Zapharos Legends of the Lost Gods (Arkhevari Rising #1)

Preface

The dream found me the way the Dark Abyss always did—quiet at first, then absolute.

Absolute darkness. No sound. No stars. Only a shape where light should have been.

The female stood just beyond reach, a silhouette inked onto the void. No face, no voice—just her outline, like a memory the universe was trying to forget. The shadow tilted her head, as if we’d known each other before names mattered, and something ancient inside me awakened.

I reached, and the void reached back.

“Who are you?” I didn’t speak it. I thought it—the way my brothers and I communicate when distance turns sound to ash.

Heat pulsed against my chest—one beat, then another—like a heart remembered. Not mine. Hers.

I had witnessed the downfall of thousands of worlds, felt the silence of entire civilizations as they fell into the Maw. The Dark Abyss had taught me what endings felt like. This wasn’t that.

This was origin. Balance. A thread through the ruin.

She lifted her hand. Though she was made of shadow, I knew the shape of her fingers would fit my palm.

Aelyth.

The word flared in my mind like gold hammered thin. A myth. A comfort story told to Arkhevari soldiers who needed to believe that after eons of war, our creators had left us something kind.

We were not built for kindness.

We were built for duty—and for the Dark Abyss.

But the bond didn’t care what I believed. It settled into me, inevitable as gravity.

I took a step toward her. The black surged up to swallow her and snap the thread between us. I lunged anyway, light breaking out of me in a hard, golden glow wash that I hadn't seen since millennia of war had hollowed me out.

“Stay,” I ordered the dream.

It listened.

Her edges brightened, not enough to give her a face, just enough to shape a mouth. I didn’t hear words, only meaning: I’m lost. Find me.

Then the Abyss blinked, and she was gone. I woke with my hand outstretched, the war still waiting. Like it always did.

I lay there, breathing like a mortal, my fist clenched around nothing. For a few heartbeats, there was only the echo of her warmth and the impossible certainty humming under my ribs.

My Aelyth.

I hated the tremor in my fingers. I’d bled on broken worlds and never once shook. I’d heard the death-screams of continents and never faltered. But one shadow with a heartbeat had undone me.

I used to tell myself I didn’t need an Aelyth.

That kind of bond—myth or not—was a flaw carved into weaker males. The endless war had taught me that attachment was a wound waiting to be opened. The Mmuhr’Rhong didn’t win with strength; they corroded from within, whispering until what we were bled out through the cracks.

And yet…

There were nights, after the noise of dying worlds faded, when the silence pressed too close. I would wonder what it might be like to share that silence—to have a voice in the dark, a hand reaching back.

The old texts said an Aelyth wasn’t merely a mate. She was the balance. An anchor between the Arkhevari and the void. Without her, even gods turned to monsters.

But the Hall of Seven had forged us for endurance, not solace. The moment you wanted, you could be broken. The moment you loved, you could be used.

Still… there was a part of me that longed to be broken, not by the enemy, but by feeling. By something real enough to unmake the war inside me, even for a single heartbeat.

Duty had no patience for yearning.

So I buried it.

Buried her.

I told myself I’d do it again if it meant surviving one more war.

Only this time, the dream had made it real.

And I wasn’t sure I wanted to survive without it.

The next morning, my armor sealed around me like an old, familiar sin. My aura steadied—red, disciplined—until the last of the dream burned down to coals.

The Arkhevari had been born of light and forged in shadow.

That was our first truth. We were the contradiction our fathers carved into the bedrock of creation: guardians who walked the edge of oblivion without falling, keepers who took the last breath of dying worlds so the Mmuhr’Rhong couldn’t twist it for their war.

The second truth was uglier. Everything bright in us had been bled out across eons.

The third truth—the one I could no longer ignore—was the fail-safe our fathers whispered to make the second survivable: each Arkhevari had a balance. A counterpart. An other-half strong enough to keep us from sliding into the Black.

Our Aelyth.

Lost, they said, in the First Collapse. Scattered with the worlds we failed to save. A myth. A word we said when another brother stepped too close to the rim and didn’t come back.

But now the myth had a heartbeat.

And she had called to me.

And for the first time in eons, I—Praetor of War, breaker of worlds—wanted to be found.