered, their embers flickering uncertainly. The hymn cracked under the weight of so many crowns.
Leon’s flame swayed. Not extinguished, but pressed thin, as though the marrow itself begged him to yield.
He looked up into the breach, at the host of eternity arrayed against him. His chest rose, slow, steady, and he whispered—not to his allies, not even to the erased, but to the marrow beneath:
"...Then let them all descend."
And the chains below roared in answer.
The marrow split.
Not gently, not in cracks or fractures—but in upheaval, as though the Tower’s very skeleton tore itself open to answer Leon’s whisper. Chains the size of continents writhed upward, each rattling link carrying the weight of ages. The stair shook so violently that entire steps sheared away, vanishing into abyss.
The Thrones froze. For the first time, their dominion-layers hesitated, their converged voice faltering into dissonance.
From below, the roar rose. Not one voice. Not a chorus. A legion. The erased, the forgotten, the devoured—all those sealed in marrow’s dark. Souls long bound into silence now howled with the resonance of flame and hymn.
The chains weren’t rising to bind Leon. They were rising to answer him.
Liliana clutched her threads to her chest, eyes wide, tears streaking her face. "He’s... he’s calling them. The marrow doesn’t just wake—it remembers."
Roman staggered upright, bloody grin wider than ever. "Ha! Leon, you bastard—you’ve turned the whole damn graveyard into an army!"
Naval’s dragon-roar ripped through the suffocating dominions, flame surging hotter. "Then we’ll meet crowns with chains! Let them weigh against eternity itself!"
The Thrones reeled. Their layered dominion storm surged harder, chains clashing against glass, commandments igniting, shadows thickening. Their voices rang again, desperate to drown the uprising:
"Memory is prison!"
"Resonance is blasphemy!"
"Song is ruin!"
"We are the only law!"
Leon stepped forward into the quake, his flame no longer small against their storm but braided with the marrow’s uprising. His allies steadied behind him—Roselia’s constellations spinning into orbits of resistance, Milim shrieking laughter as she tore decree-fire with violet frenzy, Liliana’s threads binding the rising chains into harmony instead of chaos.
Leon’s eyes lifted to the Thrones. His voice cut through their convergence, not shouted, but steady, resonant with the marrow’s own pulse:
"You sit on crowns of silence. But silence is not law. Silence is death. And death has never been eternal."
He raised his hand. The chains roared in unison, pulled by resonance.
The storm of Thrones descended. The uprising of marrow ascended.
And in between, on the stair that shook like the spine of creation breaking, Leon’s flame drew the first stroke of war against the council of eternity.
The collision was not light against dark, nor flame against decree.
It was everything against everything.
The Thrones descended as converged dominions, their storm an apocalypse of absolutes. Chains struck upward, not as blind revolt, but as memory sharpened into weapons. Each link was a soul that had once climbed, each rattle a hymn of refusal. When they met, the stair screamed like a struck chord—too vast, too deep to belong to stone.
Glass refracted the uprising into endless prisons of false reflection. Chains tore through those illusions, shattering realities like brittle ice.
Commandments fell like meteors, burning with eternal decree. Naval’s molten roar caught them, dragons weaving between falling rules, breaking scripture with flame older than thrones.
Shadows of crowns multiplied, faceless monarchs seeking to smother the hymn. Roman’s specters answered, duelists in endless ranks, each one reborn from erased memory, charging into the faceless horde with laughter that mocked silence.
The Furnace roared, commandments kindling into wildfire judgment. Roselia’s constellations blazed brighter, each star a duel reborn, constellations colliding with the furnace until embers scattered like galaxies.
And Milim—Milim screamed with unholy joy, tearing decree into ribbons, devouring absolution and spitting it back as violet ruin.
At the center, Leon stood unshaken. His flame did not roar nor blind—it resonated. Every strike, every clash, every broken link or shattered decree, all folded back into rhythm. The marrow’s legion sang through him, and the stair itself pulsed like a drum to his beat.
The Thrones howled, their choir fracturing:
"We are eternity!"
"We are the weight of all!"
"We are unbreaking law!"
Leon lifted his hand, conductor’s baton in flame. His eyes blazed with marrow’s uprising as he answered:
"No. You are silence. And silence has already broken."
The hymn thundered in answer. The marrow’s chains surged higher, lashing around the dominion storm, binding glass, furnace, crown, and shadow together. The Thrones writhed as cracks spidered across their convergence, their storm faltering under the weight of voices they thought erased.
For a heartbeat, for an impossible instant, the council of eternity staggered.
And the Tower itself groaned, as if choosing whether to collapse—or to be remade.