Niraí had seen gods flayed. Had laughed in the face of void-born horrors and kissed the rim of entropy just to spite it.
But this—
This was something else.
She knelt beside Komus, who barely clung to consciousness. His blood steamed on the stone—spore-burned, glistening with starlight poison. His skin pulsed in slow waves, reforming like flesh being reimagined by ancient laws. Beside him, Ayla screamed—not a mortal scream, but one made of memory and firelight, her body knitting itself back together in gold-threaded agony.
Still alive. But only just.
Then—a shadow moved.
Not cast. Not born of light.
Shaped.
Niraí looked up.
And froze.
Qaritas knelt in the center of it all, cradling Ayla's body like a star gone dim. But it wasn't him. Not as she'd known him. Not the flickering-shadow boy, not the awkward echo trying to find form.
This was something else.
His skin was gone—or perhaps had never existed. In its place: dark matter sculpted into flesh, not solid, but dense. Weightless and crushing all at once. Veins of soft umbra pulsed across a humanoid frame too smooth, too quiet. The hollows of his cheeks drank light, and the ridges of his back rippled with energy that smelled faintly of midnight storms and static on old bones.
And then—the eyes.
Purple.
Not vibrant. Not vivid.
Violent.
They shimmered not with color, but with intention. Like they remembered too much. Like they had seen the first sun die and found it underwhelming.
Niraí's lips parted. No words came. Just breath. Uneven. Cold.
Because whatever stood there now—it wasn't just Qaritas.
It was what came after.
And yet—he held Ayla as if afraid she would vanish. Gently. Desperately. As if that simple, broken act of care could keep him anchored to something soft.
Then—
A whisper.
Close, but not spoken. Not heard with ears.
Felt.
In the marrow.
"Welcome to the Fold."
Qaritas flinched. His purple eyes widened—but not in fear.
Recognition.
Niraí's heart thudded once—loud and human and real.
Because for just a moment, she didn't see a savior or a weapon.
She saw a beginning.
And beginnings were always dangerous.
Ayla's breath caught like glass under pressure.
Her eyes fluttered open—unsteady, unfocused—but when they found him, they stilled.
Qaritas.
His form was barely comprehensible now. Shadow-forged. Still kneeling beside her. Still holding her as if her blood might spill the moment he let go.
Red-gold ichor slicked his hands.
Ayla reached up. Slowly. Trembling. Her fingers shook, not from fear—but from the effort of being.
Her hand touched his chest—his new form—hesitant, like she didn't know if it would burn her.
It didn't.
"You're... still here," she whispered.
Qaritas tried to speak. But his voice had changed. Deeper. Resonant. Not like an echo. Like a beginning.
"I didn't—" he started, but stopped. Swallowed. "I had to."
Ayla nodded once. Her hand fell back to her chest, where her skin—still half-transparent, still remaking itself—shimmered with golden thread.
"You saved us," she said.
But something in her voice broke—because she didn't know what it had cost.
Across the battlefield, Komus groaned—low and raw, like a glitching star trying to spin itself back into place. His breath rattled in his chest as the burn on his shoulder bubbled and shrank, skin threading itself together like old light weaving memory.
Niraí held him close, arms locked around his torso, refusing to let him slip even a breath further into darkness.
"You ever pull a stunt like that again," she whispered, "I'll kill you myself."
He coughed—bloody and sharp—but managed a grin.
"Promise?"
She laughed. Just once. Just enough to crack the ache in her chest.
"You idiot," she said, brushing hair from his face. "You beautiful, broken idiot."
"I thought I could hold it," he murmured. "Didn't want anyone else hurt."
"Look how that worked out," she said, brushing away a tear she didn't remember letting fall.
He leaned against her, finally allowing the weight of pain to pass into her arms. For a moment, they weren't Ascendants. Not warriors. Not myths.
Just two souls, scarred and holding each other like it mattered.
Qaritas stood now, slowly, like gravity wasn't quite sure how to hold him anymore.
He looked down at his hands.
They weren't hands. They were shape. Darkness given edges.
His body moved like smoke trapped in skin.
He didn't feel pain.
He felt weight.
His voice came out too quietly for anyone but Ayla to hear.
"What am I now?"
Ayla looked at him—not with answers. Just honesty.
"I don't know," she whispered. "But you saved me."
He flinched. As if that was worse than anything else.
Cree stood off to the side, flames dimmed to a low smolder. They hadn't spoken since the end.
They hadn't moved closer.
They wouldn't look at him.
Not even once.
Their arms were folded. Their shoulders tight. And behind their silence was something too heavy for words.
Not hatred.
Not fear.
Memory.
They had seen this before.
Daviyi, still standing near the arena's gate, said nothing.
Her eyes tracked every movement—Qaritas's stance, Ayla's breath, the arc of light in Niraí's tears.
But her expression wasn't fear.
It was math.
Calculation. Observation. Truth, waiting to be named.
And still—no judgment.
Only thought.
The wind shifted. The air pulsed again.
Qaritas looked up—not toward anyone.
Just up.
Where the whisper had come from.
Where Ecayrous had been.
The echo still rang.
"Welcome to the Fold."
He clenched his jaw.
"I don't want to belong to that."
Ayla, resting now with her head in his lap, opened her eyes again.
"But you don't," she said.
"You chose us."
Qaritas didn't respond at first.
He wasn't sure what "us" meant anymore.
The not-empty inside him stirred—not in hunger, but in warning.
What if saving them now meant losing them later?
Komus and Ayla lay beneath the veil of sigil-light, slowly regrowing into themselves. Niraí watched over them, her hand in Komus's hair, fingers sifting gently as if any harder would shatter him again.
Qaritas stood at the center of them all—unmasked, unreadable, skinless and shaped by shadow. He wasn't flickering anymore.
He had become.
And now he spoke.
"I want to hear what he has to say."
The sentence didn't crash like thunder.
It landed softly.
And somehow—made the entire coliseum feel colder.
Cree turned sharply. "You what?"
Qaritas didn't raise his voice. He never did.
"I said I want to understand him. Ecayrous."
Niraí's breath hitched.
Not in shock.
In recognition.
Daviyi said nothing—but her gaze deepened. Calculating again. Watching the angles of truth shift with the boy no longer bound by form.
"You're not saying you trust him," Hydeius said, voice low, carved from stone and ash.
"No," Qaritas replied. "I don't."
He looked at his hands. Smoke-limned fingers flexing like memory in motion.
"But I believe the truth lives in the questions we're not supposed to ask."
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was bracing.
Like standing on the edge of something sacred and terrible.
Then—Komus screamed.
Raw. Hoarse. Bleeding pain into syllables.
"You don't get to ask about them! You don't even know what they are!"
He tried to rise—Niraí held him, but not tightly enough.
"You want to hear Ecayrous out?" Komus's voice cracked, wild with something older than grief. "He's not just a fragment! He is Eon!"
Qaritas blinked. "He said—"
"He lied!" Komus shouted.
Cough. Blood. Fury.
"Fragments aren't leftovers," he spat. "They're rebirths. Different universes. Different Eons. Born again. Each one worse than the last. That's what we're dealing with. Not shadows—successors."
Cree looked shaken for the first time in centuries.
Hydeius's expression turned to iron.
And Qaritas—Qaritas just watched.
Then—
Ayla stood.
Shakily. Skin still mending. A breath away from collapse.
But she stood.
She placed a hand on Komus's shoulder. "Back off."
Komus froze, trembling. He turned to her—red-eyed, desperate.
"I'm trying to protect you," he said, voice breaking. "I failed before. You know I did. I let them do things to us that I—I couldn't stop. You think I'm over that? That I could ever—after what he did—"
He pointed, not at Qaritas.
At where Ecayrous had stood.
At the space still echoing with hunger.
"You want to trust that thing?"
Ayla didn't flinch.
"No," she said. "But I want the truth."
She turned to the others—battered, broken, bleeding.
But clear.
"If what he says is true, then the Primarch Ten deserve to see their children again."
She looked at Daviyi. At Cree. At Hydeius.
"You remember what it meant. You remember them."
Komus fell silent.
No scream left. Just the sound of someone losing faith in the comfort of hate.
Cree exhaled. No fire in it.
Daviyi finally stepped forward, folding her hands.
"We'll weigh it," she said. "Truth has weight. So does cost."
"And sometimes," Daviyi added softly, "we pay it without knowing what we lost."
She looked at Qaritas—not with blame. Not with fear.
Just calculation.
And the smallest, most fragile flicker—
Hope.
Than everything around Qaritas began collapse around as if he was in a dream.
As he heard shouts from the other, as he slipped in the dream.
But it didn't feel like dreaming.
It felt wrong
It feels like remembering something that hasn't happened yet.
He stands at the edge of silence—where space forgets its shape. The stars are wrong here, drifting backward in slow spirals, like they're being unmade in reverse. And at the center of the void:
A child.
Small. Barefoot. Sitting calmly on the cracked lip of creation.
They hum softly. A broken tune. Wordless, circular, like something sung at the end of time.
Their eyes are violet—but not just colored. They are alive with static, tiny universes dying and being born in each blink. They hold in their hands the pieces of a shattered cosmos, arranging them like toys.
A fractured sun. A string of forgotten laws. A black hole shaped like a teardrop.
And then the child smiles.
Innocent.
Godlike.
Terrifying.
Qaritas steps forward, but the void doesn't move under his feet. It listens.
The child doesn't look up.
Not yet.
Behind the child, shadows ripple—longer than they should be, shaped like memories that chose to survive. They wear Eon's many faces. The old forms. The fallen ones. Some Qaritas has seen in dreams. Some only in instinct.
They lean forward as if waiting.
Watching.
He whispers:
"I'm not like them."
The child tilts their head.
Then turns.
Their face is not monstrous.
It is his.
Not as he is now, but as he once was.
Before Becoming.
Before the not-empty whispered his name.
And the child says—
"Then why do I look like you?"
The smile doesn't fade.
It deepens.
Cracks.
The void behind them collapses inward—folding like paper catching fire.
Light turns to ash.
Ash turns to breath.
Breath turns to nothing.
As he heard Ayla's voice.
Calling out to him.
And Qaritas—
Wakes.
Suddenly. Violently.
He sits upright, chest heaving, skin cold with sweat. The Library around him is quiet—but not asleep.
Everyone is watching him closely.
"Are you alright you collapse " Ayla voice cracking with each word
Qaritas looked away whispering "I'm fine", before standing up.
But he couldn't shake the feeling that something is watching and waiting.
On his tongue, a whisper he does not remember speaking:
But in the silence that follows—
He isn't sure he believes it.
Because the child in the dream had smiled with his mouth.
The coliseum had not stopped trembling.
Daviyi stood as if carved in thought, her fingers twitching with unseen equations. Cree stared at nothing, his eyes flickering between memory and horror. Hydeius hadn't spoken since the word "children." As if any word now would be a betrayal of silence.
Qaritas stood alone.
Again.
Until Niraí broke the spell.
Her voice didn't rise above the hum of the Library, but it was enough.
"We need to stop."
The others turned—slowly, reluctantly.
"Not forever," she added. "Just for now."
Cree blinked like he was waking from a dream. Daviyi tilted her head, calculating—always calculating. Hydeius gave a quiet nod, the kind that meant agreement born not from strategy, but weariness.
Niraí continued, stepping forward, her boots making no sound against the data-stone floor.
"We're fractured. And we'll keep fracturing if we don't rest. Just one night. Just long enough to remember that we're more than the pain we've inherited."
She looked at Komus, then at Ayla.
Then at Qaritas.
"We regroup in the morning. Before we go after the next fragment. Before we give our answer."
Silence met her words—but this time, it wasn't resistance.
It was surrender.
The Library responded before any of them could move. A corridor unfolded nearby—quiet, warm, and curved like a question waiting to be asked. A hollow between walls that didn't used to exist, lined with book-spines glowing faintly like fireflies in dusk.
It was a place for pausing.
For breathing.
They didn't speak again as they entered it. Just the rustle of fabric. The sound of bodies lowering to floor-pillows shaped from unwritten pages. The air smelled of cedar, ink, and distant memory.
Komus was the first to sleep.
Ayla followed, curled beside him.
Cree watched the ceiling like it owed him something. Daviyi pulled a volume from the shelf and opened it to a blank page, staring like it might bleed the truth.
Hydeius stood in the doorway for a long while, arms folded, before finally letting himself sit.
Qaritas remained awake.
Niraí sat beside him.
They didn't speak.
Not yet.
She simply placed a hand over his—not forcing, not guiding. Just presence. A reminder that even gods should not have to hold things alone.
It was long past the moment when everyone else had drifted into sleep before Qaritas finally let his body lean back.
He didn't close his eyes because he was tired.
He closed them because something in the Library had stopped listening—
And started watching.
The dream begins where the last one left off.
But this time, Qaritas does not arrive.
He was always there.
No entrance. No footfall. Just being—as if he had never left the edge of the void. As if waking had only been a distraction from the truth.
The stars are wrong again. Spiraling inward. Dying before they're born. The air tastes like burnt silence.
At the center, the child still sits.
Purple eyes, deeper now. Less innocent. More knowing.
They hold a fragment in their hands—a broken law, humming with forgotten physics. They hum to it like a lullaby, coaxing its shape back into meaning.
"Why do you keep running?" the child asks without looking up.
Qaritas says nothing. Not yet.
The child turns the law over in their hands and breathes on it.
It becomes a bird made of gravity.
Then unravels.
Then bleeds.
"You think dreams are prophecy," the child says. "But they're not. They're memories with their skins turned inside out."
The child finally looks up.
Their face is his.
Not the one he wears now—but the one he wore before Becoming.
The face of someone who still believed things had shape. That beginnings were innocent.
"I am you," the child says. "Or maybe you are me. I forget the order."
Qaritas steps closer.
"What do you want from me?"
The child's smile does not grow. It deepens—like a wound learning to speak.
"I want nothing," they say.
"You're the one who wants."
They gesture behind them.
And suddenly, a throne appears. It is not carved. Not forged. Not even built.
It is assembled from the aftermath.
Planets that never formed. Songs that never had singers. Universes that unraveled before being named.
The Throne of What Was.
And it calls to him.
"You were once the son of all creation," the child says softly.
"The axis. The echo. The first form after the first forgetting."
"I was…" Qaritas breathes.
"We were," the child corrects.
"You are becoming what the Fold tried to erase."
The throne pulses.
It has no back. No armrests. It was not made to hold.
It was made to remind.
The child rises now.
Taller.
Older.
Still his face.
But… cracked. Bleeding starlight from the eyes. Smiling with teeth made of law.
"You don't belong to Ecayrous," they say. "You don't belong to the Library. Or to them."
"You belong to the ruins."
"To the broken things. The forgotten shapes. The memories before the first gods woke."
And then the child's voice deepens—echoing now with all the versions of Qaritas he never became.
"You're not here to choose a side."
"You're here to restore the ones that were lost."
Behind him, thousands of voices whisper.
Forgotten universes.
Unmade worlds.
Erased children.
Not screaming.
Calling.
The throne waits.
Qaritas stares.
And the child smiles again.
"It's time to take back what was yours."
"To take back the throne."
"To stop pretending you were ever small."
And the dream ends.
But not like sleep breaking.
It ends like a curtain falling on a truth that was never supposed to be seen.
He wakes.
Breathless. Cold. Hands trembling.
The Library around him is quiet—but wrong. The walls pulse like they're waiting for something to change.
And on his tongue, a sentence he didn't remember speaking:
"I was once the son of all creation."
He says it aloud.
And something in the Library listens.
Not a god.
Not a whisper.
Something older.