The shattered realms trembled — an infinite plane of fractured skies and bleeding stars, where gods, demons, and angels watched the mortal war through rifts in the fabric of creation. It was a place of stillborn suns and inverted mountains, where time hung heavy like ash.
Zeus stood among them, his armor cracked from the strain of being held back by the Veil's fading strength. His thunderbolt pulsed with restrained fury. Beside him, the Archangel Seraphiel's burning wings cast long shadows across the celestial scar. Demonic princes stood at the edges of the great fissure, claws flexing, their eyes locked on the mortal plane that was now slipping from their grasp.
Then the air shifted.
A cold wind rippled through existence itself — and the entire realm stilled. The light dimmed. The thunder quieted. Even the endless screams from the demon legions fell into silence.
From the black nothing between the fractures, a single figure walked out.
Morpheus.
He no longer radiated the raw power of a mortal mage. No — the gods saw it instantly — this was something worse. He was translucent at the edges, flickering like a dying flame and yet brighter than any sun. His skin shimmered with faint etchings of runes that moved beneath the surface, rearranging like living scripture. His eyes were bottomless voids rimmed with white fire.
And as he stepped forward, reality recoiled. The broken sky mended itself around him. The stars burned steady once more.
Seraphiel's composure snapped first. Her voice, a blade of fury and grief, cut through the frozen air.
"MORPHEUS! At last! At last, you show yourself before the divine! We offered you peace! We offered your world salvation and you spat upon it!"
Lightning forked across the sky from Zeus's clenched fist as the other celestial beings stirred — demons growling, angels drawing their radiant swords.
Morpheus merely looked up at them. His voice, when it came, was soft — tired — but it carried across the entire shattered realm like the toll of a funeral bell.
"Peace?"
He took another step forward. The ground, if it could be called that — splintered into molten chunks beneath his feet.
"Why is it that your definition of peace…"
His eyes lifted to meet Seraphiel's, unblinking, steady, ancient.
"…is the servitude of my people?"
The words hit like a hammer. The nearest seraph flinched — his halo dimmed. Even the demons hesitated.
Morpheus raised his hand. Tiny motes of light — like dying stars — circled his palm.
"You came to our world not to offer peace, but dominion. You demanded faith when you could not inspire it. You demanded obedience when you could not lead. You took from us our mothers, our fathers, our children — and you called it mercy."
Zeus's voice thundered across the expanse:
"Your kind was unworthy! You were chaos, tearing apart the order of creation—"
"Order?" Morpheus whispered. "You call your tyranny order?"
He stepped closer again. The gods felt it this time — the weight. The very air thickened with the density of collapsing realms. A nearby demon screamed as its body turned to ash, unable to endure his proximity.
"You think yourselves divine because you can create," Morpheus said, eyes fixed on Zeus. "But you create only cages. You build heavens to contain, hells to punish, and laws to keep your thrones intact."
Zeus's bolt crackled with blue fire, shaking the firmament. "You dare lecture the father of gods—!"
Morpheus cut him off with a whisper:
"I am not lecturing you, Zeus."
He raised his hand — and the lightning died. Every spark in the sky winked out at once.
"I am sentencing you."
A silence fell over the shattered realms, vast, suffocating, absolute.
***
The mortal realm was burning but this time, not with despair.
The skies over Britain split with the colors of spellfire, rune-light, and sacred flame. What once had been chaos now felt focused every wizard, every centaur, every goblin, every surviving giant and enchanted creature moved as one. The humans had regained their rhythm, their unity, their purpose — and for the first time since the Veil cracked, the gods knew fear.
Angels shrieked as the air itself turned against them — tempests of transfigured shrapnel ripping their wings apart. Demons clawed through the mud and smoke only to find their own shadows rising against them — animated by curses and necromantic will. Even the divine-born soldiers — the ones who had mocked humanity's weakness — were forced into retreat lines.
Morpheus's proclamation still echoed in the marrow of every mortal who could wield magic. They felt him. The realm sang through them. Power coursed through their veins like wildfire — and for the first time, the celestial invaders saw their prey become predators.
A towering seraph tried to rally the divine lines, his spear blazing with molten white.
"Hold the line! They are nothing but flesh—!"
A lance of lightning, twisted into a spear by human hands, tore through his skull before he finished the sentence. His body exploded into light.
From the smoke came a sound like a hiss.
Herpo.
He strode across the charred remains of the front line, every step measured, every movement brimming with cold rage. His hair clung to his face, slick with blood and soot. His robes were shredded, revealing the faint silver scars of his own transfigurations — remnants of his brother's madness now burned into his skin.
He didn't fight with elegance. He fought like someone whose heart had just been ripped out.
A demon lord lunged at him, claws dripping with molten ichor — Herpo's wand snapped forward, and the creature froze. Flesh twisted, bones shrieked, its body folding inward like origami until it became a single black stone. Herpo's eyes, cold and hollow, barely flickered as he kicked the stone into the mud.
Another angel descended, sword raised high. Herpo lifted his hand and spoke — a word of power that shouldn't exist in mortal tongues. The angel's wings withered mid-flight; its divine radiance dimmed into corpse-gray before it hit the ground, screaming.
And then — with a guttural growl that didn't sound human — Herpo's pupils split into vertical slits. His veins darkened. He unleashed his curse-born fury, his voice merging with the serpentine hiss of the basilisk within. Every being within a dozen meters turned their gaze away, terrified to meet his eyes.
Across the battlefield, demons stumbled as walls of earth erupted beneath their feet — Albus's transfiguration at work — and Herpo met them halfway, cursing, burning, breaking anything still standing.
The gods could feel it now. The tides turning. The mortals cutting through their legions.
A demonic prince screamed, its body aflame from both hellfire and human spellcraft.
"The Veil— the Veil is sealed! We can't retreat!"
An angel of gold and flame drove her spear into a charging centaur, even as she bled light from the wounds carved by a goblin's axe.
"We will not fall to mortals!" she roared. "Overclock! Overclock your vessels!"
And then — they did.
The gods' bodies began to crack, leaking white and red radiance. Angels screamed in transcendent agony as their halos burned hotter, wings turning to brands of light. Demons tore their own chests open, feeding their cores to the fires of their souls. Even the lesser gods — avatars of storm and ruin — began to glow brighter, sacrificing their forms for more power.
The air grew hotter, thicker. The battlefield became a furnace. The ground shook as magic density reached breaking point.
Herpo stood in the center of it, chest heaving, wand slick with blood. His voice was hoarse, a snarl ripping through the smoke:
"You think agony will save you? I've lived in it!"
He raised both hands — transfiguration and curse entwined. The ground beneath the overclocked gods split open. The soil turned to molten glass, and from beneath, serpentine constructs of solid stone erupted — biting, crushing, constricting divine forms.
Angels fell screaming from the sky. Demons exploded under the pressure of sheer mortal will.
And still, the gods pushed forward.
One — a towering figure of volcanic metal and molten blood — stumbled toward Herpo, laughing through the fire.
"You'll burn with us, mortal!"
Herpo's eyes flared green —
"Then let it be so."
Their powers collided, turning the battlefield into a blinding maelstrom of light, blood, and collapsing magic.
Above them, Albus and Tenzin's combined wards shimmered faintly, holding the collapse at bay just long enough for their armies to regroup.
The angels were breaking. The demons were dying. The gods were cracking.
And through it all, Herpo stood beneath the raining ash, breathing hard, eyes like two dying stars — the grief of a man who'd just lost everything now weaponized against creation itself.
It began as a low hum — a resonance of shared despair that spread through the divine and infernal ranks. The angels screamed hymns that cracked their halos. The demons tore at their own hides, channeling infernal essence until their veins glowed like molten iron. Even the gods trembled with the mad decision to unleash everything — to burn themselves out rather than accept defeat.
A suicidal surge of power flooded the battlefield. Wings disintegrated into light; horns burst into ash. The ground screamed, the air liquefied, and reality began to distort.
Herpo stood amid the storm of dying gods, his hands outstretched, tendons quivering as his own blood turned black from the backlash.
"No—no, no, no!" he rasped, slamming his palms into the shattered earth. Ancient runes burned around him, weaving barriers, siphons, wards — anything to slow the suicidal detonation around him. The backlash struck him like a tidal wave. His nose shattered. His ears burst. Blood spilled from his eyes, his mouth, his pores.
Still, he refused to fall.
He screamed through the agony, feeding his own life force into the crumbling wards. The world dimmed around him — sky collapsing into a red horizon, angels exploding into flares of gold, demons erupting into clouds of black flame.
Then, through the smoke, a voice cut through the chaos.
"Herpo!"
Helga's silhouette emerged from the ruin, light radiating from her palms. She dropped beside him, her hands pressing against his chest as healing runes shimmered over his ravaged body. The air hissed where her magic met his burning skin.
Herpo coughed violently, spitting blood and broken laughter. "You shouldn't—be here— he- would be furious."
"What has he done?" she hissed, her voice trembling as she forced her magic into him. "What has he done, Herpo? What has Morpheus done and where has he gone?"
Her voice cracked. Tears blurred her vision. Herpo's body convulsed as another shockwave struck them, but Helga held on, pressing harder, sobbing openly now.
All around them, the divine armies were dying not in glory, not in victory, but in desperation.
Herpo's eyes fluttered open just long enough to whisper, voice shredded by blood and exhaustion—
"He's… he's gone where none of us can follow."
The next blast tore the horizon apart.