"Thou dost not bow.”

The words did not echo; they did not pass through air or space. They were pressing into Jon’s mind like a weight upon his very soul. The voice was not spoken but imposed, as if reality itself bent to the will behind it.

“Thine ancestors did kneel. They did plead, they did break, they did perish. Yet thou dost stand. Good.”

The entity did not move—it consumed. The light in the room withered, the walls shrank away, the world itself forgot how to exist around it. In its presence, time lost meaning.

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“As was written before the first stone was set upon the earth, before breath was stolen from the void to birth the lesser forms, this hour was foreseen. And so, I decree: If thou art to bear the essence of mine abyss, thou must stand before the unraveling of self and remain. No mind, no man, no god shall break thee, lest thou be cast into the abyss forgotten.”

It did not vanish. It ceased. Where it once stood, a seven-legged star now burned into the floor, the blackened lines pulsing with a loathsome, living darkness. The ichor that filled its form breathed, slow and terrible, the way something in deep slumber stirs just before it wakes.