Lord of the Foresaken
Chapter 136: Father’s Wrath

Chapter 136: Father’s Wrath

The moment Vexara spoke those words, something fundamental broke inside Reed Thorne.

Not his heart—that had shattered long ago. Not his spirit—that had been ground to dust across sixty years of warfare. What broke was the last restraint that kept him human.

The quantum storm that erupted from his core wasn’t rage. It was something far more primal—the fury of a father who had watched his children become monsters, wielded as weapons by forces beyond mortal comprehension. Lightning the color of spilled blood cascaded from his form as reality itself recoiled from the transformation.

"No more," Reed’s voice carried harmonics that hadn’t existed moments before. "No more games. No more choices. No more mercy."

His tactical implants overloaded and burned out, replaced by something infinitely more dangerous—pure, unfiltered will made manifest. The Entropy Collective’s crystal throne room began to crack as Reed’s ascending power challenged the very concept of endings.

"Reed!" Lyralei screamed, her dimensional armor flaring as she tried to contain the reality storm. "You don’t understand what you’re doing!"

But Reed was beyond understanding, beyond reason. He had become the Sovereign of Storms, a force of nature wearing the face of a broken father. His quantum consciousness expanded, touching every reality where his son’s empty peace had taken root.

"I gave them life," Reed snarled, his form now wreathed in tempests of raw creation and destruction. "I will not watch him steal their souls."

Nihil the Unmaker recoiled as Reed’s transformation sent cracks through the Entropy Collective’s very foundation. "Impossible. You cannot simply reject entropy. The heat death of meaning is inevitable—"

"Watch me."

Reed’s departure from the entropy realm wasn’t teleportation—it was an act of violent editing upon reality itself. He tore through dimensional barriers like paper, leaving wounds in space-time that would never heal. Behind him, the Screaming Nexus began to form as his fury destabilized the junction between realities.

The Desolation March had begun.

Reed’s path across the collapsing multiverse was marked by storms that had never existed before—tempests of pure will that resurrected the dead only to kill them again, cyclones of temporal energy that aged mountains to dust in seconds, tornadoes of liquefied space that turned solid matter into abstract concepts.

He found Kaedon’s first target: New Byzantium, a refuge world where survivors of a hundred dead realities had built a gleaming city of hope. Kaedon’s organic ships hung in the atmosphere like diseased fruit, broadcasting their siren song of merciful emptiness.

Reed didn’t announce himself. He didn’t offer terms. He simply arrived like the wrath of creation itself.

The first ship died before its crew realized they were under attack. Reed’s storm-wreathed form tore through its bio-mechanical hull, his hands crackling with power that unmade the very concept of the vessel’s existence. The hollow souls within—volunteers who had surrendered their consciousness for peace—suddenly screamed as their awareness returned just long enough to experience true death.

"Father?" Kaedon’s voice echoed across the dimensional channels, confused and still maddeningly serene. "I sense your rage. But why do you fight mercy itself?"

Reed’s answer was the destruction of three more ships, his fury carving through their living hulls like a scythe through wheat. The fragments fell burning toward New Byzantium’s surface, and Reed realized with savage satisfaction that he no longer cared about collateral damage. The citizens below could run or burn—their choice.

"You want to know why?" Reed’s voice boomed across reality, carried by storms that spoke in his voice. "Because I am your father, and I refuse to let you become this thing!"

The hunt began in earnest. Each time Kaedon’s fleet jumped to a new reality, Reed followed, his passage leaving scars in space-time that would persist long after both of them were dust. The Desolation March carved through dimensions like a wound that wouldn’t heal, and in its wake, entire pocket realities simply ceased to exist.

On Mourning’s End, a world of eternal twilight where the last poets of the multiverse had gathered to preserve beauty in the face of annihilation, Reed’s storm caught Kaedon’s forces mid-conversion. The poets—gentle souls who had never known violence—were lined up in orderly queues, waiting to surrender their creativity to the void.

Reed arrived like a hurricane of molten fury.

The battle wasn’t a battle—it was a massacre. Reed tore through Kaedon’s hollow servants with the efficiency of a machine and the savagery of a wounded beast. His power had evolved beyond quantum manipulation into something that rewrote the rules of existence on a fundamental level. Where he struck, the converted didn’t just die—they experienced every moment of pain and joy they had sacrificed for emptiness, compressed into a single instant of absolute agony.

"Stop!" Kaedon materialized among his burning ships, his form still radiating that terrible, peaceful emptiness. "Father, you’re causing them to suffer! Can’t you see that I’m trying to save them from this?"

"By stealing their souls?" Reed’s laugh was the sound of breaking worlds. "By turning them into hollow puppets? That’s not salvation, boy—that’s abomination!"

"It’s mercy!" Kaedon’s serene mask cracked for the first time, revealing genuine anguish beneath. "Do you know what it’s like to feel everything, Father? Every death in every war, every sob of every orphan, every scream of every victim? I can make it stop! I can make all of it stop!"

"By becoming a monster!"

Their clash sent shockwaves through seventeen dimensions. Father and son, creator and destroyer, fury and emptiness—their battle was less physical combat than a philosophical argument conducted with reality-shaking force. Where Reed’s storms struck, existence itself screamed. Where Kaedon’s void touched, concepts simply ceased to have meaning.

The poets of Mourning’s End died in the crossfire, their final verses cut short by energies that reduced metaphor to meaningless noise. Reed felt each death like a hammer blow to his conscience, but his rage burned too bright for guilt to slow him.

But Kaedon was no longer the idealistic boy who had once begged his father for bedtime stories. The void had made him something else—a force of entropy with the face of a child Reed had once carried on his shoulders. Their battle stretched across star systems, each exchange of blows reducing entire civilizations to quantum foam.

It was on the crystal plains of Severance that Lyralei finally caught up with them.

She arrived in a blaze of dimensional fire, her form wreathed in the authority of a dozen conquered realities. But she wasn’t here as a conqueror—she was here as a woman watching the father of her children destroy everything she had tried to build.

"Enough!" Her voice carried harmonics that forced Reed and Kaedon apart, dimensional authority slamming between them like a wall of crystallized will. "Reed, look what you’ve become! You’re destroying entire worlds in your hunt for him!"

Reed turned those storm-wreathed eyes on her, and Lyralei saw nothing of the man she had once loved in their depths. "He’s stealing souls, Lyra. Our son is committing genocide and calling it mercy."

"And you’re committing genocide and calling it justice!" she screamed back. "How are you any different?"

"Because I’m not pretending it’s for their own good!"

The Shattered Heart Engagement began not with declarations of war, but with the sound of two hearts breaking in perfect synchronization.

They had been lovers once, partners in a cosmic dance of creation and control. They had shared dreams of a perfect multiverse where order and chaos balanced in harmony. They had created children together—beautiful, terrible children who now threatened the very foundations of existence.

All of that history, all of that love, all of that shared pain—it all became weapons in their hands.

Lyralei struck first, her dimensional authority seeking to bind Reed’s ascending fury within constructs of crystallized law. But Reed’s power had transcended such limitations. He shattered her bindings with contempt, his storms turning her orderly constructs into swirling chaos.

"You were always too controlling," Reed snarled as his lightning turned her armor to slag. "Always convinced you knew better than everyone else!"

"And you were always too willing to destroy everything for your principles!" Lyralei’s counterattack came in the form of dimensional rifts that sought to scatter Reed’s consciousness across infinite realities. "Even now, you’d rather see the multiverse burn than admit you might be wrong!"

Their battle was everything their love had once been, inverted into perfect hatred. Where they had once created beauty together, now they spawned horrors that would haunt dimensions for eons to come. Their shared intimate knowledge became tactical advantages, each knowing exactly where to strike to cause maximum pain.

Reed’s storm-form wrapped around Lyralei like a lover’s embrace, then began tearing her apart at the quantum level. She responded by opening doorways in his flesh to dimensions of pure agony, filling his expanded consciousness with the screams of every soul that had ever died in his campaigns.

The crystal plains of Severance became a hellscape of competing realities as their battle raged. Mountains were born and died in seconds. Oceans boiled into steam that condensed into blood. The sky shattered like glass, revealing the roiling chaos of the Screaming Nexus that had begun forming in Reed’s wake.

And in the midst of their mutual destruction, neither noticed the small figure approaching across the devastated landscape.

Vexara walked calmly through the reality storm, her nightmare creatures following in perfect formation behind her. But these weren’t the chaotic monsters of before—they were organized, purposeful, beautiful in their terrible symmetry. Her childhood nightmares had evolved into something far more dangerous: dreams with intent.

"Mother. Father." Her voice carried easily across the battlefield, somehow audible despite the cosmic forces at play. "You’re both missing the point."

Reed and Lyralei paused their attempt to murder each other, both turning to stare at their daughter. In the momentary ceasefire, the devastation around them became visible—entire civilizations reduced to conceptual debris, realities torn apart by the backwash of their hatred.

"The game isn’t about choosing between order and chaos," Vexara continued, her nightmare-court arranging itself in a perfect circle around the family. "It’s not about mercy versus justice, or emptiness versus feeling. Those are all just... distractions."

One of her creatures—a beautiful horror that looked like a butterfly made of screaming faces—landed gently on her shoulder. "The real game is about who gets to decide what reality means. And none of you are the player."

Reed felt his fury falter as understanding began to dawn. "What are you saying?"

Vexara smiled, and in that expression was all the terrible wisdom of a child who had seen through the lies adults told themselves. "I’m saying that while you’ve all been fighting over the rules..."

The Screaming Nexus, that wound in reality caused by Reed’s rampage, suddenly pulsed with organized energy. Through its chaotic surface, shapes began to emerge—vast, incomprehensible forms that hurt to perceive.

"...someone else has been changing the game entirely."

The shapes pushed through the dimensional breach, and reality itself began to scream as something far older and more alien than any of them stepped onto the stage of existence.

Reed’s storm-form flickered as true terror pierced his rage for the first time in this campaign. Whatever was coming through the Screaming Nexus wasn’t from their multiverse—it was from somewhere else entirely, somewhere that operated on rules that predated the very concept of existence.

"Vexara," he whispered, his voice suddenly small and human. "What have you done?"

His daughter’s smile widened, and for a moment, Reed saw not his little girl but something wearing her face like a mask.

"I’ve invited the real players to the table, Daddy. And they’ve been so very eager to meet you all."