Chapter 18: When Light Fights with Shadow

Ashgrave Hollow burned.

The ancient summit site, carved in dead stone and half-buried in ash, was now a battlefield. Itzal, the Shadow-Titan, roared as its temporal-shifting body twisted the world around it. Lightning cracked, then reversed. Spells fizzled, then detonated again in mirror directions. Trees that had died centuries ago suddenly bloomed—then turned to ash.

It was chaos incarnate.

And it didn’t care who ruled Arcanis. It only existed to destroy.

Elira Dawnbreaker stood her ground, hands raised toward the sky. Golden rings of sigils spun around her, forming an enormous glyph of stabilization.

“I’m holding its time loop barely in place!” she screamed, sweat streaking her face. “If it warps any deeper, it’ll take the whole continent with it!”

“Then get ready to burn out,” Lord Varrick growled beside her. He plunged his obsidian greatsword into the ash-soaked ground, unleashing tendrils of shadow magic that wrapped around Itzal’s flickering limbs.

Itzal shrieked, shifting again—a second head emerging from its back. It bit through Varrick’s shadows like mist.

“This thing is Kael’s pet?” Varrick barked. “No wonder the bastard’s winning.”

“Less talking!” Elira snapped. “More destroying!”

General Thorne and Captain Aurelia, leading the elite units from Darkveil and the Arcane Union respectively, fought side-by-side—reluctantly.

“We’re actually working with them now?” Aurelia shouted as she slashed through temporal rifts spilling wraithlings from the future.

Thorne slammed a voidling into the ground with a molten gauntlet. “Don’t like it either, Goldilocks. But right now, it's this or get eaten across time.”

Together, the combined forces began to coordinate. Light mages cast anchoring spells. Darkveil berserkers kept the flickering horrors from closing in. For the first time in centuries, light and dark weren’t at war.

They were barely surviving together.

And Itzal began to feel it.

Its timeline distortions were slowing. The echo-lag between its movements shortened.

Then came the signal.

“NOW!” Elira roared.

A fusion spell—a forbidden blend of pure light and corrupted void, cast by both Elira and Varrick—slammed into Itzal’s core.

The creature shrieked.

It tried to reverse its death.

But the union of opposing magics shattered its temporal loop.

In a flash of silence—

Itzal imploded.

Dust and echo filled the air.

Ashgrave Hollow was now a crater—charred black, ringed with dead magic, and soaked in blood from both sides.

And yet… they were alive.

Varrick coughed and rose from the dirt. “Well. That was unpleasant.”

Elira stood beside him, her robes in tatters, eyes cold. “That... was a message.”

They both turned north—toward the abyss.

“Kael Draven wants us afraid,” Elira said.

“He wants us divided,” Varrick added.

A long silence passed.

And then—

“Perhaps we should disappoint him.”

Far beneath, in the Abyss Order's Rift-Chamber, Kael stood watching the battle through mirrored crystal.

He wasn’t angry.

He was smiling.

“Good,” he whispered. “They’re beginning to understand.”

Selene stepped forward. “Understand what?”

Kael’s voice was barely audible.

“That I am the only true future.”