Before the multiverse, there were stories.Before the gods, there were scripts.And before Hope...There was one who ruled the end of every tale.
They called him Finalus.
But when Hope was born, his ending—his existence—was unwritten.
And now?
He wants it back.
In the Quiet Between Stars
Sarive sat cross-legged in the Silence Chamber of the House Between Realities.
His breath was steady. His aura—normally light-blue—flickered with gold veins now, evidence of something shifting inside him.
He could feel it.
A cold pressure.
A name trying to force its way into existence.
"Finalus…"
He whispered it aloud.
The walls groaned.
The chamber cracked.
Even the void listened.
Hope's Memory is Rewritten
Hope stood before a mirror conjured by her own unstable power.
She looked... different.
Eyes too bright. Hair too white. She blinked, and her reflection smiled without her.
"Who are you?"
"I'm who you could've been."
The reflection stepped out of the mirror.
"Before they gave you freedom."
Suddenly, the child screamed and collapsed. Sarive and Diana rushed in as the room began to distort.
Her skin pulsed with corrupted star patterns.
Diana caught her.
"What's happening?"
Sarive placed his hand on Hope's head—and saw all of it.
A dark presence, stitched from lost timelines and broken endings, was infecting her.
Not just possessing. Replacing.
Hope was becoming something she was never meant to be—
The vessel for a forgotten god.
The Return of Finalus
Across existence, final chapters began appearing where there should be none:
A galaxy vanished mid-battle.
A timeline skipped to its own destruction.
An entire race aged and died in an instant.
At the edge of Source, Finalus stepped out of unreality.
Cloaked in void, face ever-shifting, voice like the last page of a book.
"They replaced me with a child.A child with no end.I am the End.And I have come to reclaim my place."
With every word, stories collapsed.
Diana's Choice
Deep beneath Themyscira, Diana returned to the Temple of Paradox, where the gods dared not go.
There, chained in shadow, sat Antithesis—a being who had once devoured the Oracle of Delphi.
"You seek to fight Finalus?" it whispered.
"I seek to protect Hope."
"Then you must become more than truth."
Diana stepped into the circle.
And for the first time since her birth…
She lied.
She said:
"I'm not afraid."
And in doing so, she claimed a power the gods had forsaken:The Power of the Unspoken Word.
Sarive Awakens the Core Flame
As Hope trembled in his arms, Sarive's vision blurred.
Finalus was coming. No… arriving.
The multiverse dimmed.
So he reached deep inside, past strength, past speed, past light and rage—
Into the core of his new power.
The name of it burned through him:
Origin Flame.
A golden-blue fire erupted from his chest, forming wings across his back, a crown above his head, and a new emblem on his chest:
A blazing circle with no beginning or end.
And for the first time, the gods above looked down...
And trembled.
Hope Chooses Herself
Within her soul, Hope stood between two doors.
One led to becoming a god.
One led to becoming a child.
Finalus called to her through the first.
Sarive and Diana, from the second.
"What if I'm not enough?" she whispered.
And then she remembered something Sarive once said:
"Being enough isn't the point. Being yourself is."
She smiled.
And slammed both doors shut.
"No one gets to write me but me."
Finalus howled.
Reality twisted.
And war was declared.