(Alternative Title: "Rubies, Specters, and the Echo of Forgotten Thrones")
The ruby pulsed violently against my chest, not just vibrating but sinking into my very marrow.It wasn't just energy.It was... memory.A buried scream from the origin of everything.
The Ojo roared within me.It wasn't a sound.It was a collapsing wall, a thousand voices crying out at once.
I dropped to my knees.The ground cracked beneath me, the old crypt trembling like it was about to vomit me back into nonexistence.
My mind shattered into fragments.
[Visions]
I saw—
A throne beyond stars, abandoned and bleeding.
A sea of kings and queens, bowed in terror.
A crown, floating in rivers of broken planets and dying light.
A name, whispered by entire dead universes:
Drav* C*ros *auron.
Not Renji.Not human.Something older, more monstrous, more inevitable.
The ruby in the door pulsed harder, cracks spider-webbing across its surface.It was responding to me — or maybe, to what was hidden inside me.
The Ojo inside my chest ignited in molten light.
The world bent.
Gravity screamed.
Symbols that had been dead for eons reactivated, spinning around me like broken planets.
Then — the rupture.
The crypt buckled inward.Reality ripped open, folds of raw existence peeling like burnt skin.
Out of the fissures poured Specters — not illusions, but living fragments of things that had died when the multiverse was still an infant.
They clawed at the air, screaming, begging, hating.
And above it all, something worse:
A presence.
Watching.
Smiling.
Waiting.
I barely had time to stagger backward before the ruby embedded in the door detonated with a soundless explosion.
[Elsewhere: The Forbidden Awakening]
Far beneath layers of earth and secrecy, the hidden facility of TP was being torn apart.
Sirens wailed.
Alarms burned.
Soldiers with gold-and-black uniforms sprinted across shattered hallways, dragging injured comrades, shouting into radios that only spat static.
The great Command Chamber, once a monument to control and order, now looked like the belly of a dying machine.
At the center, General Illyria stood, her eyes locked onto the impossible readings flashing across the last intact screens.
Entity 0-23n detected.Reality anchors: FAILING.Unknown breach type: UNDEFINED.
Without a word, she tore a badge from her collar —a relic older than any human civilization —and slammed it into a lock no one dared touch.
A hidden mechanism groaned open, revealing a red button, pulsating with ancient runes.
No hesitation.No backup plan.
She slammed her fist down.
[The Descent of Fallen Crowns — Corrected Version]
The earth screamed.The ceiling split apart, light leaking through fractures in reality.
And from that broken sky—a figure fell, armored in blazing radiance:
Amenadiel, Hammer of the Throne.
He landed hard, shaking the ground, his wings struggling to hold shape against the collapsing heavens.
At the same time—
From the cracked ground itself,from a chasm that vomited darkness older than hell—another figure rose, grinning with a mouth full of doom:
Lucifer, Morningstar Fallen.
He dusted soot from his jacket as if emerging from a particularly nasty pitfight.
The base trembled around them, unable to contain the weight of their existence.
Lucifer smirked, cracked his neck, and said:
"Well, it's been centuries since someone had the balls to pull me out of the Pit without knocking first."
Amenadiel frowned, wings twitching:
"Something ancient moves.Something even we feared to name."
Static exploded from the destroyed monitors.One last image forced itself onto every shattered screen.
A stone tablet.Ancient.Cracked.Floating in an abyss deeper than hell itself.
Three letters burned into its crumbling face:
DCT.
Lucifer's cocky grin shattered.
He stumbled back — a prince of darkness, staggered by three simple letters.
Blood dripped from his mouth and nose.
Amenadiel grunted, clutching his chest, silver blood spilling from his eyes.
The entire bunker tilted, the ground fracturing.
"No..." Lucifer rasped, voice hollow with something worse than fear.
"It cannot be him...The Forgotten One...The true Tyrant of Before."
Amenadiel forced the words past bloodied lips:
"D...C...T...Dravion Céfiros Thauron."
The screen shattered completely.The stone image burned into their memories like a scar.
[Meanwhile, Deep Within Renji]
Buried beneath stone and blood and dream—
Renji shuddered.
The Ojo in his chest pulsed once.Twice.
A slow, ancient rhythm.
And on his unconscious lips, barely a breath,barely a whisper—
"...Home..."
For a moment, the ruins of the crypt bent inward toward him, as if the very world itself remembered something too painful to survive.
And in the deepest currents of existence,a smile old as ruinbegan to spread across the forgotten halls of reality.