The prior discourse with Ellios had already begun to decay, fading into the ether like a hollow echo devoured by the northern gale. Now, Arka sat entirely alone within the stifling gloom of his chamber, willingly abandoning his mortal shell as his consciousness was violently dragged down into the abyssal void.

  At the absolute floor of that nothingness, he stood face-to-face with his destiny once more. The Death Gate loomed before him, arrogant and utterly unyielding, shrouded beneath a canopy of bruised, perpetually roiling ashen clouds.

  Slowly, Arka advanced, wading through a silence so dense it threatened to crush his ribs. As he stepped directly beneath the oppressive shadow of the gargantuan obsidian pillars, he raised his hand. His bare palm made contact with the surface of the gate—a stone that radiated a glacial chill eclipsing eternal permafrost. Instantaneously, a grotesque, unnatural reaction was catalyzed.

  The very surface of his astral flesh began to violently sublimate, bleeding off thick ribbons of white vapor that drifted upward. The vaporized essence of his soul slowly diffused, coalescing into a dense fog before spiraling upward to seamlessly merge with the necrotic clouds of the void. He was not being annihilated; he was physically resonating with an existence infinitely more primordial.

  Amidst this bizarre, corrosive dissolution of his own soul, the corner of Arka’s lip actually curled upward. "The curse of House Rahessa..." he spat, a razor-sharp scoff that violently fractured the dead silence of the dimension.

  His eyes drilled straight through the colossal monolith before him, his gaze dripping with absolute contempt. What breed of curse was genuinely worthy of his terror? What weight did a mere mortal threat to life hold when dragged before this absolute terminus of death? In this abyss where all ultimate ends converged, every conceivable manifestation of sorcery, blood-hexes, and the petty political machinations of the mortal sphere were reduced to utterly meaningless dust.

  House Rahessa profoundly underestimated the blood of House Sagara. Arka knew with crystalline clarity exactly how that arrogant dynasty perceived the world. Yes, perhaps the matriarchs of Rahessa possessed the sheer arrogance to read the currents of spirituality. Perhaps their eyes were calibrated to perceive the arcane veils hidden from mundane men, and perhaps their hands were capable of weaving the kinetic energies of the cosmos to their whim. They genuinely believed themselves to be the sovereign gods of life.

  Yet, that blinding hubris rendered them utterly blind. They could never decipher the architecture of the deepest, abyssal dark the way a Sagara could. Arka allowed the white vapor to continue bleeding from his form, feeling his metaphysical tether to the monolith of death grow exponentially denser and absolute.

  "Is the depth of your power truly so shallow that you dare to underestimate us to this degree?" he murmured with glacial coldness.

  If House Rahessa genuinely believed their pathetic curse possessed the tensile strength to bind a Sagara, they had committed a fatal miscalculation. They remained blissfully ignorant that the very youth they had so casually dismissed had just laid his hands upon the literal gate that would one day swallow their entire, arrogant dynasty whole.

  Amidst that suffocating silence, a sudden, sepulchral chill slithered up his spine. Arka did not flinch. His gaze remained welded to the black monolith towering before him, entirely apathetic to the new, elongated shadow currently stretching itself across the carpet of fog. He did not turn his head, nor did he require visual confirmation, for the very first time he had laid hands upon this gate, he knew with absolute certainty the Lantern Bearer would manifest.

  The ancient entity, draped in tattered, moth-eaten robes, stood perfectly still behind him, radiating a sickly, jaundiced yellow glow from the archaic iron lantern swaying gently in his right hand. That meager illumination felt incredibly fragile within the crushing void, yet it proved stubbornly resilient enough to avoid being devoured entirely by the encroaching dark.

  "House Rahessa," Arka’s voice butchered the silence, the timbre as frigid as the soul-essence continuously sublimating from his flesh.

  The Lantern Bearer cleared his throat softly, the sound akin to the crunch of desiccated autumn leaves beneath a heavy boot. "An ancient lineage," the old man countered placidly, "but not too ancient."

  The lantern swayed once more, establishing a metronomic rhythm for the history about to be unspooled. "They were consecrated with a blessing directly from the Gate of Preservation. A divine boon that serves to bind, whilst simultaneously restricting. They are mandated to pass that staggering power down exclusively through the female scions of their bloodline."

  The ancient figure drew a long, heavy breath—an inhalation that sounded thickly choked with the dust of bygone epochs. "It was birthed during..."

  His words hung suspended in the ether. The suffocating silence violently reclaimed the void. Arka could acutely sense that the Lantern Bearer was not merely hunting for vocabulary; he was staring across the vast, churning ocean of time, akin to a man desperately attempting to tally the stars on a heavily overcast night. Hmmm... The Sagara youth permitted the silence to stretch, profoundly feeling the astronomical age of the entity standing at his back, currently actively excavating memories from an unfathomably distant past.

  "I cannot say," the Lantern Bearer finally murmured, his tone yielding slightly to the labyrinth of time. "It proves exceedingly difficult to recall the precise chronological sequence." He stepped forward sluggishly, taking a position beside Arka without once severing his gaze from the Death Gate.

  "But one truth remains absolute. After the First Monarch descended and violently fractured the world order... three subsequent, cataclysmic disasters followed in his wake." The Lantern Bearer hoisted his lantern a fraction higher, casting its pale light upon a minuscule section of the gargantuan obsidian pillar. "House Rahessa rose from the ash of that specific cataclysm. They were not birthed from an era of peace; they were forged from the festering remnants of the world's absolute despair."

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  Hearing this, the corner of Arka’s mouth hooked into a razor-sharp sneer. So, the vaunted House Rahessa—who paraded with such suffocating arrogance and looked down upon his bloodline with such contempt—was nothing more than a byproduct of a disaster? The dynasty that loudly proclaimed themselves the sacred bearers of life had only crawled from the mud when the world was in its final, agonizing death throes. Arka let out a low, derisive snort, staring dead ahead at the absolute terminus of death, profoundly savoring the sickening irony of destiny's twisted game.

  Arka violently pivoted his will, snapping his focus away from the abstract historical discourse and anchoring it back to the dense, physical reality looming before him. His eyes swept across the freezing obsidian surface, halting abruptly upon a high-relief carving protruding from the left portal of the Death Gate.

  It was the relief of a colossal bull.

  Even imprisoned within the form of dead, motionless stone, the entity radiated an aura of pure, unadulterated savagery. The sculptor—whichever cosmic entity it had been—had forged it with harrowing, anatomical precision; its musculature was carved thick and impossibly dense, the veins bulging outward like the gnarled, hardened roots of an ancient oak strangling its entire frame. Its horns curved aggressively forward, serrated and vicious, looking as though they were primed to actively eviscerate the sky of the void. The bull’s visage was a terrifying mask of primeval cruelty flash-frozen in time.

  "Come forth," Arka commanded. His volume was not deafening, yet it resonated with an absolute, tyrannical authority that was instantaneously absorbed into the very molecular structure of the gate.

  The left portal of the Death Gate reacted with terrifying immediacy. The impenetrable obsidian surface seemingly warped, transmuting into a viscous, violently boiling liquid for a fraction of a second, before it violently detonated outward.

  GROAAARRR!

  An eardrum-rupturing bellow violently butchered the eternal silence of the fog dimension. The beast did not merely step forth with majestic grace; it violently breached the portal akin to a rabid, blood-drunk prisoner who had just successfully shattered the iron bars of a cell that had entombed him for millennia.

  Its movements were explosive, unrefined, completely saturated with eons of suppressed, volcanic rage and the feral, intoxicating euphoria of newly claimed freedom. Its massive hooves—no longer dead stone, but living, pulsating meat, bone, and sinew—slammed into the floor of fog with logic-defying, concussive force.

  BOOM!

  The earth of that empty dimension bucked violently, transmitting a seismic shockwave that forced the necrotic clouds above to spiral with escalating velocity. The sheer scale of the monstrosity defied all rational metrics—it was a moving mountain of pure, violent muscle, vastly larger and infinitely denser than any armored war-elephant that had ever walked the mortal sphere. Scalding heat geysered from its cavernous nostrils, forging fresh plumes of steam that violently swirled around its colossal, now-tangible physique.

  Amidst the seismic tremors and the catastrophic manifestation of sheer, brutal power, Arka entirely ignored his summoned abomination. His gaze slid sideways, locking onto the silhouette of the Lantern Bearer.

  The ancient entity remained anchored in place, entirely unfazed by the violently shaking earth or the rampaging fury of the bull. Arka observed that the aged face, typically swallowed by the shadow of his cowl, was now tilted slightly upward. The Lantern Bearer’s clouded eyes were welded entirely to the colossal beast currently celebrating its violent liberation.

  The dying light of the lantern reflected within those ancient pupils, and for a fleeting microsecond, Arka was utterly stunned. He witnessed no terror, no shock, nor any shred of awe reflected there.

  Arka recognized that the Lantern Bearer’s eyes looked as though they were desperately holding back a profound, agonizingly deep yearning. It was a gaze steeped in a silent, heart-wrenching nostalgia, as if the old man were bearing witness to a long-lost comrade—or perhaps a deeply cherished companion from an epoch long forgotten—finally being emancipated from its eternal shackles.

  Arka slowly raised his hand. With a gaze as glacial as the void essence surrounding him, the youth’s fingers moved, viciously twisting the residual fog of Rahessa’s lingering curse that still drifted wildly in the ether. The white vapor that had previously sought to cannibalize his soul was now nothing more than pathetic, pliable threads entirely enslaved beneath the absolute will of the Sagara heir. With a single, violent, unhesitating jerk of his wrist, Arka hurled the concentrated mass of cursed energy forward, allowing it to brutally impact and seamlessly absorb into the massive, mountainous body of the Titan Bull.

  "Hunt down the mother of the witch who authored this curse," Arka hissed. The absolute, tyrannical authority in his voice vibrated straight through the marrow. "Rampage across the ocean of her consciousness."

  To the apocalyptic power sourced directly from the Death Gate, physical distance and mortal wards were entirely devoid of meaning. Death required no physical address. Death required no plotted trajectory, no compass, nor any cartography. Even if its prey cowered within the most abyssal subterranean burrow, shielded behind multi-layered spiritual aegises, or seated upon the most heavily fortified throne in the mortal realm, death perpetually possessed the absolute certainty of how to locate its designated target. The moment a name was cast down into the dark, not a single breathing entity could evade the toll.

  Reacting to the absolute decree of its sovereign master, the Titan Bull unleashed a roar that actively tore the ashen sky asunder. The sound was no mere bellow of a feral beast; it was the apocalyptic war-horn of a bygone era. The gargantuan monster reared up, shifting its entire, impossible mass to stand vertically upon its hind legs.

  Its monolithic silhouette eclipsed the Black Gate, akin to a god of absolute ruin violently roused from an eternal slumber. Scalding steam blasted viciously from its dilated nostrils, violently colliding with the glacial ambient temperature of the dimension to forge entirely new, suffocatingly dense clouds of fog in the ether.

  When its front hooves finally slammed back into the earth, the empty world felt as though it were actively preparing to cave in on itself.

  The Titan Bull launched itself forward with a terrifying velocity that violently mocked the laws of physics for a creature of such astronomical mass. It carried with it the concentrated, boiling wrath of thousands of years. Every single thunderous strike of its gargantuan hooves against the fog-earth triggered a cascading chain of seismic shockwaves, sending devastating tremors that caused the entire void dimension to quake violently.

  The monstrosity continued its brutal, relentless sprint, physically tearing through distance and dimension, until the silhouette of its heavily muscled back slowly began to blur, eventually vanishing entirely, swallowed whole by the endless, rolling ocean of ashen fog.

  Arka stood absolutely motionless amidst the lingering seismic aftershocks, his darkening eyes locked onto the trajectory of his departing hound. Now, it was merely a matter of calculating the time until the first agonizing shrieks of absolute despair shattered the pristine walls of the grand residence of House Rahessa.