Some things don't survive history. Some things survive to erase it.
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The Graveyard screamed first.
Not with sound—but with remembrance.
As if every bone and broken star around them suddenly remembered who they had once belonged to—and wanted revenge for being forgotten.
The Skotosars came.
Not in silence this time.
They charged.
Cathedral-Broken thundered across space, their bodies rippling with muscle spun from shattered galaxies. One raised its fist—and with it, an entire ring of asteroids collapsed inward like prayer devoured by regret.
Ayla didn't move.
She commanded.
Her eyes flared gold-red.
The cosmos buckled.
A constellation above her rearranged itself mid-motion—lines of starlight bent into blades, orbiting her like a crown of orbiting execution.
She raised her hand.
And the sky responded.
Ten spears of burning hydrogen and collapsed time ripped through the first wave—tearing through Cathedral-Broken like rage given geometry.
They bled starlight.
And screamed sermons as they died.
Qaritas blurred—his feet skating across the light of their star, warping gravity around him. The Guiltborn lunged—serpent-thin and sorrow-slicked, whispering.
"You let her die. You let all of them die."
Their coils slithered through light, moving with a grace made of guilt.
Qaritas didn't argue.
He answered.
Void lanced from his palms—unmaking not with heat, but with subtraction. One Guiltborn lunged—
—and disappeared.
Not banished. Erased.
Another wrapped around him, faces pressed against his body, whispering sins he hadn't committed yet.
"You could become him," they hissed.
"Eon is in your blood."
Qaritas's eyes turned full-black.
"No."
He pulsed.
Void rippled outward—cutting in silence.
The serpent's middle collapsed. Its head kept whispering as its body dissolved into memory dust.
Above them, the Choir Silent raised their hands.
Space froze.
Their silence rang louder than war.
Ayla blinked. Suddenly—there were no stars.
No cosmos. No light.
Just… stillness.
The moment before history forgets you.
Then Ayla gritted her teeth.
And remembered herself.
Stars returned in an implosion of fury.
She summoned an entire solar nursery—a birthing nebula condensed into a single bolt, and hurled it into the heart of the Silent Choir.
It hit.
And they did not scream.
But reality stuttered.
Her flame cracked with celestial math— Binary starbursts of orbit and extinction.
Thousand spinning equations etched themselves into the air as planets formed and died in the space of a heartbeat.
Qaritas was bleeding.
Not from wounds—but from memory.
The Memory-Bled surrounded him now, leaking vision from their skulls.
He saw Ayla dead.
He saw himself holding the blade.
He saw himself as Eon.
"No," he whispered. "No—"
One of the Memory-Bled reached for him.
Their hands didn't touch.
They unwrote.
His arm flickered, started to vanish from the elbow down.
Qaritas snarled—and bit his own thumb. Blood hit the air—and with it, focus returned.
He clenched his fist.
Reality snapped back.
Void spiraled from his core.
He surged forward, spinning—a storm of unmaking. Black sigils crackled around his limbs like chains he'd made into armor.
He didn't destroy the Memory-Bled.
He emptied them.
Stole their prophecy.
And turned it back on them.
Ayla was everywhere.
She did not fight like a warrior.
She fought like a system of stars weaponized.
She bent comet-tails into blades, collapsed micro-galaxies into pulse bursts. She summoned eclipses to blind, black holes to trap, and constellations to slice time like skin.
A Harrowmask crawled toward her on broken limbs, holding a thousand masks—all people she'd failed.
Ayla blinked.
She saw herself in one.
But she didn't flinch.
She opened her hand.
A mask of herself—made of light—formed in her palm.
She flung it into the creature's core.
It exploded in clarity.
No gore.
Just truth.
Then: the Herald of What Was stepped forward.
No fanfare.
Just a slow blink that turned a moon into forgetting.
Qaritas charged—
But time skipped. His attack finished before he started it.
Ayla screamed, "DON'T LOOK AT ITS EYES!"
He couldn't help it.
It was too late.
The Herald spoke.
"Ecayrous sends—"
Ayla appeared between them.
Not teleported.
Inserted.
She carved through the Herald with a line of universe.
It blinked.
And Ayla shouted—her own voice becoming a constellation.
"WE ARE NOT YOUR PAST!"
She raised both arms.
Stars bent.
The Graveyard lit up—
A supernova erupted where her soul had once been measured.
The Herald twisted. Cracked. Began to disintegrate.
But it whispered one more thing before vanishing:
"Then burn together."
Suddenly—
Everything charged.
The entire Skotosar host.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Every failed faith. Every guilt-forged beast. Every silence given teeth.
Ayla turned to Qaritas.
Her voice was quiet.
"Ready?"
Qaritas grinned through blood.
"No."
Pause.
"But I'm not stopping either."
The star pulsed beneath them.
Then—
They launched.
Light and Void, moving as one.
Together, they collided with the storm of monsters.
Their star didn't carry them.
It launched them—like twin judgments written in physics and fury.
Qaritas's boots skated the arc of the star's tail, every step flaring with starlight warped into void. Ayla danced just ahead, her body a prism of solar fire, comet-flare hair streaming behind like prophecy set ablaze.
They split.
Curved.
Crisscrossed through Skotosar lines—not dodging. Slicing.
Ayla spun—palms open—dozens of solar blades detonating mid-orbit and raining down like heavenly shrapnel. Her fingers moved faster than thought—each twitch a rewritten orbital truth, every motion a new weapon of light converted into warform.
One Harrowmask lunged from above—six limbs snapping bone-to-bone, obsidian masks chattering like teeth.
Ayla didn't duck.
She accelerated upward, using the star's speed, and kicked off a slivered comet-shard—flipping into a tight spiral.
She became a blazing axis, incinerating the Harrowmask mid-air—masks vaporizing in screams that sounded like names.
Below, Qaritas spun through three Guiltborn, his body wrapped in coiling voidchains. Each time one tried to tighten around his throat, he shed another layer of reality.
Not blood.
Identity.
He let it happen.
Because with each piece torn away, he became leaner. Sharper. More himself.
He landed hard on the curved path of the star's corona, used the rebound to launch straight through a Cathedral-Broken's chest—void spreading like black ink veins across its torso. It exploded, not in gore, but inverted geometry—collapsing inward into a tiny dark knot that screamed until it stopped existing.
He didn't pause.
He ran up the light itself, curving behind Ayla.
"Ayla!" he called. "Left!"
She didn't look.
She dropped.
And Qaritas leapt—over her, kicking off her shoulder mid-fall, and drove his entire fist into the face of a Memory-Bled descending from the dark.
It shattered.
Not bone.
Time.
The star beneath them jolted—realigning, rotating like a predator pivoting mid-pounce. They flowed with it.
Like dancers caught in a burning clockwork.
More Skotosars charged—Choir Silent in rows of six, hands raised, mouths closed. They projected silence like radiation. Ayla's fire winked out mid-strike.
Qaritas staggered. His vision fractured. He felt doubt again.
Felt nothing.
Just before the silence ate their will—
Ayla screamed.
Not fear.
Her name.
It ruptured space.
Flames exploded from her core, slashing through three Choir in a spiral. Her voice became starlight, her eyes molten orbit.
She threw her arm forward—and time sprinted to obey.
Comets snapped from a distant ring, bending their trajectory to pierce the Choir.
Each comet held a single word: No more silence.
And then—
Ayla vanished.
Qaritas blinked. Looked up.
She had jumped—into orbit itself—above the star's trail.
A silhouette against nebula-flame, she raised her arms.
The sky burned.
Dozens of stars responded.
All of them hers.
They aligned, forming a grid across the graveyard's sky.
She dropped both arms.
And the stars fired.
A volley of burning geometry—a network of beams like divine latticework—lashed downward.
The battlefield became holy dissection.
One by one, the Skotosars were severed. Not by light.
But by law made light.
The law of her cosmos.
Qaritas leapt back into her orbit. The Void swarmed around him like armor with a heartbeat.
Behind them, the last Cathedral-Broken threw a star-fragment club straight at their path.
Ayla didn't dodge it.
She ignited the atmosphere in front of them—turned it into a friction field that melted the weapon mid-flight.
But the force hit them both, sent them spiraling sideways, crashing hard against the curve of their star's tail.
Blood in Qaritas's mouth. Fire in Ayla's bones.
Still, they stood.
Around them, the Skotosars regrouped.
Thousands.
A wall of sorrow, rage, and unrepentant memory.
Ayla coughed, wiping blood from her cheek.
"We're not done," she said.
Qaritas's hands burned with void.
"No," he said. "We're just the prologue."
They joined hands.
Light and shadow braided together—stars and silence, cosmos and unmaking.
Their hands met—not for comfort. For velocity.
Once, Ayla had feared dying alone under forgotten stars.
Now she burned with someone who remembered her name—and fought beside her anyway.
And with one final push from the star beneath them—
They charged.
Straight into everything.
Even silence flinched.
And the Graveyard of Stars—howled.