CHAPTER 180: NOTHING BUT CHAOS

Draken

The stench hit us before the sight did.

I held Vesper in my arms as we crested the final ridge, the rocks beneath our feet slick with blood that had dried and cracked in long, angry lines. The wind was dead still, heavy with rot. Not just blood. Death. The kind that soaks into the earth and stays.

And then we saw it.

The ritual site stretched wide across the barren plateau—an altar ground that had once pulsed with arcane symbols, spiraling in precise, cursed symmetry. The blood had dried, but the marks were still visible. What should have been swirling runes of power... were now nothing more than dark stains, hollow and lifeless.

But what made my gut twist—what made Vesper slowly climb down from my arms, her face pale and eyes wide—was the bodies.

They were everywhere.

Piled on top of each other. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Humans. Demons. Most of them looked like ordinary civilians, some wore magical robes, indicating they were magicians. Others looked like they had been dragged here, throats torn, limbs broken. There was no logic to the dead. Just meat in a heap.

Vesper covered her mouth, her voice tight with horror. "God... Draken. This... this isn’t a ritual site anymore. It’s a slaughter pit."

I looked away, jaw clenched. "We need to move. Aelin might be here."

That single thought cut through the chaos in my mind. We had to find her—before whatever caused this came back.

I should have thought about it a bit more. That is the people here were dead, that meant the ritual was already done. But I was in too much of a hurry to find our little human Queen that I didn’t think much about it

We took a step forward.

Then the earth trembled.

The blood on the ground ignited—not with flame, but with light. The lines began to glow, softly at first, like embers waking. Then brighter. And brighter. Until every line carved in blood burned with unnatural red light.

Vesper drew in a sharp breath. "That’s not supposed to happen."

I didn’t get the chance to reply.

The sky cracked open with a sound like the earth being torn in two. Overhead, the clouds split apart in a jagged line, and through that rupture opened the Eye.

!!!

A massive, lidless, abyssal eye.

It stared down, unblinking. Just looking at it made my head spin—my soul recoil. I felt like it was staring straight into my bones. Vesper grabbed my arm, nails digging into my skin, her breath caught in her throat.

"Draken—look!"

Shadows—creatures—started clawing their way out of the eye. Their bodies were hideous. Twisted. Misshapen and wrong. Bone plates jutted out where skin should be, spines spiraled in impossible directions, and mouths—so many mouths

—hung open with rows of serrated black teeth, shrieking in wet, gurgling roars.

They fell on the dead with a hunger that defied nature. And not just the dead.

Some were still alive. It was only when we heard the screams coming from the dead bodies that we realized that amongst the heaps of bodies on top of bodies, someone was alive.

But we were not spared any time to look and help

Screams pierced the air as the monsters tore into them. Ripping, shredding, devouring them whole with a terrifying lack of effort. Blood sprayed across the ritual stones. One poor broken and battered demon tried to fly away—one of the winged kind—but an abyss beast leapt thirty feet into the air, latched onto its leg, and ripped it in half mid-flight.

Vesper unsheathed her blades, eyes burning with fury and fear. "We have to find her, Draken. Now!"

I shifted into stance, letting the fire rise within me. "Fight. Search. No hesitation."

We charged into the chaos.

I drew my claws out, the longest I could and then my weapons met flesh—if it could be called that. One of the creatures lunged, jaws snapping sideways like a serpent. I sidestepped and brought my hand down, cleaving it in half.

The core was easy to find in the small ones since one cut revealed most of their insides. As soon as I found it, I burned it with my fire.

It didn’t scream. Just collapsed, twitching, before dissolving into black sludge.

Vesper danced between two more, her fire blades lighting up the air like twin suns. She severed a spine with a brutal twist, then spun low, flames erupting from her foot as she kicked one of the beasts into a broken pillar.

Her natural power to put herself on fire was her advantage. She cut open the monsters and kept cutting them with her fire till she hit and burned the core as well.

Another leapt from the shadows behind her—too fast. I hurled at it and followed with a blast of fire. It shrieked, burning mid-air before it hit the ground, smoldering.

"Thanks!" she shouted.

"Eyes up!" I called back, parrying another lunging beast. "They’re not slowing down!"

They weren’t. More poured from the eye in the sky.

We moved like two blades of the same weapon—covering each other’s backs. Vesper lit the air ablaze, incinerating a horde with a wave of fire. We were trained enough now to take out smaller monsters like this.

To throw so much fire at them that they burned along with their cores.

I cleaved down anything that slipped through, cutting through chitin and bone like paper. One beast wrapped its tendrils around her arm, trying to drag her down—but I tore through it with a burst of flame, grabbing her wrist before she fell.

"Still with me?" I asked, pulling her up.

Her face was streaked with soot and blood. "Still with you. But I’m not seeing Aelin."

We tore through another wave, the air so thick with smoke and black ichor I could barely see more than twenty feet ahead. I reached out, calling for her—

"Aelin!" I shouted, voice hoarse. "Aelin, if you’re here—answer!"

Nothing.

Only the roars of the monsters. The screams of the dying. The sky shook above us as another beast, the size of a war elephant, crashed through a crumbling spire and let out a guttural roar that echoed across the valley.

We didn’t run. We couldn’t. If we ran, this whole place would be swallowed, and we’d never get the answers we needed.

Still, there was no sign of her.

But before we could do more, massive sized monster came out of the abyss

!!!!

Never had I ever seen one that big that stepped out of the bleeding eye like a giraffe.