The sorcerer’s ambition was a blade held to the throat of the gods.

  “You court annihilation, Eryonn.”

  The voice came from the monk who had followed him—a withered ascetic draped in saffron robes, his eyes milky with age yet seeing more than any mortal rightly should. The old man leaned on a staff carved from the spine of a Naga prince, its tip eternally dripping a viscous venom.

  Eryonn, High Aspirant of the Black Lotus Clan, laughed. “Annihilation? No, old man. I seek ascension. The Wheel of Samsara grinds our souls to dust over an eternity. Do you not understand? We are all of us trapped as rats, no more than ants to the uncaring gods. I will break its spokes and reign as the architect of the new reality.”

  In his hands he clutched the Vajra of Indra, stolen from Indra’s celestial vault. Raising the Vajra as if taunting the gods with his hubris, the ritual circle beneath his feet—a spiral of crushed precious gems and the blood of the Devas—ignited, its flames casting shadows that writhed like tortured spirits. The air itself hummed with anticipation.

  The monk’s staff struck the stone with a power that shattered rock hundreds of feet below the earth, as he screamed into the rituals roar, “The Wheel is not yours to bend! To fracture it is to unleash the Adi-Atman—the Primordial Hunger that even the gods fear!”

  But Eryonn had long ago ceased listening. As the monk’s futile efforts spread venom over Eryonn’s magical shield, he chanted the Mahakala Mantra, its syllables sharp and as devoid of life as shattered bone. The Vajra’s light pierced the heavens, and the sky itself sundered. And screamed.

  ———

  As the mortal realms sky smoldered far below him, Eryonn found himself standing atop the Peak of Infinite Dawn, where the stars burned close enough to scorch his flesh. Below him, the mortal realm sprawled—a tapestry of kingdoms and forests woven between vast stretches of ocean, blissfully unaware that the very fabric of existence was threatening to unravel. Eryonn’s heart was pained as he saw the beauty from so far above, a view no mortal being had ever before been graced with, but he grit his teeth in determination as he raised The Vajra high over his head. The Vajra of Indra vibrated with Divine force, the sheer power shredding the flesh from Eryonns arm, its diamond surface pulsing with the trapped lightning of an eternity of storms, its gilded edge tempting with the promise of godhood.

  Eryonn’s lips curled as he recited the Eight Unspoken Syllables—words forbidden and thought lost to time. The air split, not with cacophonous noise, but with silence, as if reality itself inhaled sharply. Far below, the earth wept as rivers began to bleed upstream, mountains quaking violently as if even their ancient, unyielding cores felt the gravity of his actions.

  The Devas came first as legion, blinding spears of divine fury aimed to pierce his heresy, promising a grim reminder of the fragility of mortals. But Eryonn had carved their sigils into his ribs years ago, each scar a burial ground for a god’s name. Their wrath shattered against him like glass on granite.

  “Mortal fool,” resonated a voice older than continents—Varuna, Lord of Oceans, his beard a cascade of stars and drowned galaxies. “You cannot unmake what we have woven.”

  Eryonn simply laughed. “I do not seek to unmake,” he said, driving the Vajra into the stone beneath his feet. Blood—his own, thick and black as primal tar—pooled around the blade. “I seek… to replace!”

  The Divine Gods watched and waited as The Peak of Infinite Dawn trembled. Not earthquakes but something deeper—the groan of ancient chains as creation itself tilted and began to pull itself apart. Stars winked out one by one as the Vajra drank their light. In the mortal realm below, animals wailed their terror in unison, priests of all religions found their prayers and pleas answered with but scorch marks on parchment.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  When Indra himself descended, riding a war elephant forged from the diamond dust of the endless turning of The Wheel’s Thousand Spokes, Eryonn was already more than flesh. His shadow stretched across the realms, woven with threads of stolen divinity. The Vajra floated from the stone to his hand and was raised not as a weapon, but as an extension—a new law thus written, a new god thus born.

  “You are too late,” Eryonn whispered to the Divine Gods among the paling stars—and meant it as neither boast nor threat but as simple fact.

  The Wheel of Samsara ground to a halt suddenly, as Indra ripped the Diamond Chakra from its core, “Mortal, you are a but a gnat struggling against the gods.” Indra threw the Chakra at Eryonn with the might of a thousand supernovas, and for a brief moment, chaos ceased. The rivers halted their backwards flow, the mountains stood tall and still, reality itself seemed to pause as if time itself waited for what came next. On instinct and with his newly divine senses, Eryonn blocked the attack with the stolen Vajra and struck the Diamond Chakra in its central axle.

  Both Divine Weapons shattered. Chaos resumed its reign in the realm below.

  Eryonn’s triumphant smile broke against Indra’s resilience, “No… no… what have we done…” he whispered as The Twelvefold Chains of The Wheel and the Golden Slivers of Indra’s Vajra fell as individual Godsplinters into the raging chaos far beneath them.

  Indra roared as his elephant dissolved into a sleet of diamond dust that rained destruction on the breaking realm below. “You have birthed The Unmaking! All… is as none.”

  In the wake of the cataclysm, a Void Rift formed at the Peak of Infinite Dawn, an endlessly hungering wound in reality itself. Continents tore free of their chains, mountains crumbled, and sand flooded from deserts into the rift. Devas let loose reality-bending shrieks as their ruined bodies erupted in fountains of celestial blood, a beautiful yet macabre rain descending upon all the realms. Eryonn’s flesh unraveled into golden strands as the sardonic laugh of his unmaking echoed thunderously through The Six Realms.

  In the mortal realm below, a mother clutched her dying son. The sky around them shined with the light of a thousand diamond suns as chaos and destruction was delivered upon them. The boy’s fingertips brushed a glowing rock that had struck clean through his caretaker. As her body burned, the burnt-umber glow etched veins of fire into the boys body as the rune [Ember] engraved itself in his palm. When the child coughed, flames burst from his lips, finishing the destruction of their home already far past redemption. By dawn, the surviving Elders would call it a miracle. By dusk, they’d war over the child's still-warm body for scraps of rune-flesh. So began The Hunger— priests ravenous as Pretas—hungry ghosts, kings baptizing their armies in the ashes of their homelands. The Fragments of The Wheel would soon be the only gods worth worshipping.

  When the dust settled centuries later, the world was no longer a sphere, but a reflection of the Shattered Wheel of Samsara— the landmasses fused together into a single colossal ring around the Peak of Infinite Dawn which now sealed the Void Rift within. The Six Realms, once distinct layers of existence, had been hammered together in the forge of the failed ritual, becoming territories surrounding the central hub.

  ———

  250 Years Later

  A scholar-cleric of the Lotus Society scaled the Peak of Infinite Dawn. Weeks of grueling travel had led her to the highest point a mortal human was able to reach on the central hub. Her hands clawed at stone that still slowly wept Eryonn’s blackened blood, as she pulled herself over the final ledge of her ascent. Heaving breaths racked her body as she struggled in the thin air. Turning, she found herself face to face with a jagged scar in the rock shimmering black with inverted starlight. Her suspicions were revealed as truth as her lantern flickered and the flames began to be pulled into the scar. “The rift is truly widening… the Six Territories think they rule,” she whispered to the howling wind, “but none see the World Eater coiled in waiting.”

  Deep below, in the mountain’s molten core, the Adi-Atman— the Primordial Hunger — stirred. The serpentine liquid of void energy, gnawed persistently at the seals Eryonn and Indra unknowingly forged in the wake of their conflict. When the Hunger rises from its slumber, the Shattered Wheel will complete its unraveling, and all realms will plunge into its throat. For now though, the mountain stands tall, containing the devastation within, as in the shadows of its infinite slopes Seekers like Taran hunt for Godsplinters to obtain the power necessary to find answers.