They had forgotten fear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

66,666 years of patience were over.

The seal did not break with a roar, but with a sigh.

Not slept. Waited.

He took his first step forward. The ground beneath his foot turned to glass. The air began to curdle. And somewhere in the silent, unsuspecting city, every clock stopped at the same second.

When the final year clicked over in his mind, he opened his eyes.

And beneath it all, in a tomb of compressed darkness at the core of the world, the Dark Magus, Xarthon the Unmaker, had waited.

“They starved the world to weaken me,” he whispered, his voice the scrape of a glacier on bedrock. “They made it mundane. Safe.”

A flicker of surprise crossed his features, then a smile that was older than the mountains.

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.