The temple's entrance swallowed Kael whole. Reality twisted as he stepped through, the doorway functioning less like a passage and more like a tear in existence itself. His foot touched ground that simultaneously felt miles below and inches away from where he'd started.
The interior defied comprehension. Corridors branched in directions that shouldn't exist, their walls covered in mirrors that reflected versions of himself that moved independently. In one, he saw himself as he was before exile—proud, unbroken. In another, a version that had submitted to the gods, golden light replacing the shadow in his veins. And in the darkest mirrors, something that had transcended both humanity and divinity entirely.
"Choose," whispered voices from everywhere and nowhere. "Choose what you will become."
At the heart of the temple, he found the ritual chamber. Black glass formed its walls, floor, and ceiling, creating an infinite reflection of infinite reflections. An altar rose from the center, carved from material that seemed to absorb both light and shadow.
Three items lay upon it:
A knife with a blade of pure void, its edge cutting shadows instead of air, A chalice that held darkness so absolute it made the surrounding blackness seem bright, A book bound in material that felt disturbingly like his own skin, its pages written in script that burned his eyes to look at directly
"The Ebon Pact demands truth," the voices whispered. "Show us yours."
Kael lifted the knife. Its touch sent ice through his veins, numbing him to everything except the raw core of his being. "And what truth would that be?"
"Why do you seek power?"
The question echoed through the chamber, through time, through his very soul. Each mirror showed a different answer:
For revenge against the gods, To protect others from divine cruelty, To understand the nature of existence, To become a god himself, To end all gods, To free humanity, To rule, To destroy, To create, To simply exist without chains
"All of these," Kael answered. "And none of them."
He drew the blade across his palm. Blood welled up, but instead of falling, it hung suspended in the air, forming shapes and patterns that told the story of his existence.
"I seek power," he continued, "because it is my nature to seek it. Because every chain ever placed upon me has only made me want to break it. Because every limit I've encountered has only made me want to transcend it."
The blood-shapes shifted, showing his countless deaths in this realm, his battles, his discoveries. Each drop held a memory of pain, of learning, of defiance.
"I seek power not for what I will do with it, but because the seeking itself defines me."
The chalice began to pulse with dark energy. Kael lifted it, watching as his suspended blood was drawn into the infinite darkness within.
"The price," the voices warned, "is everything you are."
"No." Kael smiled. "The price is everything I was."
He drank.
The transformation began immediately. The darkness spread through him like living ink, rewriting his essence. Every memory became a brand of agony:
His childhood burned away, replaced by knowledge of spaces between spaces, His first love crystallized and shattered, each shard becoming understanding of powers beyond reality, His human name dissolved, leaving behind comprehension of words that could unmake existence, His fear transformed into awareness of dimensions beyond counting, His hope splintered into fragments of cosmic truth, His rage became gates to realms of pure chaos, His joy split into pathways through time itself
He screamed, but the sound came from everywhere at once, in frequencies that caused the mirrors to crack and reform in endless patterns. His flesh became a suggestion rather than a fact, darkness and light and void all occupying the same space within him.
The book opened itself, its pages turning by some unseen wind. The script began to crawl off the pages, burrowing into his transforming flesh like burning worms of knowledge. Each word taught him things no mortal was meant to know, each sentence reshaped his understanding of reality.
Time lost meaning. He was simultaneously experiencing every moment of the ritual at once:
The beginning, where his human flesh still struggled to contain the change, The middle, where his very soul was being rewritten in languages of power, The end, where what emerged was neither human nor god, but something else entirely
When it was over, what stood before the altar was both Kael and not-Kael. His flesh was marbled with veins of pure void, his eyes pools of swirling violet energy that saw through multiple layers of reality at once. Power radiated from him in waves that distorted space itself, each pulse carrying echoes of knowledge that could drive mortals mad.
"The Pact is sealed," the voices declared. "You are unmade and remade."
Kael flexed his new form, watching as reality rippled around his movements. "No," he corrected, his voice resonating on frequencies that caused the temple itself to shudder. "I am simply more of what I always was."
As he walked out of the temple, each step left impressions in reality itself—footprints in the fabric of existence that would never quite fade. Selene waited outside, her divine light flickering as it encountered the waves of power rolling off his transformed being.
"You're still you," she observed, surprise evident in her voice. "Different, but... still you. How?"
Kael looked at her with eyes that could see the strands of divine energy woven through her being. "Because surrendering everything I was..." He smiled, an expression that caused nearby shadows to writhe. "...was always part of who I am."