[Third Person POV]

  Under a sky that looked like an open, festering wound, where clouds twisted into shreds of purple and crimson, the Citadel of Oblivion stood tall. Here, in the heart of demonic territory, reality itself felt heavy, saturated with dark mana that would suffocate any human within seconds. The ground, made of bck obsidian that reflected the dim light of the atmosphere, vibrated with malicious anticipation, as if the earth itself were holding its breath before a scream. The sulfurous vapors rising from the cracks not only burned the lungs but carried the whispers of the souls that had been devoured to build that nightmare of a pce.

  At the very top of the central tower, in a chamber open to the icy winds of the abyss, four figures stood like monuments to decadence and power. Malphas, a demon with gigantic wings and cws that seemed carved from night itself, stared at the horizon with predatory intensity. His membranous limbs occasionally stretched, slicing through the air with a hissing sound that made the lesser demons guarding the doors tremble in terror. His eyes, two pits of ghostly fire, turned toward his allies, who waited with a mix of impatience and religious fervor.

  " The time has come to stop waiting in the shadows," Malphas hissed, his voice sounding like dry bones cracking under a heavy boot. "I know it took us longer than the four years we originally pnned for this great work. The humans, those pretentious ants hiding behind stone walls and cheap faith, believed their pathetic resistance was the reason for our silence. They did not know that time was not an obstacle, but an ingredient. We were perfecting the vessel that will contain our destiny."

  Beside him, Vespera, a demon whose figure was wrapped in bck armor so polished it seemed to absorb space itself, let out a cold ugh. Her fingers, ending in sharp tips, tapped rhythmically against her bracer.

  "Let them keep celebrating their 'peace' in Whirikal and Orestia. The higher they think they have built their castles, the more melodious the sound of their foundations shattering will be. The dey only allowed us to gather what was truly needed so that our lord’s return would be absolute," she added, her gaze filled with a malice bordering on madness.

  Grog, an ogre whose height made the tower’s architecture seem small and fragile, growled in agreement, acidic saliva dripping onto the obsidian floor and corroding it instantly. Beside him, Asterion, the minotaur with dark fur and horns engraved with blood runes, kept his double-bded axe resting on the ground, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the great magic circle dominating the chamber. There was no loyalty in their faces in the human sense of the word; what existed was twisted devotion, a thirst for chaos that could only be satisfied by the presence of a superior entity.

  Malphas made an imperceptible gesture with his cw, and the atmosphere in the chamber changed instantly. A procession of lesser demons—deformed creatures with too many eyes or limbs—entered the room carrying objects that would make any mortal’s sanity unravel in an instant. With mechanical and terrified movements, under the scrutinizing gaze of the commanders, they began pcing the relics at key points of the gigantic runic circle that covered almost the entire floor.

  First, they deposited the bones of ancient titans, remains of creatures that walked the world before the gods had names, charged with static death energy that made the air grow dense. Then they poured the blood: a thick bck mixture from demons fallen in past wars, and a fresh, vibrant red blood extracted from sacrifices of human bloodlines that carried the spark of nobility. Finally, they pced magical stones of impossible colors, each pulsing with intermittent light, representing elements of nature corrupted to their darkest essence.

  When everything was arranged, Malphas advanced to the center of the circle, holding a gss vessel that seemed to pulse with its own light. Inside was a celestial liquid, a hypnotic substance that moved with a will of its own, spinning and shining with a glow that promised both eternal glory and absolute destruction. Any demon who gazed upon that liquid felt an irresistible urge to leap forward and drink every st drop to satisfy a spiritual hunger they had never known existed. It was a divine poison, nectar from another pne.

  "Back, scum!" Malphas roared, striking the lesser demons aside with a wing as they stared in fascination at the celestial glow. "This is the catalyst. The soul of what is to come."

  With terrifying precision, Malphas pced the vessel at the heart of the circle. He looked at Vespera, Grog, and Asterion, and for a moment, their rivalry vanished before the magnitude of the ritual.

  "Now! Circute all your power! Hold nothing back for your miserable individual ambitions!"

  The three commanders roared in unison, releasing waves of dark mana that struck the magic circle like a tsunami of shadows. Massive amounts of energy began to circute at dizzying speed around the sacred objects. Malphas, at the center of the storm, began chanting a spell in an unknown nguage, a tongue of harsh, guttural sylbles that seemed to tear the air itself apart.

  At that moment, reality began to violently distort. Spatial cracks appeared throughout the hall, fractures in the fabric of existence that revealed the absolute void beneath the world. The pce began to colpse; the stones of the tower were pulverized and floated in the altered gravity, but no one in the chamber flinched. The demons continued injecting their power with iron will, their faces contorted by effort and fanaticism.

  As the spell approached its climax, the bones, blood, and magic stones began to melt, losing their physical form and becoming a primordial sludge that mixed with the celestial liquid. The light exploded, a combination of electric blue and absolute bck that blinded even the commanders for a moment.

  The liquid, now infused with all the energy of the chamber, began to take shape little by little. First a vague silhouette, then the limbs of a person. The figure hardened at astonishing speed, transforming into a statue of volcanic rock that steamed with internal heat, making the air vibrate. The rock began to crack, emitting metallic sounds that echoed like funeral bells.

  "Look! It’s happening!" Vespera excimed, her armor vibrating under the pressure of the mana. "The awakening is imminent!"

  The demons present, from the smallest to the most powerful, began to accim with hoarse and distorted voices. "Welcome, my lord! Welcome, the end of times!"

  But when the rock finally shattered into a thousand pieces with an explosion of energy that knocked several of them down, it was not a gigantic monster that emerged. From the smoking rubble stepped a woman with long red hair, a color so intense it looked like liquid fire. Her skin was pale as marble, and her expression was one of absolute indifference, as if the entire world were nothing more than a grain of sand beneath her feet.

  However, when she lifted her gaze, her eyes revealed the storm within. They were eyes that reflected infinite depth, filled with ancient mencholy and rage. If Liselotte had seen them at that moment, her heart would have stopped; those eyes were terrifyingly simir to Tiara’s, the spirit of the pnet, sharing the same divine spark of origin, but unlike Tiara’s, hers were twisted by millennia of hatred.

  The woman walked with predatory grace toward the four demons gathered before her. Malphas, Vespera, Grog, and Asterion, without hesitation, knelt in unison, lowering their heads until their foreheads touched the obsidian floor.

  "You took your time," the woman said. Her voice was not a shout, but it resonated in the minds of every living being in the citadel like thunder. "It took you longer than expected to find the appropriate fragments to reconstruct my essence. However... I will not punish you for your slowness. This time, you have exceeded my expectations."

  She looked at her hands, closing and opening them, experiencing the solidity of her new flesh.

  "Thanks to you being clever enough to find the blood of the pnet’s spirit, Lyre’s pure essence, and using it to create this body... I have acquired far more power than I ever had before those cursed heroes sealed me into nothingness," she continued, a cruel and overflowing smile curving her lips. "I feel Lyre’s life flowing through my veins. Now I am not only your sovereign; I am the punishment this world has brought upon itself."

  Suddenly, she began to ugh. It was an uncontrolled, hysterical ugh, a cacophony that made the spatial cracks open even wider around her. The demons looked at her with reverent terror. When she finally calmed down, her gaze turned cold, focused on the horizon beyond the red nds.

  "No one can stop me now," she procimed, her voice projecting with such force that it was felt in every corner of the continent. "Hear me well, inhabitants of the surface! The time of your games and your little crowns is over. I have returned to recim what is mine by right of blood and fire. The time has come to take revenge on humanity and conquer this entire world under my boot!"

  The roar of the demons that followed her words shook the foundations of the Citadel of Oblivion. The holy war the humans were pnning was no longer an offensive; without them knowing it, it had become a desperate race against the end of their species. The Crimson Queen had returned, and she carried in her veins the very blood of the earth they had sworn to protect.