The air in the Warrens tasted of rust and old blood.
Eryk Thorn ran, his boots slipping on damp stone, his breath ragged in his throat. The tunnels twisted like a serpent's gut, the walls pressing in too close, the ceiling sagging as if the weight of the world above might crush them at any moment. Behind him, the echoes of pursuit—boots, shouts, the metallic whisper of drawn blades. The Black Tongues. The Council's hounds.
And now, his father.
Kael Thorn had come for him.
Not to save him.
But to correct him.
Sera's hand clamped around Eryk's wrist, her grip was as iron as her knife.
"Move, Stray Dog!" she hissed, yanking him around a corner. Her knife was out, her eyes wild in the flickering torchlight. "They're closing in."
Eryk didn't need to be told. He could feel them. The hunters. The hunger. The hollow in his chest throbbed like a second heartbeat, a void that had learned to pulse.
He was still holding fhe Null Grimoire. But the moment he stumbled and his body crashed into the dirt, his power was triggered, causing it to be swallowed by his own. And Eryk didn't know what to do.
When he stood up, he tried to take it out of him but he didn't know how to do it. He couldn't let his power out anymore, as if the Null Magic was gone in him.
But it whispered in the spaces between his thoughts.
More. More. More.
He gagged.
"Focus," Sera snapped, shoving him forward. "You pass out now, we're both dead!"
Eryk stumbled, catching himself against the wall. The stone was slick with moss, cold beneath his palms. He wanted to scream. To tear at his chest until the book spilled out. To rip the hunger from his ribs and fling it into the dark.
But he couldn't.
Because the hunger wasn't just in the Grimoire anymore.
It was him.
~○~
The chamber burst into was a slaughterhouse.
Bodies littered the floor, their robes singed, their faces frozen in silent screams. The air reeked of charred flesh and something sharper—ozone, maybe, or the aftermath of a lightning strike. At the center of it all stood Veylin, the old Spellbreaker, his bone knife dripping black onto the stone.
He turned as they entered, his hollow eyes was gleaming at the moment.
"Ah," he said. "The prodigal son returns."
Eryk's stomach twisted. "What did you do?"
Veylin spread his arms, the knife glinted in the light. "Fed."
Sera's grip on Eryk tightened.
"We need to go. Now!"
Veylin chuckled. "Too late for that, girl. The feast has begun."
A sound echoed from the tunnel behind them—a roar, raw and furious, shaking the walls.
Kael.
Eryk's blood turned to ice.
Veylin's smile widened. "Ah. The Firebrand comes."
Kael Thorn emerged from the shadows like a storm given flesh.
Flames wreathed his arms, his eyes burning like coals in the dark. His cloak was gone, his tunic torn, but the fury in his stance was unmistakable. He didn't look like a father. He looked like a man who had come to burn the world to ash.
His gaze locked onto Eryk.
"Boy."
The word was a blade.
Eryk flinched. "Father—"
Kael didn't let him finish. He lunged, fire erupting from his palms in a searing arc. Eryk barely dodged, the heat singing his hair as he crashed into Sera. They hit the ground hard, the impact driving the breath from his lungs.
"Is that your father? He could've killed us with his fire!" Sera snarled, shoving him aside as another blast shattered the stone where they'd lain. "Get up!"
Eryk scrambled to his knees, shaking his hands. His chest ached. The hollow inside him pulsed, as if eager to meet the fire head-on.
"Stop it, father!" Eryk choked out. "I don't want to fight you!"
Kael's laugh was a broken thing. "You think this is a choice?" Another blast, this one so close the heat blistered Eryk's skin. "You shame us. You spit on our name!"
Eryk's vision blurred as he tried to avoid the fireballs going through him.
He doesn't see me.
Not as his son.
Not as anything but a failure.
Veylin's voice slithered through the chaos. "He will never understand, boy. Mages never do."
Kael's head snapped toward the old Spellbreaker.
"You."
Veylin grinned. "Me."
Kael's fire surged, a torrent of flame that engulfed the old man in an instant. But Veylin didn't scream. He didn't burn. He absorbed it, the fire vanishing into his hollow core like water into sand.
Kael staggered back with his eyes so wide.
"What—"
Veylin lunged, the bone knife flashing. Kael twisted, but not fast enough—the blade grazed his arm, and the flesh grayed where it touched, the magic in his veins unraveling.
Eryk's stomach lurched.
No!!!
He didn't think twice. He moved as fast as he could to go through his father.
The hollow in his chest opened.
But it was too late for him anymore. Because the feast started again, and Veylin was just smiling through him while Eryk's father was kneeling in front of Veylin.
And then, darkness erupted from Eryk's hands, hid eyes darkened as if he eas in rage.
Not fire. Not light. The absence of both. It slammed into Veylin like a living thing, swallowing the old man's stolen magic in an instant. Veylin gasped, his knife clattering to the ground as his veins blackened, his skin withering like parchment in flame.
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
Then Veylin collapsed, his body folding in on itself like a puppet with its strings cut. His father, Kael, just watched his son doing it.
And then, Veylin turned to be dead as his whole existence but his skin swallowed by the thing in Eryk's chest.
Just like Mael.
Just like Dren.
Eryk stared at his hands. They trembled, the darkness receding but not gone. It lingered beneath his skin, coiled and waiting.
More.
"Eryk...?" Kael's voice cut through the silence. "What are you?"
Eryk looked up. His father stood frozen, his fire guttering with his face a mask of horror.
The word tore from Eryk's throat before he could stop it.
"Your son!"
Kael flinched. For a heartbeat, something flickered in his eyes—doubt, maybe, or grief. But then his jaw tightened, and the fire returned, brighter than ever.
"No," he growled. "My son died the day he let the Academy cast him out."
The flames surged.
Eryk didn't move to his stand because e was so tired.
Of running.
Of fighting.
The fire hit him like a hammer.
But the void just ate it like a food.
~○~
The world unmade itself.
It didn't crack or shatter. It just folded inward. Like breath held too long or a scream choked down too deep.
Fire met hunger.
Light met absence.
For a heartbeat—no, a breath stolen from time itself—they hovered. Kael's flames writhed around him like a living crown, searing gold and furious. Eryk's magic, in contrast, gaped open like a wound in the fabric of existence, vast and quiet and endless. A void that was not empty, but starving.
Then they collided.
The impact did not ring like thunder, nor crack like lightning.
It erased.
Sound didn't explode; it just vanished between the two of them. A deep, swallowing stillness, like the world had forgotten how to make noise. The clash of fire and void birthed not chaos, but silence absolute.
Kael's fire didn't flicker out.
It was devoured by the void living inside Eryk's.
Flame curled in on itself, drawn hungrily into the black. No ash and no smoke.
Kael staggered back. His knees hit the stone with a sickening thud. His hands, still frozen mid-cast, had turned the color of dead bark—gray, brittle, veins shriveled as if the magic had been sucked from his blood like marrow from bone.
He gasped. The air was so wrong—thin, tasteless, and hollow. As though the void had swallowed more than fire. It had taken the very flavor of the world.
Across from him, Eryk stood trembling.
His hands were numb. His fingertips tingled with ghost-fire, but there was no heat. Only cold. Not winter cold, but something deeper, like a buried chill that remembered the dark before creation.
"I don't want to fight, papa..."
His vision blurred. The hunger inside him pulsed, sated and yet restless, like a mouth forced shut that still wanted.
His chest ached with the weight of it. With the wrongness of it.
"Please... I don't want this."
Kael raised his head slowly, as if it cost him everything. His face was ashen, streaked with soot and shock.
"What have you done?" Kael tried to make a fire but it seemed like he was so drained he couldn't call his mana core anymore. "What did you do?"
His voice was hoarse, not from anger, but from disbelief. From devastation.
Eryk couldn't answer. He opened his mouth, but there was only breath, and no words could fill him in.
Because the truth was worse than any accusation his father could throw at him.
He hadn't done anything.
The void had.
It had reached through him—used him—and acted.
And it had enjoyed it.
The silence between them were too defeaning the moment they stopped fighting.
And then, Eryk felt a hand on his shoulder, making him startled to his stand while he wasy crying.
Sera.
Her touch grounded him, rough and warm and real in a world that no longer felt solid. Her voice, low and sharp, cut through the haze. "We need to go. Now."
Eryk's feet refused to move. His eyes were locked on hin father.
The Firebrand. The Breaker of the Burning Gates. The man who had reduced armies to cinders.
Kneeling and empty.
His fire gone.
His legend undone.
Eryk's throat closed around a lump made of guilt and grief and fear.
"I never wanted this," Eryk whispered. "All I wanted was to have a mana just like yours, because I'm scared I will fail you."
The words felt too small.
Kael didn't reply.
He didn't even blink. Didn't breathe.
He just stared at his son like he was judging him.
Maybe he couldn't speak. Maybe he wouldn't.
Or maybe, after everything, there was simply nothing left to say.
Sera's hand tightened. "Eryk."
He flinched.
It wasn't the name. It was the way she said it.
Like he was still human. Like he hadn't just unmade the man who had raised him. Like he wasn't a walking curse with a hole where his soul should be.
The void was no longer seen in Eryk's as he heard Sera's voice.
Sera yanked him back. "We have to move. They'll come here and they will take and kill you if they found out what you did."
And as if summoned by her words, the tunnels behind them breathed.
Whispers, barely audible at first. But growing. Echoing through stone and memory.
Spellbreaker.
Monster.
Thorn.
The last word hit hardest.
Not just a name. A legacy. A weight Eryk had carried his whole life. And now... Now it was fractured beyond repair.
The void stirred in his chest. But it was quietly watching him now.
More.
~○~
They emerged from the Warrens near dawn.
The sky above the Ashen District was the color of rotting plums—gray and purple and bruised. Rain threatened at the edges, a humid heaviness in the air. Smoke coiled through the broken streets like ghosts with nowhere left to haunt.
Eryk stumbled forward, legs buckling. He collapsed against a crumbling wall, and a stone biting into his back.
His chest heaved. His hands still trembling up until now.
Sera crouched beside him, her knife still drawn, her back to the wall. Her eyes flicked between alley shadows like a hawk tracking prey.
"We can't stay here," she said.
Eryk didn't answer.
He was staring at his hands.
But he could feel it—wrong.
Like his skin was just a mask stretched over something else.
Sera turned to him, her voice softening in a way it rarely did.
"Eryk."
He flinched again.
That voice—genuine and unsure—hit harder than any blow. It peeled away the numbness just enough to hurt.
"I can't control it," he said. His voice cracked. "I didn't want to hurt him."
She didn't look away.
Didn't pity him.
Didn't fear him.
She saw him.
"I know." Sera took a deep breath. Then, slowly, she sheathed her blade. "But we couldn't stay here. They're going to hunt you down if you stay here."
He looked up. "I can't control the thing inside me, Sera. It swallowed the book inside me and I couldm't let it out..."
The morning light caught her face, etched it in steel and shadows. Her mouth was a grim line, her posture rigid and ready. But her eyes hadn't changed since the day they met.
Sharp. Steady. Unafraid.
"Then let's find someone who could teach you how to control it." Sera smiled faintly. "Together."
Eryk's breath hitched. His throat burned.
He nodded on her. "Together."
And for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, he felt it. A glimpse of hope.
Somewhere in the distance, the Black Tongues howled—a chorus of blood and bone and pursuit.
The hunt wasn't over.
But neither were they.
And the void, deep within his ribs, pulsed.
Waiting.
Always.