An absolute, ringing silence fell over the God’s Wake.
The Red God’s inflated, mangled corpse remained jammed firmly between the chasm walls, forming a plug of vitrified flesh and shattered metal directly beneath the precipice.
The Bone Ship used its bone tail and paws to pull out of the ravine.
Trenn knelt on the tilted timber deck. His breathing was ragged. His golden tail hung slack against the wood. He was coated in the sticky, gold blood of the Red God. In his hands, he held the ivory stock of Zeen’s soul-bound musket.
As the physical ringing in his ears faded, it was replaced by a hollow, suffocating quiet in his mind. Trenn closed his eyes and instinctively reached out through his empathic web, hunting for the familiar, jagged hum of the gnome's soul.
He found nothing.
The tether that had connected them since the Wayrest was severed, leaving a gaping, psychic crater that hit Trenn harder than the explosion. Zeen was just... gone.
“No…”
He tuned his Mana Radiation. In his gold tail, he felt the discordant hum of the Necrosis Element… and there it was. Zeen’s soul, next to Gil’s. They were looking at each other, holding hands over the musket, refusing to move on from the World Between Worlds.
Trenn stared down at the wedge of crushed Red Metal beneath them. The tomb of the Red God. The tomb of his friend.
"Zeen..." Ezy whispered from the cockpit, her broken voice drifting through the lingering smoke.
Her grief pierced through Trenn's paralysis. He gripped the cold ivory stock in his hands. Not gone. Not yet.
Trenn slowly climbed to his feet. He remembered the dying wish.
“Bind me to the musket when I'm done.”
His eyes, bleeding gold and rimmed with soot, burned with a terrible, absolute focus. To perform the ritual, Almitad had used an emerald gifted by the Gem-Croc.
Trenn pulled the musket’s hammer. The perfectly cut gemstone was there. He traced Gil’s tether, from his ghostly form to the green stone.
He’d become a master of binding, of tethers. Was that all he had to do? Create a bond between Zeen’s soul and the emerald, while attuned to the Necrosis Element?
The cold, discordant hum flooded his veins, freezing the fire in his chest. He threw his awareness into the World Between Worlds.
I've got you, Trenn projected, his mind a steel trap closing around his friend’s spirit.
Trenn poured his mana into the stone. A profound, resonant chime echoed across the deck. The musket shuddered in Trenn’s grip.
For a fraction of a second, the two translucent figures flickered into existence over the weapon—a broad-shouldered gnome in a cook's apron, and a smaller, soot-stained gnome with a manic grin. Their clasped hands met the stone, and their spectral forms dissolved into a dual-toned pulse of silver and warm orange light that settled deep within the ivory stock.
Trenn collapsed back against the Crusher’s treads, his chest heaving, the musket clutched tightly to his chest.
They were together.
The rumble of engines broke the silence.
From the far end of the God’s Wake, the surviving Wolf Kin riders had returned.
There were only a dozen of them left. They idled their heavy motorcycles a hundred yards away, their engines a low, uncertain growl.
They looked at the massive skeletal galleon. They looked at the geyser of ichor pooling around the wedged, dead mass of the Red God.
And they looked at Vavnaar. The exile was covered head-to-toe in a mix of Wolf Kin and god blood, holding a greatsword that hummed with violence, standing protectively in front of his three pups.
The riders dismounted. They didn't draw their weapons. Instead, they dragged a figure from the back of the lead motorcycle.
It was a massive Wolf Kin in blue-painted armor. He was bound in heavy iron chains, his snout bloodied, his eyes darting frantically.
“Tribane,” whispered Vavnaar.
The riders hauled their former Alpha through the dust and threw him at Vavnaar’s feet. They didn't say a word. They simply stepped back and bowed their heads, exposing the back of their necks in absolute submission to the victor.
Tribane looked up, baring his teeth in a pathetic, desperate snarl. "You were exiled! You have no claim—"
Vavnaar didn't let him finish. Silver Flash moved in a fluid arc.
The hum of the blade was followed instantly by the dull thud of Tribane’s head hitting the vitrified glass.
Vavnaar shook the blood from his sword and sheathed it. He turned to Yetran, Arenlys, and Manalee, the tan pup. His scarred snout softened for a fraction of a second.
"We are done running," Vavnaar told them. "We are home."
He turned back to Trenn. The Wolf Kin approached the edge of the chasm, pulling heavy iron canteens from the saddles of the abandoned bikes. He waded into the pooling ichor, filling the flasks with the warm blood of the Red God.
The other Wolf Kin followed, and collected more of the precious liquid.
He looked up at the Wild Mage resting against the Crusher.
"We have our kingdom, and we have our bounty," Vavnaar rumbled, bowing his head in a gesture of profound, hard-earned respect. "We are even, God Slayer. May the mist never hide your prey."
Trenn nodded slowly as the Wolf Kin pack mounted their Black Liquid-powered bikes and rode back toward the tree line, leaving the ruins of the God's Wake behind.
Ezy sat in the cramped, oil-scented cockpit of the Crusher.
In her living hand, she held the skull of the Shepherd of Loss.
Zeen had carved and painted it beautifully. The marigold vines, the gilded spiderwebs. And set perfectly into the right eye socket was the cracked, hollowed-out obsidian sphere of the One-Eye.
You were always the smartest one in the class.
A tear carved a clean track through the soot on her cheek. She traced the carved bone with her thumb. She had lost so many pieces of herself. Her hand, her eye, her ear, her foot. She had bolted scrap metal and dead bone to her body just to keep moving.
But Zeen wasn't scrap. Zeen was family.
Ezy lifted the death mask. She took a shuddering breath, the smell of stale calcium and old magic filling her nose, and lowered it over her head. She cinched the leather strap tight.
She opened her eye.
Her left eye saw the interior of the Crusher’s cockpit, rendered in the dull, grey light of the overcast sky.
But her right eye—the eye she had lost to the Fire Elemental, what seemed like a lifetime ago—opened into a world of vibrant, violent color.
The One-Eye amulet, positioned perfectly over her empty socket, acted as a lens. The shadow magic trapped within the shattered sphere resonated with her own neural pathways. The blindness vanished, replaced by a high-contrast thermal and magical overlay.
She could see.
Through the right side of the mask, she saw the residual heat bleeding from the Crusher’s manifold. She saw the ambient, glowing radiation of the Red God’s ichor pooling in the chasm. She saw the warm, steady heartbeat of Mara standing on the deck.
The fluttering wings of Bomber, circling above, with Skate in its furry paws.
Ezy touched the cold bone of the mask, a watery smile breaking across her face.
"You stubborn, brilliant idiot," she whispered, her voice echoing with a hollow, resonant rattle from within the skull. "It fits perfectly."
The winch of the Crusher shrieked as Ezy hoisted the last of the heavy wooden Ratling barrels onto the Bone Ship's deck.
They had spent hours harvesting the Red God’s ichor. They had enough liquid gold to buy an army. Or, more importantly, to buy the ultimate favor from the Grimoire Mages.
Trenn sat on the edge of the timber deck, his legs dangling over the massive white ribs. He stared at the twice-bound musket resting across his lap, his thumb tracing the fused emerald.
Footsteps approached. Mara sat down beside him.
She looked exhausted. The black Husk armor was gone, replaced by a simple canvas tunic that hung loosely over her. She smelled of pine needles and dried Wolf Kin blood.
"We have the ichor," Mara said, looking at the rows of sealed barrels. "The Anurys Mirror is only a few days' march from here."
"Yeah," Trenn said softly. "I can finally go home."
He looked at her, the weight of the impending goodbye suddenly heavier than the golden scales on his back. "Mara, I... I don't know how to thank you. For not giving up on me, even when... For everything."
Mara turned to him, her amber eyes narrowing in genuine confusion.
"Thank me?" she scoffed. Her ears twitched in annoyance. "Trenn, if you think you're walking through that portal alone, the gold has finally rotted your brain."
Trenn blinked, stunned. "What? Mara, Earth is... It's a warzone right now. It's dangerous, it has no natural mana, it’s—"
"It's where you’re going," Mara interrupted, her voice leaving no room for argument. She rested her hand on the hilt of her kris knife. "I broke my oaths to the Mana Forest to follow you. I have no home here anymore. My pack is you, the gnome, and whatever weird pets you collect on the way. Where you go, I go."
"And somebody has to maintain the heavy artillery," a hollow, resonant voice called out.
Trenn turned. Ezy leaned against the Red Metal leg of the Crusher. She wore the skull mask, the black obsidian eye gleaming with an eerie, violet inner light. Her massive skeletal hand tapped against her metallic leg.
"Going to another world through a magical mirror to fight Wild Mage Warlords?" Ezy let out a sharp, rattling laugh. "That is exactly the sort of Wild Mage Song nonsense I signed up for when I left the Hive."
A flutter of pink and yellow descended from the grey canopy. Bomber’s legs opened, dropping Skate onto the timber deck. The slime flowed forward, ascending Trenn’s boot to settle in his lap beside the ivory musket. Trenn rested his butchered hand on its yielding, purple surface.
A deep, rhythmic purr vibrated through the gel, transmitting a simple, unburdened contentment. The paralyzing dread of the One-Eye no longer stained their tether.
Trenn’s gaze rose to the fox-kin warrior who refused to leave his side, and the cyborg-looking gnome wearing a death mask who had just rebuilt her life from scrap. He felt the musket in his lap, holding the soul of the Shepherd of Vengeance.
He wasn't bringing a monster home to his mother. He was bringing an army of monsters.
Trenn smiled. The scar on his cheek pulled tight, but for the first time in a long time, the expression reached his eyes.
He closed his eyes and reached for the cold, necrotic tether in his mind.
Walk.
With a seismic groan of bone and black sinew, the Bone Ship lurched forward. The giant undead crocodile pulled itself away from the shattered mountain, carrying its crew of broken, unyielding survivors toward the Anurys Mirror.
Toward Montreal.
THE END OF BONDS OF RUIN: SCRAP THE GODS, BIND THEIR SOULS
(Please read the Author Note below for the first chapter of my next book, Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal.)
The End of an Adventure, and the Beginning of an Apocalypse
And so ends Bonds of Ruin: Scrap The Gods, Bind Their Souls.
If you made it this far, thank you. Writing Trenn, Mara, Ezy, Zeen, and Almitad has been an incredible, brutal journey, and knowing you were reading along made every chapter worth it. Seriously. I wouldn't have done it without you.
If you enjoyed this completed trilogy, please consider leaving a Rating or a Review! It is the absolute best way to help new readers find this story now that it is finished.
But the story of this universe is far from over.
Trenn is bringing an "army of monsters" back to Earth to fight the Warlords of Montreal. But who are these Warlords? What happened to Earth while Trenn was hunting gods, lost in the Morning Mists?
I am taking a two-week break to prepare the launch of my new parallel series, Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal.
This new series will start as a separate fiction on Royal Road. It follows Rom and Natalie—two Wild Mages who were not Isekai'd when the Mana Bomb hit. It is a gritty urban apocalypse story that follows them as they try to survive the initial destruction of Montreal, navigating the rise of the Warlords Trenn is currently marching to face.
Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal will launch on a new fiction page with a four-chapter mass release on March 26, 2026!
To give you a taste of the story, I have attached Chapter 1 of the new series right below this note.
Thank you for everything, and I'll see you in the ruins of Montreal.
MANA BOMB: WARLORDS OF MONTREAL
Chapter 1: Day Zero
The world ended on a Tuesday morning. For Rom, the world’s end began not with hellfire, but by tripping through a coffee shop door into the biting autumn wind and the roar of a crowded Montreal sidewalk.
He salvaged his balance by juggling his keys and his cup, but the lid popped. A dark bloom of scalding coffee spread across his white cotton shirt, burning his skin before rapidly cooling in the brisk air.
Shit.
He had a ten o’clock meeting meant to put the final nail in his team's coffin, and now he was going to witness the execution wearing a massive stain.
Corporate had stopped giving him projects to actually manage months ago. Somehow, he had become the company's Grim Reaper—a spreadsheet coroner sent in to perform the post-mortem, fire the staff, and sign the death certificates.
Today was supposed to be his own team’s turn. He was supposed to look Marcus—a guy who just had his first kid—in the eye and tell him his severance package was in the mail. The guilt had been gnawing a hole in his stomach since Sunday.
As he dabbed frantically at his ruined shirt, a flash of violet light erased the world.
Pressure buckled the air, squeezing his lungs until his eardrums throbbed in the vacuum. The screech of a nearby bus vanished. A hum resonated in his molars, flooding his mouth with the sharp, metallic taste of pennies.
He closed his eyes against the sting. The moment passed. The world returned, but the street was frozen in a collective, breathless flinch.
Beside him, a young woman’s laughter caught and twisted into an uncontrolled gurgle. She dropped to her knees, her manicured fingers digging frantically into her scalp. "Head," she choked out, her voice scraping like sandpaper. "Burns—"
Rom dropped his coffee and keys, lunging forward to catch her shoulder. "Hey, are you—"
He recoiled. Translucent mucus frothed from her lips, dripping onto her silk blouse with a vicious sizzle. Yellow smoke, stinking of burned hair and heavy ammonia, coiled from the dissolving fabric.
Rom watched in paralyzed horror as the slick flesh of her face sagged, peeling from her skull in a heavy, wet wave.
The sheer, unnatural heat of it pushed him back. The stench of scorched meat flooded his sinuses, triggering a violent gag reflex.
Within seconds, the ripple of collapsing tissue melted into a smoking, quivering slurry of organs and fat. Her skeleton, stripped brutally clean, balanced for a single heartbeat before clattering into the pooling ooze.
Rom stumbled back, his boots slipping on the hissing edge of the puddle.
What the fuck—a chemical weapon? Am I hallucinating?
He retreated, bumping hard into the pedestrian behind him. He spun to apologize, but the words died in his throat.
The man was petrified from his expensive leather shoes to his neck. A tide of gray stone climbed his jaw, pouring over his terrified eyes and hardening them into polished, unblinking granite.
A storefront window to Rom's left abruptly vomited fire and glass across the sidewalk. The gut-punching BOOM broke the city’s paralysis. The street erupted into a screaming, shoving human wave.
The sheer mass of the mob hit Rom like a concrete wall. He was instantly swallowed in a crush of wool coats, briefcases, and screaming mouths. The pressure hit his chest from all sides, compressing his ribs until black spots danced in his vision.
He couldn't expand his lungs. His boots lifted entirely off the pavement, carried forward by the sheer, animalistic surge of a thousand terrified people pressing in the same direction.
A shoulder caught him hard in the throat. Rom choked, thrashing wildly.
He drove his elbow into the back of a man in a trench coat, using him as leverage to claw his way out.
Beneath the roar of the crowd, he heard the wet, sickening thud of someone falling, followed immediately by the frantic scrambling of boots trampling over whatever—or whoever—had gone down.
Pure, primal adrenaline flooded his veins. He caught a woman's shoulder, and violently shoved his way past her, bursting out of the human vice and stumbling over the curb into the street.
He caught himself on the hood of an idling sedan, gasping raggedly for air.
But before he could fill his lungs, the metal beneath his palms suddenly groaned and buckled.
Rom pushed back, dumbfounded. Inside the car, the driver was convulsing, a thick spray of green shoots sprouting from his mouth. The mob screamed anew, climbing over the hood and trunk of adjacent cars to put distance between themselves and the vehicle.
A massive oak branch erupted from the driver’s chest, punching through the windshield and whipping Rom across the jaw with wet leaves. Wood groaned and rapidly expanded, tearing the driver apart as a swelling trunk hoisted the chassis entirely off the asphalt.
Steel ruptured under the immense pressure. The vehicle's frame blasted outward in a shower of deadly shrapnel. Rom threw his arms over his face, but a dense block of plastic and wiring—the car's stereo unit—tore through the debris cloud and slammed into his forehead.
Light flashed behind his eyes. The sky and street swapped places as his back struck the asphalt, driving the remaining air from his lungs. Grit ground into his cheek. The coppery warmth of blood flooded his mouth, mingling with the phantom taste of pennies.
Get up. The command looped in his dazed mind, but his limbs wouldn't obey.
Gasping, fighting the violent spin of his vision, he watched the screaming crowd scatter in terror, abandoning him entirely beneath the canopy of a giant tree growing out of a mangled car.
The high-pitched ringing in his ears was pierced by a deep groan of tortured metal, followed by the sharp crack of ice shifting on a warming lake.
He managed to prop himself up on his elbows.
A minivan a few yards away was entombed in a thick shell of black frost. A head-sized sphere of jagged ice rolled across its warped hood, leaving a trail of crystalline needles in its wake. It hit the pavement with a heavy thud, instantly freezing the asphalt around it.
It's freezing the ground, Rom realized through the haze of his concussion. I need to get up high.
He scanned the chaotic street. Ten feet away, an abandoned pickup truck sat parked directly beneath the sprawling canopy of the car-erupted oak tree. One of its thick, low-hanging branches hovered just above the truck's roof.
Run.
Rom scrambled up, wincing as glass shards ground deep into his palms. The anomaly reacted instantly to his movement. It pivoted and launched itself at him, paving the street with a slick trail of black rime.
Rom bolted toward the pickup. He used an uprooted slab of pavement to vault upward, aiming for the truck bed, but his blood-slicked hands slipped on the metal rim.
His knee slammed brutally into the bumper. Pain flared, but panic overrode it. He dug his boots into the tire tread and heaved himself up just as the tumbling black core reached the truck, freezing the metal bumper instantly as it climbed.
He scrambled across the roof, his boots slipping on the encroaching frost. Knowing the truck wouldn't save him for more than a few seconds, he lunged off the side, throwing his arms high toward the oak canopy.
His right hand clamped around the thick branch. His shoulder popped agonizingly in its socket, but he held on, swinging his left hand up desperately to secure his grip. He dangled over the street, screaming through clenched teeth as the embedded glass in his palms ground against the rough bark.
Below him, the ice sphere wheeled back, shot up the truck’s frosted windshield, and launched into the air. It slammed directly into his dangling boot and burst into an inky spray.
Instantly, black frost bloomed. Crystalline needles crawled up his calf, freezing his blood vessels and stiffening his muscles into solid, heavy ice. The sudden, unnatural weight of his frozen lower leg tore at his already strained shoulder joints.
His fingers slipped on the bloody bark. His grip gave out. He fell.
Rom hit the asphalt feet first. A sickening, crystalline crunch echoed above the ringing in his ears.
The impact buckled his hips, whipping his torso backward. His head bounced hard off the concrete. White stars burst across his vision as the wind was driven violently from his lungs in a ragged wheeze.
Fighting the blackness at the edges of his sight, he ground his bleeding palms into the grit and shoved himself into a seated position. Gasping for air, he followed the line of his own body: hip, thigh, knee, the shredded, bloodless cuff of his pants... and then the pavement.
His boot lay three feet away, his foot still laced neatly inside.
The impact hadn't just broken his leg; it had shattered the frozen limb entirely. Chunks of blood-streaked ice and brittle, frozen marrow littered the street between his stump and his boot.
Rom inhaled a scream, but his lungs seized in shuddering paralysis.
His stomach convulsed, sending a spike of fire from the tip of his stump straight up his spine. The burning city, the screaming crowds, the massive tree—it all faded into background noise.
The world narrowed to a pinprick of agony.
Then, the ice at the edge of the wound began to melt.
Warm, brilliant red blood pulsed from the shredded stump, pooling rapidly on the gray asphalt. The femoral artery. The clinical, spreadsheet-coroner part of his brain supplied the fact with terrifying detachment. He had maybe sixty seconds before he bled out.
Move.
Rom dragged his trembling hands from the pavement, ignoring the glass embedded in his flesh. He fumbled blindly at his waist, his blood-slicked fingers struggling against the metal buckle of his leather belt. It slipped. He cursed, a wet, breathless sound, and yanked again. The leather pulled free.
He wrapped it around his thigh, just above the ruined knee. He looped the tail end through the buckle, bit down on the leather with his back teeth, and pulled with both hands, using every last ounce of remaining strength to wrench the makeshift tourniquet tight.
Agony flared so bright it washed his vision in white. He screamed, the sound muffled by the leather in his mouth, but he didn't let go. He pulled tighter, feeling the thick leather bite deeply into his skin until the pulsing flow of blood slowed to a sluggish seep.
Rom collapsed backward onto the freezing pavement, his chest heaving, his hands locked in a death grip around the belt. Above him, the violet sky churned over the ruined city. He didn't know what had just happened to the world, only that somehow, he was still in it.
