They had forgotten fear.
He raised a hand, expecting to feel the resistance of the world’s magic. It had been a torrent when he was imprisoned, a wild ocean he had learned to poison. Now, he felt… nothing. The magic was gone. Drained. Or perhaps just hidden.
“They starved the world to weaken me,” he whispered, his voice the scrape of a glacier on bedrock. “They made it mundane. Safe.”
The seal did not break with a roar, but with a sigh. el mago oscuro renace despues de 66666 anos
He looked toward a distant city, its skyscrapers blinking like a child’s toy. He saw no wizards on the towers. No wards on the walls. Just soft, sleeping creatures who believed in light switches and engines.
Not slept. Waited.
He did not need to reclaim power. He was power. And the people of this new, clean, logical world had just made a fatal mistake. They had forgotten fear
He counted every heartbeat of the planet. He felt the footsteps of a billion creatures above him, each a dull thrum in his endless calculus of revenge. The number was not random. 66,666 was the number of binds in the chains of reality, the number of days it had taken him to build his first empire of screams, and the number of times he had to die inside his own stillness to shed the last shred of his humanity.
When the final year clicked over in his mind, he opened his eyes.
The Dark Magus laughed. It was a horrible sound—the first laugh of anything that had been truly alone for 66,666 years. Now, he felt… nothing
The world above was a quiet place. The descendants of the heroes who had sealed him had long since forgotten magic, trading it for iron and steam. They lived in glittering cities of glass and wire, believing the old legends were fairy tales for children. The last warden of the Lock, a weary order of monks, had disbanded three thousand years prior, their final prophecy lost in a library fire.
For sixty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six years, the Obsidian Lock had held. Empires had risen and turned to dust beneath the moss that swallowed their crowns. Oceans had claimed continents, then retreated, revealing new valleys for new kingdoms. The very stars had crawled across the sky, redrawing the maps of gods.