Beyond the edge of known creation, where reality lost its coherence and even the stars dared not shine, there existed a place no chronicle recorded and no god dared name.
It was not a void.
It was worse.
It was the memory of a void that once chose not to exist a wound in being that had never healed, because it had never been acknowledged. Here, even silence did not dwell. Here, only anticipation breathed. Waiting.
And now, it stirred.
In the heart of Vahryn, Zeirion stood before the Grand Orrery a sphere of cosmic lattice that showed the Realms in motion. It had once been stable. Now, it shimmered and twisted, its once-perfect arcs fracturing, bending like dreams recalled wrong.
"The unraveling has begun," said Elyra. She stood beside the throne dais, her aura steady but grave. "Each day, more memories vanish. Places rewritten. Bloodlines forgotten even by their own ancestors."
Aralya traced her fingers across one of the orbits. "Like someone undoing the weft of a tapestry… without cutting it. Just pulling threads until it all comes loose."
Zeirion narrowed his gaze.
"What lies at the center?"
Elyra stepped forward and whispered a name.
No sound left her lips.
But they all heard it.
Even the Orrery recoiled.
The Womb Without a Name
Aralya's breath hitched. "That is not a place."
"No," Elyra said. "It is the idea that birth itself was a mistake. It is where the Unborn Sovereign sleeps, not in stasis… but in protest. Against being. Against consequence. He dreams of a final stillness, not peace but the extinction of motion, thought, possibility."
Zeirion's voice dropped into the tone he used only when preparing for the impossible. "And this… 'Womb'… is waking."
Elyra nodded. "Because you touched the Heart of Unmaking. You gave permission for forbidden paradox to reassert itself."
Aralya turned to Zeirion, sharp with concern. "You broke the Spiral for balance. But it was a prison, wasn't it?"
"A gilded cage," Elyra said. "But not for mortals. Not for fate. For him. The Spiral did not just contain destinies it excluded the Unborn Sovereign's timeline from the multiverse. And now..."
She touched the Orrery, and a thread of black bled across it.
"…his absence has become presence."
Meanwhile, in a remote monastery carved from frozen starlight, the monks of the Forgotten Breath awoke to screams they could not remember starting.
In the west, an entire nation dreamed of a day that never happened and awoke to find their capital was gone, replaced by endless white plains, as if history had simply… stopped.
In the Hollow Courts, one of the ancient gods clawed at its own skin, shrieking as its name unraveled letter by letter into dust.
And beneath it all, the Womb Without a Name pulsed.
Not like a heart.
Like a hunger.
Back in Vahryn, Zeirion turned from the Orrery and faced the chamber.
"Then we hunt the unimaginable," he said.
He summoned the Sigilguard, the Council of the Rewritten Flame, the Voidwalkers of Aetherdeep.
"To find what is not a place," he continued, "we must seek where memory dies loudest. Aralya, take the Astral Navigators and scout the Rift of Unspoken Years. Elyra, you will come with me."
"Where?" Elyra asked.
He turned, and his voice thundered like the edge of judgment.
"To the Edge of Beginnings. Where even the Spiral once hesitated. If the Unborn Sovereign dares to wake…"
He clenched his fist.
"…then we will be the nightmare he never prepared for."