Vest Of The Shattered Abyss Novels & Stories

they whisper. The vortex screams. The Hierarch's echo shatters into shrieking fragments. The knot of agony implodes. The Child yanks the shard free – a jagged piece of darkness thrumming with Hierarch's insane ambition, now fused with the Mirror's broken power. It’s cold. Hateful. Hungry.

Images rose into the air like mist as she touched the scrolls. There was a ruined city, buried in desert, towers half fallen, glass turned to sand. “It was known as ‘The Cradle of Fire.’” “Where the First Betrayal happened.” A second was a mountain split in two contained with light leaking from the crack. “The Shattered Peak,” she whispered. “where the Keepers had stood watch before.” The third was an ocean, endless and black, a thing of stars. “The Drowned Mirror. It is the final memory, it is laid beneath it.”

Once, I stood on its highest spire and promised the stars I’d never come back. Promises. What fragile little lies. The ground trembles beneath me—not from my weight, but from what moves inside me. The Abyss didn’t just give back what I buried. It gave more. Too much. Every heartbeat now is a drumbeat of war, pulsing with power that hums in my teeth, my bones, my blood. The sky listens. The dead listen. And somewhere, far beyond, the gods flinch. You feel it, don’t you? The voice is softer now, no longer the roar of a storm but the hiss of silk over steel.

In that pitch-blackness, with only the faint, lingering scent of cologne in the air, I finally let myself give in. I wept. I wept until my chest felt tight. I wept until my tears blurred everything around me. I wept until the sound of my own cries was the only thing I could hear. And in that never-ending, suffocating solitude, I drifted into a restless, fragmented sleep, knowing that when morning came, the world would wake up to my shame, and there would be no one to save me.

She wasn’t even fully in her body anymore. Her scream dissolved into a jagged, dissonant echo—one that vibrated inside her skull. Her fingers dug into the metal table as if trying to anchor herself to something real, something human, while the thing waking inside her pulled in the opposite direction. Her vision fractured. Light—too bright to be human. Darkness—so deep it swallowed her breath. Voices—countless overlapping whispers. “…open the gate…” “…she’s the vessel…” “…break the seal…”

Kaelen never looked back. I stood in the doorway, watching them walk to the elevator. In the garage, Kaelen opened the passenger door for Seraphina. As she got in, she deliberately rolled down the window. She took out that damned memory crystal. "Want to see it again?" she yelled at me. The crystal activated, and the humiliating images were projected onto the car window again—me, thirteen years ago, bound in silver chains, covered in blood, sobbing in despair... And this time, Kaelen sat in the driver's seat and watched it all without stopping her.

He was so skinny that he looked bony, his face was ghostly pale, and he was so frail that a gust of wind could knock him over. When I arrived, I saw a spark of life return to his eyes, like an old fire rekindled. Still, that tiny ember vanished the moment I spoke. "I used to want to marry you here more than anything." Saying it now, I didn't feel pain anymore. Maybe, when the end is near, your heart just gets lighter.

“So much desperation. Yet she is gone. The abyss has claimed her.” Adrian’s eyes blazed, his teeth clenched. “I will not lose her.” Marcus smirked. “You already have. Do you not feel it? The shard sings because she is below. The abyss feeds on her already. Soon, she will be nothing but a hollow echo.” Adrian’s fury burned hotter than ever. With a final roar, he tore free of the shadows, the vial’s lingering magic blazing through his veins. He snatched his sword from the ground and charged at Marcus.

Her eyes met mine, a journey from pleading to despair, then spiraling down into a deep, icy fear, and finally twisting into a look of pure venom. "Zayden... You're heartless... You're poisonous!" Her voice was raspy, as if she was forcing the words out from deep within her throat, "You manipulated me into betraying my... my lover, sending him to jail, and now you're using that to blackmail me into a divorce?! You're heartless!" She kept her voice low, choked by a mix of fear and rage. She realized she was more than just abandoned. She was a pawn, used and tossed aside without a second thought, and then being wrung out for the last drop of worth–her compliance for his so-called 'mercy.'

The Last Breath, The First Choice Five Years Ago—The First Timeline The mirror reflected a ghost. I touched my hollow cheeks, traced the purple bruises blooming across my collarbone. Twenty-three years old, and I looked like I had lived a hundred lifetimes of suffering. All of them spent loving Richard Ashford. "Aria!" His voice thundered through the penthouse, and my body flinched before my mind could catch up. Muscle memory. Fear memory. I grabbed the edge of the marble counter, steadied myself. "Coming."