Qaritas didn't breathe.
Not because he couldn't.
Because something inside him was changing.
It wasn't a memory. It was something older. Something beneath memory. Like a soul waking up.
He looked at Ayla. And for a moment, he didn't see a woman broken by godhood.
He saw someone who had held the impossible—and refused to let it die.
Ayla's voice dropped again—lower now. Not quieter. Just heavier. Like it carried a weight no one else had dared to hold.
"I thought... maybe, just maybe, I could save them."
"From Ecayrous. From what he made them into. I thought if I earned their trust, if I showed them anything softer than the blade, I could turn his weapons against him."
She looked down, hands curled into loose fists.
"So I did everything I could. I trained them—not just to survive, but to be kind. I told them stories of a world without war. Without pain. A world where we wouldn't have to kneel to monsters wearing godhood like a crown."
"I read them tales by starlight," she whispered. "Lullabies from a home I barely remembered. I told them love wasn't weakness—just proof they were still alive."
That they were allowed to want more.
Qaritas didn't interrupt. He couldn't. Every word cut clean and deep.
"That's when they came for me."
Her jaw clenched.
"Ecayrous's assassin division—over two hundred Skotosars, bred and broken for death. My 'brothers.' My 'sisters.' The ones I bled beside for centuries. The moment I tried to leave... to retire... they turned."
Her hands trembled—but her voice did not.
"They didn't let me go quietly. I fought back for four hours. No food. No water. No pause. Every breath was pain. Every movement—defiance. I killed as many as I could."
There was a smile. Not of victory—but of memory.
"People watched. Did nothing. Said I deserved it for 'insulting the division.' I heard them placing bets as I bled."
"When I couldn't stand anymore—when I was crawling through my own blood—they surrounded me. Laughed. Stabbed me until my legs stopped listening. My arm snapped like paper. Poison turned my breath to fire. I was barely breathing."
Her voice broke—only for a heartbeat.
Ayla's breath hitched. The dark held its breath. The kind of stillness that comes before something is born... or broken.
——————————————————————
She looked up—and now, now, her eyes were glowing. Not with magic. With something older.
Her vision smeared. Her heart stammered, unsure of its duty. One more breath and she would vanish.
"That's when the shadows came."
Qaritas tensed.
"Seven of them," she said.
"Each one holding a heart."
"My assassins' hearts."
"And Zcain... the third eldest. The one with hollow eyes and quiet footsteps—"
She swallowed hard.
"He began eating them."
Qaritas reeled.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't even present. Just... calm. Like someone completing a ritual they were born to finish.
The voices told me to kill them, he said, as he wiped the blood from his mouth. After all... they touched our mother.
And yet—he cried. Silent tears. No sobbing. Just two lines of grief running down his blank face.
——————————————————————
Qaritas felt his knees weaken. But Ayla kept going.
"The others just stood there. Quiet. Still. But tears ran down their faces. Silent. Unacknowledged."
"Not for the dead. For me."
She closed her eyes.
"I dragged myself forward. Crawled through dirt and blood. And when I reached them... I hugged them."
"All seven."
"They were just children," she whispered.
"As shattered as I was."
"Not born monsters—made."
Qaritas stared at her—not as a god, but as something rarer.
A weapon that had chosen mercy.
Maybe that was what frightened the gods most.
"And still... they chose mercy. They had been made into weapons—so had I. But that day, mercy was the sharpest thing we carried."
She didn't cry. But she looked like someone who once had—until it burned her hollow.
The silence that followed wasn't empty.
It was sacred.
He looked at Ayla.
She didn't speak. She didn't have to.
But her eyes met Qaritas's, just for a moment—
and in that quiet, something passed between them.
A vow neither of them had to speak.
Some stories didn't need endings.
Just the courage to begin again.
Then—a ripple in the dark. A hush behind the silence.
——————————————————————
The veil between story and stage tore, and Hela stepped through, as she always did—just before the gods changed.
She wore shadow like silk. A raven-skull mask glinted faintly. Violet eyes gleamed beneath it, hungry for the ache behind the story.
"Ah," she whispered, voice like silk against a knife's edge, "there it is."
She turned slowly, trailing her fingers along the edge of memory like it were a stage curtain.
"The part where mercy becomes rebellion. Where love becomes treason. Where a monster—"
She tilted her head toward Ayla, who stood frozen in her moment of grief,
"—dares to become a mother."
Hela clicked her tongue.
"Do you know how rare that is? To choose tenderness after blood? To unmake the blade you were forced to become?"
She stepped past Qaritas, and though her heels touched nothing, they still echoed.
Something flared inside Qaritas. A spark beneath the ribs. Not anger, not awe—recognition. Like her words had brushed against something buried so deep it had forgotten its own name. But it remembered the taste of mercy.
Her fingers tapped the side of her mask, thoughtful.
"Pieces stirring. The cracks beginning to glow."
She turned back to the scene behind her—Ayla on her knees in memory, surrounded by the silhouettes of children forged from agony.
"Stories like this, my sweet choir of readers," she cooed, addressing not just Qaritas but the you behind the page,
"They never begin with power. Or purpose. They begin with someone who should have died—and chose not to."
Hela raised her hand.
A theater unfolded behind her—bone-white seats rising from mist, skulls grinning in every row. Corpses leaned forward, rapt.
The Ossuary Stage had returned.
"Now then," she said, settling into her throne of vertebrae and voidlight.
"The children have cried. The gods have bled. The dead are paying attention."
Her smile stretched.
Maybe it had echoed once. Maybe it was echoing again.
She tapped her temple—once.
"We're all watching now."
And like a breath leaving a dying god, the shadows receded.
The Library returned.
The silence she left behind wasn't quiet—it buzzed. Like a name waiting to be spoken.
Qaritas touched his chest, half-expecting his heartbeat to echo through bone.
Something was still watching. But so was he.
He didn't know what kind of god he was becoming.
Only that he no longer feared the question.
Maybe the ones who remember pain best are the ones who should rewrite the story.
"Curtain's yours, darling. Let's see if you're worthy of your echo."
And somewhere—between breath and becoming—he heard it:
A heartbeat forged from mercy,
echoing like a blade drawn in silence.