Novels by josephinelazaruschu

Kael wasn’t breathing.Not because he couldn’t—but because something inside him had frozen.Not fear. Not confusion.Recognition.A truth buried for lifetimes had just opened its eyes inside him.The Tribunal’s final weapon hovered behind him, pulsing with raw, ancient energy. The battlefield crackled beneath their feet. Elias stood a few paces away, strangely calm, arms crossed, eyes on Kael like he’d been waiting for this moment forever.Pamela was kneeling beside Marcus, who was barely conscious, his skin still shifting under the aftershock of Kael’s unleashed power. Neither of them spoke. They couldn’t. Something bigger than all of them had just cracked open the sky.Kael took a slow step forward, and then another.And then it hit him.A rush of heat behind his eyes. Pressure in his chest. The world bent sideways, and—He dropped.Darkness.Except it wasn’t empty.Flashes. Slices of memory, jagged and violent, began tearing through his mind.A voice echoed across the space inside

Kael stood still as the sky split further open.The battlefield had become quiet—too quiet. No sound of wind, no distant thunder, not even the groan of broken metal. Just silence.Not even the Tribunal spoke anymore.They hovered like insects on the edge of death, their broken constructs twitching in place as if they could sense what was coming. Not even in their worst nightmares had they planned for this.Then it came.Not with fury. Not with fire.But with stillness.Like the moment right before death. The last breath before the void.A shadow… stretching across the torn sky. Not cast by any light, but by the absence of it.It descended slowly. Gracefully.Its form was impossible to define—shifting, alive, yet ancient beyond time. Eyes blinked across its body, then vanished. Its skin looked like cracked stone and starlight. When it moved, it bent space itself. The air didn’t vibrate. It submitted.Pamela collapsed to her knees, clutching her head, gasping.“Don’t look at it,” Marcu

The sky didn’t settle after the Tribunal vanished.It writhed.Lightning danced across colors that had no name. The ground trembled beneath them, and a sound like the grinding of history echoed from above. It wasn’t thunder. It was older. It was the groaning of something waking up—something that should have stayed asleep.Kael stood there, motionless, his chest rising and falling like he had just climbed out of a grave.Elias walked toward him, slowly.“You felt it too, didn’t you?” Elias said, his voice low. “You didn’t just kill the Tribunal. You cracked the seal.”Kael’s fingers clenched. His veins pulsed with that strange light again.“They lied,” he muttered. “They told me I was the threat. But I was just the door.”Pamela stood to the side, her body still not fully recovered from the changes the Tribunal’s failed erasure had caused. But she held her ground.“Kael…” she said, voice shaking. “Something’s wrong. I can feel it. It’s in the air. It’s—”A pulse rippled across the h

The battlefield was silent.Not the kind of silence that came after victory. This was the kind that made your skin crawl, your heart pause, and your breath catch. Like the whole universe had stopped to see what would happen next.Kael stood in the center of it all. Head bowed. Shoulders rising and falling slowly. Steam curled from his skin, rising into the shattered sky.He should’ve been dead.No one should have survived that.But Kael… wasn’t like anyone anymore.Pamela stared at him from a distance, clutching her side where blood still seeped from a wound she barely noticed now.“He’s… different,” she whispered.Marcus didn’t speak. He just watched Kael. His jaw clenched. His hands ready—but also shaking.Kael slowly looked up.His eyes were not human.They were black with flecks of deep gold—swirling, shifting, like galaxies trapped in his gaze. His skin pulsed faintly with an unnatural glow, and the scars that once marked his body were gone. Replaced by something older. Symbols.

The world was a blur of broken time and unraveling reality. Kael’s breath caught in his throat as he stood before the one he had seen in the void—his predecessor, his reflection, his origin.The man didn’t look divine. He didn’t wear armor forged in celestial fires, or glow with the radiance of ancient stars. No.He looked tired. Scarred. Worn down by lifetimes of battles that never truly ended.Yet there was something in his eyes. Something beyond time. Something godlike.Kael opened his mouth. “What are you?”The original Kael turned toward him, slow and steady, his footsteps echoing like thunder over glass.“You mean what were we,” the original said quietly. “Before they broke us. Before they cut us down piece by piece and buried our names.”Kael swallowed hard. “You’re me.”“No,” the original replied. “You’re me. But I’m what came first. Before the Tribunal. Before the Director. Before the concept of control ever existed.”“I was the mistake they couldn’t afford to let repeat.”

Silence.But it wasn’t the silence of peace.It was the kind of silence that crushed your thoughts, stretched out your heartbeat, and made you feel like time had forgotten you.Kael stood in a place that wasn’t a place.It had no ceiling, no floor—only infinite darkness, shimmering with fractured lights that blinked in and out like dying stars.He wasn’t falling.He wasn’t floating.He simply was.And he wasn’t alone.At first, he thought it was another hallucination.The pressure in his chest.The flickers of memories that didn’t belong to him.Faces he had never seen. Deaths he had never died.But they kept coming.Kael saw himself standing in a city that looked like Cresmont—but older, more advanced, with skybridges lined in silver light. That version of him wore a black coat, armor laced with glowing veins. His eyes were sharp. Cold.Then it changed.Another Kael. This one… younger. Cleaner. Standing in a white room, smiling at people he didn’t recognize. A scientist? A subject?A