He reinforced his consciousness, drawing on the vast ocean of power locked in his subconsciousness. The pressure eased immediately but didn't stop.

The entity was patient. It had been here for millennia, it could wait and now Galthor was right in its domain. Talk about Irony.

For a moment Galthor actually panicked, what if he fell through space time into another place entirely? What if he fell into places that's not even the Abyssal land anymore?

Galthor fell for what felt like hours. Days. The twisted space-time of the canyon made it impossible to know for certain. At some point, he stopped trying to track the passage of time and simply existed in the endless descent.

Then, without warning, he stopped.

He expected to crash, but he just..... stopped. His momentum simply ceased, and he found himself standing on solid ground as if he'd stepped off a stair.

He looked around, his expression weary.

Grey stone stretched in every direction, flat and featureless except for the faint luminescence that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The fog had thinned here, replaced by a perpetual twilight that cast no shadows. Floating islands dotted the void above him, connected by bridges of what looked like solidified shadow.

Galthor blinked. "This isn't what I expected this place to be, but there's something strange here."

The architecture was alien, organic somehow, as if the structures had grown rather than been built.

And the air tasted like tears. With despair.

But suddenly he a voice filled the space around him.

"You silenced me," a voice said. It came from everywhere at once, resonating through the stone beneath his feet, through the air around him, through his very bones. "But you cannot silence grief can you?"

Galthor turned in a slow circle, trying to locate the speaker. There was nothing. Just the grey expanse and the floating islands and the taste of sorrow.

"I'm not trying to silence anything," he said aloud. "I'm trying to cross the bridge and you attacked my men. It's your fault."

Laughter followed. Hollow and bitter and utterly without humor.

"Leave? No one leaves the Weeping Canyon. Not the soldiers who fell here during the war. Not the travelers who stumbled in by accident. Not the gods who came seeking power."

Galthor blinked and froze in surprise. "And the war....are you talking about the Abyssal War where...wait. Gods have come here before?"

"Three. In all the millennia since my birth. Three gods descended into my domain, seeking to claim it for themselves." A pause. "Would you like to meet them? And why do you...not know about the war? Did the god crouching behind you not tell you?"

The stone beneath Galthor's feet shifted. Three shapes rose from the grey surface, humanoid figures frozen in poses of agony. Their features were worn away by time, but their divine auras were unmistakable. Faint. Corrupted. But divine.

Fuck basted. She actually killed a gods?

"They're still alive," Galthor realized. Fear began to creep into his soul. And why would it not? Gods...he was looking at perished gods!

"In a manner of speaking. They exist. They suffer. They feed me their grief eternally. As you will. Oh.. I've not seen the one crouching behind you before! You are are here in my domain, the time and space cut you off from the gaze of your god!"

The figures sank back into the stone, vanishing as quickly as they'd appeared.

Galthor's heart was filling with fear but his eyes hardened. "I'm not like them."

There was a pause...and then, and the air froze.

"What? You....you!!"

"I see now, so that's how it is. You're a god. A god without worshippers. A divine spark in a mortal shell. You have nothing. You are nothing. And when I've broken your mind and consumed your essence, you'll be nothing forever."

Shadow creatures began to emerge from the grey stone. They were vaguely humanoid, but wrong. Their proportions shifted constantly, their faces blank voids where features should be. Dozens of them. Hundreds.

Galthor clenched his fists. "Then come and try."

The shadows surged forward.

Galthor killed the first shadow creature with a punch that shattered its form into wisps of darkness. The second fell to a spinning kick. The third and fourth he grabbed by their throats and crushed together. But for every one he destroyed, three more emerged from the stone.

They weren't strong. Individually, they were weaker than the shadow stalkers he'd fought on the surface. But they were relentless, and each time he killed one, something happened that made him stumble.

Memories.

When the shadow creatures died, they released their contents. The grief they were made of. The final moments of whoever had died to create them.

A mother watching her children burn in dragonfire, unable to reach them.

A soldier holding his own entrails, trying to push them back inside.

A king standing on his balcony as his kingdom crumbled, knowing it was his fault.

Each death slammed into Galthor's mind with the force of a physical blow. His mental defenses held, but not that much, it was as if the time space was also affecting his mind, creating more space between his consciousness and subconsciousness. The entity wasn't trying to kill him with these creatures. It was trying to drown him in sorrow.

"Do you understand now?" The entity's voice echoed through the realm. "Every being that has ever died within my canyon lives on inside me. Their pain is my sustenance. Their grief is my power."

Galthor grabbed a shadow creature and hurled it into a cluster of its fellows, scattering them. "And you've been alone with all that pain for how long? Thousands of years?"

Silence.

"That's why you try to pull people in, not just for you food. You need them for company. Someone else to share your misery."

"You know nothing of my existence."

"I know loneliness." Galthor killed another creature, weathering the burst of grief that followed. A child dying of plague, calling for parents who would never come. "I spent my entire first life alone. Trapped in a bed. Unable to move. Unable to escape."

More creatures emerged. The entity was angry now, throwing everything it had at him.

"But I never let it break me," Galthor continued, his voice rising over the chaos of battle. "I never surrendered to despair. And I won't start now."

He unleashed his divine aura.

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