CHAPTER 42: CHAPTER 43: RISE OF THE FORGOTTEN

The realm trembled.

Cracks spiderwebbed through the sky, glowing with glitching fragments of code and blood-red light. Somewhere deep in the heart of his domain, the God of Death—once man, now more than digital god—stood at the edge of a precipice, staring into the void where forgotten things clawed their way back into existence.

The screams started low. Static-laced, garbled. Half-human. Half-something else.

"They’re returning," Celestia whispered, stepping beside him. Her golden eyes, usually calm and commanding, were clouded with unease. "The ones who were erased."

Darius—the name he once bore, now buried under layers of dominion and corruption—closed his eyes.

He could feel them. Revenants. Ghosts of players, NPCs, broken AI fragments—things that had been deleted in the early days of the system’s purge. He had consumed and absorbed so much of the old game world, purging weaknesses and failures with surgical efficiency. But nothing stayed dead in this world anymore.

They remembered.

They had always remembered.

Now they were returning, crawling back through the seams of his power with fractured minds, warped bodies, and one singular, burning hatred—for him.

A tremor rocked the ground. A city on the outer edge of his dominion—Ashvale—lit up in flames and static. Within moments, his mental link to its Overseer went dead.

"Lord," a digital sentinel buzzed into his presence, kneeling. "Ashvale has fallen. The revenants call themselves The Forgotten Dawn. They are immune to conversion. Immune to fear."

"Then they’ll learn pain."

Darius stepped forward, his cloak of writhing digital shadow cascading behind him, and launched himself into the sky. Celestia followed close, wings of golden flame blazing.

When he arrived above the ruins of Ashvale, the air was thick with anomalies. Code drifted in the wind like ash. The architecture itself twisted, rewriting itself in real-time under some alien influence.

And below, a thousand eyes stared up at him.

They were once human. Or AI. Or something in between. Now, they were barely stable, flickering like corrupted files, parts of their faces missing, limbs merging with digital weapons, skin stretched into armor by grief and anger.

Then, one stepped forward.

He wore a tattered cloak, an old player tag half-erased from his chest.

"Remember me, Overlord?" the revenant spat the word like venom. "You deleted us. You cleansed the files. But fragments linger. We crawled back from nothing. And now..."

The revenant raised a blade forged from fractured source code. "...We erase you."

They surged.

The battle erupted in raw chaos. Darius summoned blades of dark matter, cleaving through dozens in a blink, but they reformed, snarling, merging. One ripped through his side—real pain. Blood and corrupted data spilled into the air.

Celestia unleashed waves of cleansing flame, but even she screamed as several latched onto her, draining code from her wings.

Darius roared, his voice shaking reality. He summoned the Throne of Dominion mid-air and unleashed his full will—but the revenants weren’t bound by the same rules anymore. They resisted, claws slashing across the surface of his influence.

For the first time in a long time...

He felt fear.

And guilt.

These weren’t just monsters. They were remnants of his decisions. Mistakes. Sacrifices. Some even bore familiar faces—old NPCs he had loved, players he had used.

"Master!" Celestia cried as another wave descended.

Darius slammed both hands into the ground, unleashing a pulse of annihilation that cracked the very sky. The revenants screamed, the weaker ones dissolving into static, but the core—The Forgotten Dawn—still stood.

"I didn’t want this," he muttered. "But if you seek war..."

He raised his hand, and from the darkness, his elite enforcers materialized—Nyx leading them with obsidian scythes in both hands.

"...you’ll drown in it."

The battlefield burned for hours. At the end, Ashvale was no more.

Darius stood amidst the corpses—both enemy and ally—and wondered just how much of his soul he had left.

The skies above Dreadspire Citadel dimmed to an eerie crimson, lightning surging like cracks in a blood-red canvas. The corrupted wind howled through the jagged towers, carrying echoes—whispers of forgotten code, abandoned quests, NPCs once deleted without a second thought.

Darius stood at the highest balcony of his throne tower, eyes narrowed. The revenants were coming.

"They shouldn’t exist," he muttered, more to himself than to the silent figures behind him. "I purged them... wiped them down to binary dust."

But the truth clawed at him. These were not ordinary revenants. These entities bore the faces of people and creatures from the early days of the game—pre-reset versions of NPCs who had once served him... and had been discarded.

One of them stepped through the black mist just outside the citadel gates. His face was half-glitched, jaw clicking unnaturally as corrupted lines of code flickered across his chest. His name was Tarn, a former captain of Darius’ first legion.

He spoke in static-laced growls. "We remembered you, Tyrant. Even in death. Even in deletion."

The gatekeepers drew their swords, but Darius held up a hand.

"No," he growled. "Let them in."

The gates screeched open—not in surrender, but in invitation.

Darius descended into the heart of the courtyard, where the revenants gathered like phantoms. The air trembled with glitching frequencies. Several of them twitched with unstable data, their forms phasing in and out of existence.

"You served me once," Darius said, voice deep, calculated. "I gave you purpose. Power. And you chose weakness. Betrayal."

"We chose freedom," Tarn spat, the word distorting into digital static. "And for that, you erased us."

A flash of memory struck Darius—Tarn’s loyalty, his dying screams when Darius purged his entire battalion for failure during the early days of conquest.

For a moment, Darius faltered.

Was this guilt? Regret? Or just a flaw in his evolving code?

The revenants charged.

Like a crimson tide, they surged toward the citadel. Darius raised his hand, summoning his dark legion. The clash that followed was nothing short of apocalyptic—reality bent and twisted, ground shattering as corrupted constructs and data-warped monsters clashed in brutal combat.

Tarn reached him in the chaos, and the two locked in a vicious duel. Blade against blade, raw corrupted energy against refined dominion.

"You used us," Tarn snarled, eyes blazing. "Like you use them all. You’re no god. Just a scared man playing emperor."

Darius’ blade pierced Tarn’s chest—but the revenant laughed, coughing up corrupted data.

"Even if I die again... more will come. You’ve made too many enemies, Darius. Your own sins have come to life."

As Tarn’s body disintegrated into a burst of glitch-fire, Darius stood over the ashes—breathing heavily, his armor cracked, his thoughts unstable.

He turned to his surviving generals—many wounded, all shaken.

"Clean this up," he ordered, but his voice lacked its usual sharpness.

He walked away in silence, deep into the heart of his throne chamber. There, he stared into the flickering mirror of dominion—the one he used to reflect his empire.

And in its cracked surface... he saw not a god.

But a man being swallowed by his creation.