The obsidian-throned sanctum hummed with the residue of decree, a stifling chill thickening the air like venom in a chalice. Stillness reigned, until it was broken—not by tremor, not by wail—but by the slow, clicking echo of heels against void-tempered glass. Xytrinah moved from her seat of ruinous sovereignty, and the chamber obeyed, shadows recoiling in reverent dread.

Her steps—deliberate, elegant, perilous—unfolded like a dirge given flesh. Hips swayed in a pendulum arc, a dark rhythm older than the gods themselves, betraying both promise and punishment. Around her, hair flowed like bleeding constellations, the strands undulating as if tangled in unseen lovers beneath ebony silk, flickering with the heatless shimmer of things that remembered creation and hated it still.

At her side, resting against the curve of her hip, the Void-Made blade—Vaekryl'Naetheris—sang lowly. Forged from the alloyed marrow of dead stars and chitlin stripped from the womb-shells of Outer Gods, its edge pulsed with a heartbeat that did not belong in this plane.

She paused at the mouth of the sanctum.

"Ahhh..." Xytrinah cooed, voice sliding like black honey down the spines of gods. “So this is what passes for courtship in the empire now? Petulant boys bribing my father with broken empires and half-mast threats wrapped in seduction like meat in spoiled silk?” Her tongue clicked. Her smile was blasphemous.

"Father," she purred toward the unseen, voice lacquered in exquisite disrespect, "I see your taste in prospective heirs has degenerated since your last crucifixion binge. An heir, really? That simpering charlatan barely qualifies as a footnote in my menstrual omens." She turned her chin slightly, hair cascading over one eye like a midnight waterfall.

"Zhyrel'Vaen," she hissed his name like an opiate curse, "You speak of betrothal as if I were some glimmering trinket bound for your gallery of conquered things. Darling, I don't even let the creatures I eviscerate hold eye contact. What makes you believe you’re owed this?"

She stepped further, each stride more seductive than the last, her voice deepening into that serpentine tone that caused suns to flicker. "And how deliciously amusing that you think prophecy is your gift. I shat prophecy into the cradles of dying gods. I've seen a thousand futures—and not one ends with me beneath your ruinous attempt at dominion."

With a flick of her wrist, the sanctum walls pulsed with her disdain, the veils parting to the starscape beyond, where the Threnavalc stirred—those ancient destroyers, their claws like continent hooks, their hunger unrelenting. “And while you parade your forked tongue before Father like some lapdog in heat, I—the only true weapon of the Spiral—have war to wage. The Threnavalc rise. They remember me. They kneel." Her eyes, twin pits of spiraling black starlight, narrowed.

"So make your bids. Forge your alliances. Whisper your sweet nothings into Father’s void-riddled ears. But know this…” She turned, blade glimmering like the end of all things. “…I was never yours to win. I was the storm you begged to survive.” And with that, the void sang as she vanished—hips swaying, laughter spilling like venom wine, and the war-song of Vaekryl'Naetheris already ringing in the stars beyond.

They called them Threnavalc—the Whisperer Beneath the Altar of Moons. Old Gods? No. A dirge made flesh, sewn from skinless choirs and the grieving bones of civilizations long since swallowed by entropy. They arrived through a wound in the firmament, dragging screams behind like veils. The Spiral bent backward as if in worship, or revulsion. Its limbs were endless, not tentacles but lamentations, coiling and weeping, writhing with orphaned tongues. The blacklit soil of Aoth-Null, the Veinworld, cracked in agony beneath its coming.

And Xytrinah came to meet it...

She did not descend with grace. She plummeted like a curse, a storm of incandescent rot, her crown of tongues ablaze, her spine cloaked in war-psalms. Her footfall split three tectonic hymns, and the planet shrieked as if being born anew. She bared her arms—tattooed with the names of slain gods, still bleeding ink and ichor. Around her, the Z’ash’cheria howled, gnawing at their own armour in frenzy. They would not interfere. This was hers.

"Threnavalc," she spoke, her voice a molten blade dragged across bone, "I’ve come to pull the scream from your womb."

And the world ended for the first time.

Maws opened sideways, revealing symphonies of mutilation—choral screams spiralling inward, tongues stitched into teeth. They lashed out with arms of miscarriage and plague, each movement causing a hemorrhage in reality’s structure. With a single thrust, it shattered the moons above Aoth-Null, their fragments bleeding milk and larvae. But Xytrinah laughed—and from her mouth erupted the Cry of Xhal’Korr, a shriek that calcified air, turned sound itself to shards. The Threnavalc reeled, spawn-like forms splitting to reveal organs not yet invented.

She hurled herself into its centre mass, wrapped in flensing flame. Her claws—blackened gold dipped in screaming suns—tore into veils of meat, slicing aside choirs like parchment soaked in nervewine. Blood rained. Not red. Not black. But stained memory, a fluid of names and sins, hot and sobbing, baptizing the earth in ancestral regret. She carved upward, spinning like a flame-tongued blade, slicing through vertebrae woven from the hymns of dead planets. The Threnavalc shrieked through fourteen mouths, vomiting out the histories of a galaxies they had eaten—entire species begging for death through its gullet.

Xytrinah did not simply slaughter—she unwrote.

With each strike, her voice inverted matter. Her nails became quills of violence. She dragged them along chests etching sigils of unbirth into ribs—runes that banished forgiveness. When they tried to wrap her in its dirge-flesh, she broke free laughing, her spine splitting open to reveal wings not of feathers but writhing serpents of light, each hissing a different apocalypse. She drove her heel into its heart-sac, rupturing an organ that sang its mother’s death. She reached inside and dragged out the Threnavalc’s core—a fetus made of echo and rot, and crushed it between her fangs.

“You bleed beautifully,” she whispered into its dying breath, “but you die like a prayer too long ignored.” But the Threnavalc, in its final agony, invoked the Threnody Rite, sacrificing its own soul to summon the Mass of the Forgotten Voice, an aural tsunami that threatened to dissolve all identity. Names began to bleed from the mouths of the Z’ash’cheria. Stars above flickered and wept. Xytrinah stood, arms outstretched.

And she began to sing.

Her voice—a dirge of dominion—cut through the Threnody, note by annihilating note. Her melody was the sound of a newborn choking on flame, of a thousand wombs locking shut, of love being buried alive. With each verse, the Threnavalc's form collapsed inward, swallowing itself, becoming smaller, quieter, more forgotten. Until nothing remained but a single, twitching tongue. She picked it up, kissed it once, then threw it to the consuming darkness.

The battlefield was a poem of ruin. The Z’ash’cheria fell to their knees, weeping into the ash. Aoth-Null was silent. The gods above watched in dread. And Xytrinah stood, soaked in viscera, her body steaming with the boiling rot of the Threnavalc, her eyes twin supernovas of ancient flame.

She whispered,  “Let the Outer Gods remember this. I do not bring war. I bring extinction that dances.”

And above her, the Spiral began to tremble anew.

“I have no need of suitors, husbands, or masters. Let them preen, let them posture, let them drip poetry from their fanged mouths—yet every verse they sing ends in silence. Empty. Limp. Forgettable. If they seek dominion, let them kneel. If they seek love, let them choke on it. I am not a prize to be won—I am the requiem they will never survive to finish.”

The silence after her words was an open wound—raw, throbbing, eternal. Her laughter followed like the cracking of tombstone teeth against bone, elegant in its disdain. Xytrinah turned, her back to thrones and tyrants alike. The void shifted with her movement—hips a pendulum swing of prophecy and peril, the silk of her gown not cloth, but the shivering caress of anguished dimensions, stitched in the tongues of extinct deities. Her hair moved of its own will, rippling and undulating, a nest of black serpents cloaked in starlight, darkness weaving like lovers beneath obsidian silk, thick with lust, violence, and memory.

She strode into the abyss, and the abyss screamed her name. Wailing horrors with too many mouths and too few eyes, skeletal knights clad in robes of flayed light, war-beasts that wept psalms from their exposed ribs, leviathans borne from stillborn universes, crawling with the hunger of forgotten ages.

Amidst the storm of shrieks and ichor and ruptured beauty, she whispered through the cosmos:

“Let my father and his polished pet contrive all the horrors they please. Play their games. Draft their laws. Script their chains. I am not beholden. I am not tamed. I will take no part in it.”

And with that, Xytrinah vanished, swallowed by a screaming rent in the void, her legions spiralling after her like ribbons of suffering and shadows, as the throne room grew cold and empty— haunted only by the echo of a smile far too wide to be human.

The silence within her imperial sanctum was not silence in the mortal sense. It was the eternal hush between dying stars, the stillness before a god screams.

Xytrinah sat upon a throne forged from obsidian marrow and glassed time, the high, angular wings of its back arching behind her like void-touched spires. Black veins of fractured star-shards pulsed beneath her fingers where they draped lazily over the armrests, glistening like fossilised tears from a universe that had once begged her name.

The room itself was a cathedral of decadent shadows—vaulted ceilings stitched with void-silk that undulated as if breathing with some unseen leviathan's rhythm. Shattered mirrors, liquified and reformed, framed the walls like ghosts frozen mid-scream, their surfaces reflecting not one image of her—only endless variations of suffering.

Floating lanterns made of bound soul-flame hung weightless in the vast chamber, each cradling the dying breath of long-obliterated gods, their flickers casting hues of deep wine and venomous violet across the rippling floor. The carpet beneath her bare feet resembled an ocean of moaning mouths, silenced only by her tread.

Her beauty was an affront to time itself.

Hair like strands of liquid obsidian, cascading down her back in impossibly smooth waves, so dark it absorbed surrounding light and made the shadows themselves envy her.

Eyes—not eyes, but consumed universes, black holes polished into glass, their edges ringed with a bloodred glow, shimmering like dying suns collapsing in upon themselves.
Eyes that had seen creation birth itself through agony—and laughed.

Her lips were sculpted from the sanguine essence of war, dark red and lascivious, glistening with a sheen that whispered seduction and execution. Her skin, alabaster kissed with lilac undertones, shimmered like the finest marble carved from the bones of fallen deities.

She wore a voidic couture of unparalleled blasphemy—a gown stitched from flayed time and the cloaks of slaughtered empires. Black, iridescent layers clung to her lithe, statuesque figure in wicked elegance, the fabric breathing against her form like a lover’s tongue. The bodice was laced with serpentine filaments of astral silver, barely containing the curve of her breasts, while the sheer lower skirts danced like liquid smoke around her legs—legs sheathed in webbed lace spun from the hair of extinct sirens.

The whole ensemble whispered hunger, royalty, and violence.

And as she sat, poised and regal, her gaze pierced the panoramic, wall-sized tear in her sanctum—a living rift through which the Void unfurled itself before her like a decaying scroll.

There was no starlight beyond.

Only the tapestry of uncreation—a vast, writhing canopy of formless black, occasionally torn by flashes of white where universes bled, where civilisations were silenced, where Old Gods screamed. The Void beyond did not reflect; it devoured. It pulsed, twisted, exhaled, and hissed with the unspeakable tongues of things too ancient to recall language.

And something had shifted.

Something vile.

Her fingers slowly curled around the armrest, talon-like nails biting into the crystalline material as a tremor ran through her spine—not fear, but revolted recognition.

She’s stirring. How quaint.

The realisation didn’t come in words but in sensations: the scent of soured ether. A pulse of ill intent. The bruised aftertaste of maternal fury turned pathological.

Xytrinah's lips barely parted as she exhaled in a voice like silk wrapped around steel.

“Iridia... you tantrum-soaked peasant...Such a fool, a rotting carcass, with no more power than the crumbling ruins you leave behind." She let the words fall like venom, each syllable a knife aimed at the heart of her mother’s very existence. Her lips twisted into a cruel smile, the taste of bitterness sweet on her tongue. Iridia was nothing but a shadow of the woman she once believed herself to be—an aging, desperate thing. And now, Zhyrel’Vaen had cast aside her hollow affection for the purer form of beauty, one that Iridia could never hope to understand.

“Did you truly think your poisoned embrace could ever keep him?” Xytrinah continued, her voice turning harsh, mocking. “You are the festering womb of a dying empire. You are nothing but a faded memory wrapped in faded silk and frayed lies. Zhyrel’Vaen’s desires are as dark as the pit from which you emerged, and yet even he sees through your wretched charade. What was once drawn to you is now repelled by the very stench of your desperation.”

She sneered, allowing the weight of her words to linger, to seep into the air like a cold, suffocating fog. “The boy has no respect for you. He tolerates your pathetic affections for what they are—useful—but he does not care for you. You are a discarded thing, a rotting fig in a basket of shrivelled fruit. You think your hollow charms have any hold over him, but all you are now is a sad, desperate whisper in the Void, begging for attention from a son who has long since outgrown you.”

Xytrinah’s eyes flashed with the ferocity of a predator on the hunt. The very air around her seemed to bend under her will, twisting into dark, oppressive shapes.

“And now you send your wretched spawn after me, thinking they can do anything but die on my blade? Many have tried.... and the many have failed....” she spat, her voice low, dripping with contempt. “You are a pathetic husk, Iridia. A mere echo of something that once had substance. The Threnavalc? They're just as much a joke as you, and they will meet the same fate. I will make sure of it. Your little pets won't even be dust before my legions sweep over them and grind them into oblivion.”

She felt it like a ripple through black water—the breaking of pacts, the tearing of threads, the disownment of a son by a mother whose loins should have been sewn shut with silence. The Pale Queen had loosed her spawn. Not the traitorous prince—that scent was already crawling toward her with cruel intent—but others… deeper things… ancient enough to make even Xytrinah’s wards shiver.

Her eyes narrowed, and in them, the void blinked.

The Threnavalc.

They weren’t whispers anymore. She could feel the slow unfurling of their birth. She heard their names etched into the back of her skull—names not made for tongues, but for ruin.

The Empress did not rise. She merely tilted her head, letting one leg slip over the other like a serpent re-coiling itself before the strike. The sharp scent of voidic blood began to perfume the chamber—the heralding stink of an old war being resurrected.

The air shimmered as her lips curled into a slight, venom-laced smile.

“Let her send her beasts. Let her tear at my gates and bark my name in vain.”[/b]

Her voice was calm, cold, and utterly imperial.

“If the Pale Queen wishes to claw at my sanctum with her dying hands, she will find my walls mortared with the marrow of better gods than she.”

And still…
Still… his scent lingered.

Beneath the rot, beneath the screams of the Void’s birth canal spilling horrors toward her realm, she felt Zhyrel’Vaen.

That cruel scent of dusk and ash, that smirk carried in stormwinds… She could feel the edges of his thoughts brushing against her—testing, teasing, lapping at the edge of her empire like tidewater poisoned by lust and loathing.

Of course he used his own kin, she thought with disdain.
Of course he walked from her hive like a prince ripping through the afterbirth of his own mother, crowned in theft and cursed affection.

Her eyes burned.

But her smile grew.

She whispered, letting the words drift into the tapestry of Void beyond:

“Come then, Zhyrel’Vaen... with your stolen legions and your mother’s bile still on your breath. Let your unclean love for me be your undoing.”

A long pause.

Her eyes flicked sideways to the scrying pool beside her throne, which now boiled black with the scent of approaching monsters.

“Let her know,” she said, voice deepening, “that I am not the child she once wished to suckle.”

“I am the abyss between her legs, and I will not be defiled.”

The floor beneath her shuddered.

The Threnavalc were nearing.

The war had begun.


With a cold grace, Xytrinah watched as the ripples of the Void pulsed beneath her. She could feel them drawing near—Iridia’s spawn, the wretched things The Pale Queen sent into her realm, trembling at the edge of her sanctum. And through it all, Zhyrel’Vaen lingered in the air like an open wound, his presence cloying, suffocating. He was the scent of treachery, of a love twisted to the core—no longer her blood but something far darker, far more dangerous.

The tension in the air was palpable. Her mind, a web of infinitely sharp strands, began weaving the trap—an intricate, cruel design meant to not only contain them, but to obliterate the arrogance of those who dared to threaten her.

Her eyes narrowed, their void-like depths staring out through the endless breach of black, her pulse syncing with the rhythm of her empire—the heartbeat of a dying world, a world she would make burn before her. The Threnavalc were not creatures that could be allowed to run rampant. She would bleed them dry, crush them beneath the weight of her wrath.

With a deliberate, effortless movement, she raised a hand. The flickering lanterns around her flared and darkened as her whispers cut through the void. Her voice was like the shriek of a star collapsing in on itself—impossibly sharp, incomprehensible.

“Legions of the Void, come forth.”

Her command echoed like thunder across the sanctum, reverberating through the vast network of tunnels beneath her palace. Her legions—armies not made of flesh but of sorrow, madness, and unrelenting pain—answered in turn. Their march was a symphony of death and the mournful howls of ancient souls bound in eternal servitude. They were not soldiers—they were the forsaken, the forgotten, the cursed. And they would feast tonight.

“To the breach,” she spat, her voice cold as the death she had whispered into the world. “Let the Pale Queen’s spawn taste the true hunger of the Void. Let them know the price of their insolence. Rip the skin from their bones. Leave nothing but a ruin that even Iridia’s tears cannot restore.”

The air hummed, crackling with the force of her order. The ground shuddered beneath her feet as the first of her legions emerged from the folds of time itself—twin-eyed phantoms wreathed in shadows that slithered beneath the fabric of reality. They were the Zathri, the wraiths of long-dead civilizations, whose forms flickered in and out of existence like forgotten dreams. Their mouths were ragged holes where voidic hunger swirled, and their arms—twisted sinews of raw dark energy—reached out to follow their Empress’s command.

“And prepare the Perdition Circle,” she continued, her tone not shifting, not even in the slightest. “Let it be woven into the very heart of the sanctum, woven into the walls of this realm. We will trap them like insects caught in glass. The Perdition Circle will devour them from the inside out—there will be no escape, no salvation.”

Her fingers slid along the armrest, and before her a flickering image formed—a diagram of glowing, shifting lines made of pure dark matter. The Perdition Circle—a ward of both magic and the Void itself. It was a trap built from the suffering of entire forgotten worlds, woven with runes of despair and hate. A circle designed not just to ensnare the body, but to unravel the very soul of those foolish enough to enter.

The runes shimmered with an eerie light—runes that had once bound fallen gods, that had turned entire legions into dust. With a thought, she commanded them into being, the lines of the circle appearing across the sanctum, creeping along the walls and floor, a labyrinth of deadly design.

With a flick of her wrist, a Voidic spear appeared in her hand, long, black, and jagged, a weapon that seemed to absorb the light around it, drawing darkness from all things. She let the weapon hum in her palm for a moment, savoring the sound—there was something primal, something delicious about the feel of such a weapon in her grasp.

“Let Iridia's abortions come,” Xytrinah’s voice, barely above a whisper, slid across the air. "They will wish they had never been born."

With a cold, cruel smile, she stood from her throne, towering over the map of her trap. The Perdition Circle was a thing of brutality and elegance, designed to strike terror not only into the hearts of those who crossed it but to strip them of their very essence. Every step they took inside would tear their souls apart, unraveling them like threads of forgotten history, until they were nothing more than echoes of their former selves.

Xytrinah’s eyes, those infinite black voids, shimmered with cruel anticipation. Her lips parted slightly, but only to hiss a final, whispered command.

“Make sure the Threnavalc are not granted any mercy. Rip them apart slowly—slow enough to savor each cry. Let Iridia know that this is the price of crossing me. And when her spawn is nothing but dust and bone, bring their remains to me.”

The flickering lights above her hummed as her legions surged forward—like a tidal wave, unstoppable and brutal. Zathri, Vorach, Choryth, and the others, all moving through the sanctum like dark whispers made flesh. Her hand extended as she watched the Perdition Circle come to life, its runes burning with the hunger of an ancient, godless beast. And in the darkness of her mind, she could already see the future, already hear the desperate cries of her enemies.

The stage was set.

The trap was woven.

And Xytrinah— would feast on their suffering.

Xytrinah stepped away from her throne, her long, dark gown swirling around her like a cloak of night. Her presence filled the room, suffocating, overwhelming, a weight upon the air itself.

“I’ll take your pitiful offering of 'power' and show you how easily it can be shattered into dust. You will never understand the purity of my reign, Iridia. Never. You are nothing but a bitter aftertaste in the Void’s mouth, a piece of refuse that time will soon forget.”

With that final, venomous proclamation, Xytrinah turned on her heel, her mind already far away, already planning the final end for her mother’s spawn. She would wipe them all out, piece by piece, until Iridia herself was nothing but a broken relic, her cries swallowed by the blackened abyss she had foolishly dared to challenge.