A chilling, unnatural fog rolled across the River Seine, choking the romantic lamps of the Pont Alexandre III in murky violet haze.
Above the City of Light, the iron summit of the Eiffel Tower was crowned by a weeping dimensional fissure that crackled with necrotic viridian lightning. Yet the real nightmare was not unfolding in the Parisian sky—it was festering sixty feet beneath the cobblestone boulevards.
In the subterranean depths of the Catacombs of Paris, millions of human skulls and femurs stacked neatly along the limestone tunnels had begun to bleed black celestial grease.
The low, rhythmic chanting of Void-Cultists reverberated through the claustrophobic corridors, their voices harmonizing with the sickening, seductive whisper of the Void-Mother echoing from the deep subterranean faults:
"Flesh of mortals... bones of dust... break the chains... let the black ocean rise..."
At the head of an ancient bone-lined ossuary stood Archon Malidrax, the Carrion-Seer of the Maw.
Unlike the brute warlords of Azgorath's vanguard, Malidrax was an aristocratic monstrosity draped in ceremonial robes of flayed dragon-skin. His gaunt, porcelain-white face was adorned with three weeping vertical eyes, his mouth a needle-lined slit that dripped liquid shadow. In his clawed hands, he cradled the Scythe of the Black Weft—a curved blade of pure anti-matter designed to reap mortal souls and feed their ether into the Second Leyline Anchor.
"Carve the runes into their marrow," Malidrax commanded his acolytes, his voice like silk dragged over rusted nails. "When the millions of souls buried in these catacombs resonate with the Maw, the European anchor will snap like a dry twig."
Suddenly, the damp limestone walls shuddered.
The temperature in the underground corridor plummeted to absolute zero. The torches lining the crypts were snuffed out by an invisible, crushing weight of dark-matter gravity.
From the end of the narrow corridor, two sets of footsteps echoed against the stone—one heavy, measured, and armored; the other light, fluid, and lethal.
"I thought Paris was supposed to smell like fresh croissants," a smooth, razor-sharp feminine voice cut through the dark. "Not three-hundred-year-old rot."
A blinding flare of incandescent golden light exploded at the mouth of the ossuary.
Seraphina strode into the chamber, her twenty-foot wings of solar starlight folded close to avoid brushing the narrow bone walls, her white dragon-scale armor shimmering under her radiant aura. In her right hand, her white sunstone dagger hummed with five thousand degrees of thermonuclear plasma, illuminating every horrifying corner of the subterranean lair.
Beside her towered Kaelen.
The High Sovereign was clad in his obsidian doom-plate, Gloom-Weaver resting against his broad shoulder, his molten silver eyes burning with utter disdain for the vermin before him. His eighty-foot shadow-wings were drawn tightly around his flanks like an executioner’s cloak, ripples of gravitational force warping the air around his massive frame.
Malidrax hissed, his three vertical eyes narrowing into slits of pure venom.
"The Sun-Heir and her rabid hound," the Archon sneered, his needle-mouth twisting into a mocking grin. "Did Vance bring you all the way to France just to die in a sewer, little queen?"
"He brought me to watch him work," Seraphina replied coolly, her amber eyes blazing with challenge. "And to clean up whatever scraps he leaves behind."
Kaelen chuckled, a deep, rumbling sound that vibrated straight through the ancient bones in the walls. He stepped forward, his boots cracking the flagstones as Gloom-Weaver flared with violent abyssal lightning.
"You have ten seconds to drop that scythe, carrion," Kaelen growled, his voice carrying the sovereign weight of five millennia of unbroken rule. "Or I will use your spine to pave this tunnel."
Malidrax shrieked, raising his scythe high into the air.
"Awaken, children of the grave!" the Archon screamed. "Feast upon the royal blood!"
The walls of skulls rattled violently. Across the entire chamber, millions of ancient bones tore free from the mortar, swirling into towering, skeletal abominations that lunged toward the royal pair in a howling storm of necrotic fury.