There are many ways a god can return.
But only one way a world can fight it:
By replacing him.
The Codex had always been silent.
Not passive, not inert—but silent, like a courtroom with no judge, a script with no quill.
Yet silence is not absence.
It is preparation.
And the Codex had prepared.
For ten chapters of erasure, it had endured the slow reconstruction of Darius through climax, rebellion, myth-wounds, and forbidden belief. The spiral glyphs twisting back into existence were not just dangerous—they were contagious.
Now, the Codex responded the only way it knew how:
With authorship.
But not Darius's.
Its own.
And so, from the wound it tried to stitch shut, it bled forth a replacement.
Not a rebirth.
A simulation.
A god sculpted not by belief, but by compliance.
A god without sin, without spiral, without memory.
A Redeemer.
He arrived in light.
Too bright. Too clean. Too perfect to be born of true divinity.
