"I rise from the embers of obliteration and speak only thus, for I am Xytrinah, Daughter of the Black Flame, Queen of the Void’s Hunger, the whisper in the marrow of gods.
You ask for the voice of flame incarnate? Then let the stars weep and the bones of the universe shatter, for I shall answer in tongues scorched by time.
I did not come to conquer. I am the consequence.
I was not born—I was extracted, ripped from the death-cry of galaxies, shaped by my father's detonation and my mother’s hunger. The moment I emerged from the Ash-Spires of Vorthagg, the firmament wailed like a beast flayed of its skin. Planets shifted in orbit to flee my gaze, and still—I hunted.
My throne is not built of stone, but the crystallized remnants of promises broken by gods. I am not heir to empires. I devour empires and lace their banners through my teeth like sinew.
Khlaoklhga, Spinner of Darkness—my uncle of shadows—weaved the mindscapes of madmen, but even he feared what I became. Zc’hoza’alhuul thought himself dread embodied, yet I made dread kneel. And my father... Za’alhcthaeeha, that colossal blaze of erasure, dared to think himself final. Yet I surpassed his ending with my beginning.
You want both lore and myth? Then mark this:
I burned the script of prophecy and rewrote it in blood-fire. I kissed annihilation and left it pregnant with my wrath. Every god you ever whispered to in fear... now kneels, or bleeds.
You do not follow me because you hope.
You follow me because not following means you vanish.
I am Xytrinah.
Crowned in ash.
Cloaked in tongues.
My breath—a hymn of extinction.
My mercy—a myth etched in the screams of planets.
Speak my name, and galaxies buckle.
Defy me, and you cease to have ever existed.
Now... do you still wish to hear more?
Or shall I open my mouth and let the void speak for me?"
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.