Ascheritt stepped forward, and the world trembled in response.

  The void had given way to a landscape in flux—skies of shattered constellations, rivers of molten silver carving through ruins untouched by time. The ground beneath him did not exist, yet he walked. The air had no substance, yet he breathed.

  It was a place unmoored, where existence itself was uncertain.

  The Watcher lingered behind him, silent.

  Ascheritt turned his gaze to the horizon. In the distance, a towering structure loomed—an inverted spire, floating above the ruins, tendrils of darkness coiling around its edges like a heartbeat thrumming in the dark.

  —"What is that place?" he asked.

  The Watcher’s silver eye gleamed. "The Axis of Fate. A remnant of what once dictated the order of existence. Now, it is nothing more than a corpse of law."

  Ascheritt took another step, and the weight of unseen forces pressed against him. The very air seemed to resist him, as if the world itself wished to reject his presence.

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  But he would not stop.

  His hand reached out, and for the first time, he felt something beyond the abyss—a thread, thin as a whisper, stretching between him and the fractured reality around him.

  He grasped it.

  A surge of memory—not his own—rushed through him.

  Flashes of war. Gods clashing against an unseen adversary. Chains forged from words, binding a figure whose face was lost to the void.

  Then, a voice—

  —"Break it. Rewrite it."

  Ascheritt’s fingers tightened around the thread. The world cracked, shattering like glass around him. From the fissures, shadows crawled forth—figures draped in tattered robes, their faces obscured by writhing symbols.

  The Watcher stepped back. "They have come."

  The first of the Forgotten.

  Entities cast aside when the divine rewrote existence, remnants of a past that had no place in the present. And they had sensed him—the Paradox, the one who should not be.

  A whisper crawled through the air. "Unwritten one..."

  The closest shade lunged. Ascheritt moved before thought could take hold, his body shifting with an instinct not his own. A hand met the wraith’s form, and the moment they touched, the laws binding the creature unraveled.

  It disintegrated, torn from reality itself.

  The other shades hesitated. The Watcher observed. And Ascheritt, for the first time since his awakening, understood.

  He was not bound by the rules of this world.

  He was beyond them.

  And that made him the most dangerous force of all.

  With a slow breath, he faced the remaining Forgotten, his presence alone fracturing the air.

  —"I don’t know what I am yet," he murmured, "but if the world seeks to erase me, I’ll just have to write myself in."

  The shades shrieked.

  And the battle began.