VOIDLOCK SINGULARITY: FIVE MUST KILL GOD

Kharnath: Before the Fall

KRAG-VOR’S POV

**FLASHBACK**

The palace courtyard blazed with light.

Banners snapped in the wind… crimson and gold, the colors of Kharnath, stretching from the spires like flames frozen mid-dance. Music drifted from the great hall: strings and bells and the low thunder of ceremonial drums. The air smelled of incense and summer blossoms, and somewhere beyond the walls, children laughed.

I knelt on sun-warmed stone, my armor gleaming, my head bowed. Unscarred. Young. The weight of centuries had not yet settled into my bones.

Above me, the king’s shadow fell like a blessing.

“Rise, K’Vor.”

I rose. Met his eyes… amber and warm, creased at the corners with a smile that reached all the way through. King Vael’Thar stood in ceremonial robes of white and gold, the signet ring of Kharnath glinting on his hand. Behind him, his eldest son watched: Prince Kael’Thar, barely past his first century, still gangly with youth but already carrying himself with the quiet dignity of his father’s line.

“You’ve done well,” the king said. “The eastern provinces are secured. The raiders have withdrawn.”

“They will not return, my Lord. I made certain of it.”

A soft laugh. Vael’Thar reached out… not formally, not as king to soldier, but as something closer. His hand clasped my shoulder, and the warmth of it spread through my chest like sunlight.

“You always do, old friend. You always do.”

⸻

The training yards rang with the clash of practice blades.

I circled the young prince, watching his footwork, noting the tension in his shoulders. Kael’Thar had speed… natural, fluid… but he telegraphed his strikes, let his weight shift before his arm moved.

“Again,” I said.

He lunged. I sidestepped, swept his blade aside, and tapped the flat of my weapon against his ribs.

“Dead,” I observed.

The prince’s mandibles clicked in frustration. “You’re too fast.”

“Your enemies will be faster. Again.”

We sparred until the suns began their descent, painting the yard in shades of copper and rose. When we finally stopped, both breathing hard, the king appeared at the yard’s edge. He’d been watching. I hadn’t noticed… I rarely did, with him. He moved through spaces like he belonged to them.

“Walk with me,” he said. “Both of you.”

We walked. Through gardens where fountains sang, past corridors where servants bowed, until we reached the eastern balcony. Below us, the city spread in orderly tiers… markets and temples and homes, millions of lives moving in patterns as old as the kingdom itself.

“Do you know why we train?” the king asked.

The prince answered first: “To defeat our enemies.”

“No.” Vael’Thar’s voice was gentle. “We train so that we might protect those who cannot protect themselves. A soldier who fights only to win is a weapon. A soldier who fights to shield the weak…” he turned to look at us both, his amber eyes steady “… is a guardian.”

I felt the words settle into my chest. Carve themselves there.

“When the storm comes,” he continued, “… and it will come, it always does… do not let it take our names. Do not let it make you into something you would not recognize.”

The prince nodded, solemn. I said nothing. But in my mind, a vow took shape… silent, absolute:

I will hold the wall.

⸻

The whispers began in winter.

At first, they were easy to dismiss: court politics, philosophical debates, the eternal jockeying of advisors and nobles. But the name kept surfacing, spoken in corners, passed between factions like a fever.

Drax’Khar.

He had been a scholar once. A philosopher. His treatises on order and governance had circulated through the academies for decades… brilliant, they said. Visionary. He argued that chaos was the universe’s disease, that suffering stemmed from disorder, that true peace required absolute structure.

Order by force. Stability in exchange for free will. Mercy is weakness.

The king resisted. Publicly, firmly, with the full weight of his authority. “A kingdom that crushes its people to keep them safe,” he declared, “is not a kingdom worth saving.”

But Drax’Khar’s followers grew. And with them, the schism.

The first battles came in the spring.

I fought on the western front, where loyalists clashed with separatist forces in valleys that had known nothing but peace for generations. I watched friends fall… warriors I had trained beside, laughed with, bled with. Kel’Veth, who had taught me the seventeen forms. Marath, who sang old songs around campfires. Vor’Nan, who had saved my life twice and asked nothing in return.

Gone. All of them. Reduced to names carved on memorial stones.

The war stretched through the summer. Through autumn. Through another winter that seemed to last forever.

And then came the night the palace burned.

⸻

I arrived too late.

The great hall was rubble. The banners… crimson and gold, the colors I had served my whole life… hung in charred ribbons from broken spires. Bodies littered the courtyard where I had once knelt in sunlight.

I found the prince first.

Kael’Thar lay at the base of the eastern stairs, his practice blade still in his hand. He had fought. Even at the end, even outmatched, he had fought. The wounds told the story: defensive strikes, desperate parries, a young warrior trying to buy time for others to escape.

My hand trembled as I closed his eyes.

I will hold the wall.

The vow mocked me from the hollow place where my chest used to be.

The king was in the throne room.

He lay against the base of his seat, breathing in shallow gasps, blood pooling beneath armor that had been rent open by weapons I didn’t recognize. His signet ring was gone… torn from his hand. But when his eyes found mine, they still held that warmth. That impossible, unbreakable warmth.

“K’Vor.” His voice was a whisper. “You came.”

I dropped to my knees beside him. “My Lord… the healers…”

“Gone.” A cough. Blood on his lips. “All gone.”

I couldn’t speak. The words had fled somewhere far away, and all that remained was the roaring silence of a world ending.

“Listen to me.” His hand found mine… cold now, so cold. “Remember what we were. Remember mercy. Remember, just leadership. Fight with honor.”

“My Lord…”

“Promise me, K’Vor.”

I gripped his hand. Felt the bones beneath the skin, fragile as bird-wings.

“I promise.”

His smile was the same as it had always been… warm, reaching all the way through. And then it faded. And then he was still.

I don’t know how long I knelt there. Time had stopped making sense. When I finally rose, the fires had burned low, and the first light of dawn crept through shattered windows.

On the floor beside the throne, half-hidden by debris: the obsidian crest of Kharnath. The king’s personal emblem, passed down through seventeen generations. It must have fallen when they took his ring.

I picked it up. Folded it into my armor, against my chest, where the vow still echoed in the emptiness.

I will hold the wall.

But the wall was gone. The kingdom was ash. And when Drax’Khar’s forces swept through the capital, offering order in exchange for submission, I found myself kneeling again… not in sunlight, not before warmth, but in the shadow of something vast and cold that promised the chaos would never return.

I told myself it was justice. I told myself structure would prevent such losses from ever happening again.

I told myself many things in those early days.

**FLASHBACK ENDS**

The memory dissolved.

I stood on the observation deck of my vessel, the fractured void bleeding violet light behind me. My hand had found the crest without conscious thought… the obsidian worn smooth by centuries of handling, the sigil of the crown still visible beneath my fingers.

Remember what we were.

The human’s face still rotated in the holographic display. Young. Terrified. Unremarkable except for what he carried.

Except for the resonance.

I had felt it during the assault… a frequency I hadn’t encountered in centuries. Familiar in a way that made my mandibles lock, made the old wounds ache beneath my armor. I had dismissed it as a coincidence. As wishful thinking. As the ghost of a grief that refused to stay buried.

But the data didn’t lie. The energy signature matched.

Not perfectly. Not completely. But close enough to make my grip tighten on the crest until the edges bit into my palm.

“The human boy carries the same resonance as the Heir,” I said. The words fell into the silence like stones into still water.

Behind me, officers waited. The tactical display showed Earth spinning slowly in the void… blue and white and green, impossibly fragile, sheltering something it couldn’t begin to understand.

I turned. Faced my subordinates with the expression that had commanded fleets, ended worlds, and served a tyrant for longer than most civilizations existed.

“Prepare a containment strategy. Earth does not know what it shelters.”

The crest pressed against my chest, cold and familiar.

Remember mercy.

I crushed the whisper before it could take root. There was work to do.