The Graveyard fell silent.
Skotosar bodies floated like broken oaths, their blood evaporating into orbit, scattering as red-blue petals across the stars. Ayla stood panting, her skin cracked with light, her blades still burning.
Qaritas stood beside her—barely.
His knees trembled. Light cracked from beneath his skin again—like a sun trying to be born through fractured bone. His breathing hitched. Not from fatigue.
From transformation.
Ayla reached for him.
As the Void tore open like a wound that forgot how to bleed.
And through it—they came.
Not marching.
Crawling.
Skotosars. Thousands. Reinforcements forged from regret and refusal.
Their limbs scraped against space like old prayers clawing back into relevance. Their screams weren't sound.
They were prophecy denied.
Ayla blinked, heart hammering. She had thought it was over. That they'd bought even a moment to breathe. But war never ends in time—it ends in cost. And the debt was still climbing.
Qaritas staggered.
The light beneath his skin flared—violent, volcanic. Veins blazed like constellations unraveling beneath cracked flesh.
His face warped—cheekbones sharpening, his eyes elongating with a cosmic violet , as if galaxies had taken root behind them. Lines of fractal geometry began to crawl up his neck, glowing with ancient script that pulsed like breathing equations.
His hair lengthened—slow-motion tendrils of black-purple, shimmering like obsidian kissed by voidlight
He was becoming more than a question .
He was becoming one of the divine.
But his body disagreed. Awakening had begun. And this time, it wasn't a dream.
His scream tore out—not in pain. In becoming.
Ayla turned—already running.
The star beneath her feet tilted, rebelling against her urgency. She ran anyway.
"Qaritas!"
He was falling. No, flickering. Flickering through himself.
Light split around him in spirals. Void licked the air like a predator. His body was forming and failing all at once.
She leapt.
A tail—jagged, barbed—slammed her from the side.
A Skotosar.
She remembered the Dreamscape.
Qaritas, his loneliness , screaming under a sky on fire.
She had reached for him then too—and failed.
"I'm coming" she whispered.
Ayla stood. Ran. Each step a refusal.
Only ten feet.
But it felt like sprinting across time itself—to stop him from becoming the weapon she'd once been.
Qaritas felt a thousand miles away.
Then: thunder.
Not sound.
Command.
"Ayla!" Cree's voice.
"Split the star!"
Ayla didn't hesitate.
The star screamed—and so did the cosmos. Galaxies flinched. Time hiccupped. Somewhere in the ruins of dead universes, forgotten gods woke up screaming—because they remembered the last time a star chose to die like this
Celestial currents hiccupped. Time skipped. A pulse raced through forgotten galaxies.
Elsewhere—ancient watchers awoke.
"The star has split," one murmured, blindfolded in black glass.
"They've chosen war," said another, tracing glyphs into starlight.
Even distant Eon fragments felt the pulse. And smiled.
The Graveyard itself groaned.
The crack ran down the core like a divine scar. Molten geometry spilled out—squares, triangles, fractal spirals. The cosmos didn't understand it. But it obeyed.
And for a moment, it fought.
Not to stay whole—but to ensure its pieces meant something.
Light spiraled inward like breath being held—then exploded.
And each fragment chose its wielder.
Not randomly. Not by mass or magic. But by need.
The shards didn't just find them—they seized them. Komus's chest flared as Mercy roared awake, dragging him mid-air into his orbit. Niraí's body bent sideways in reality, catching her fragment before it could split her in two. Cree laughed—raw and wild—as flame kissed him open like a sun reclaiming its prophet.
A ring of golden fire belched outward—like a sun screaming as it broke its own birthright.
The Graveyard trembled. Light bled from its fractures.
Each shard of the star flared as it launched the Ascendants like weapons born of divinity and defiance.
The star's spine cracked open — golden flame surging through it like judgment set free.
The battlefield shifted. Gravity rewrote itself. Six fragments of the star peeled away, each lifting an Ascendant into orbit—alone, but not isolated.
But even gods flinch.
Cree's flames sputtered—just once—as a Skotosar pierced the thermal wall.
Hydeius hesitated when a soul tried to sing back.
Orhaiah blinked. One ruling was denied.
Niraí's breath caught—the world refused her for a heartbeat.
Komus bled from the knuckles. His boxes cracked.
For one second, the battlefield forgot they were Ascendants.
And then—
They fell—prophecy given form, unleashed with purpose.
Hydeius turned—flung a line of soulfire across the battlefield.
Souls swirled around Hydeius's shoulders like mourning halos.
Some wept. Some wailed. Some simply watched.
Each was a life he'd failed to save—and now lent him strength.
He raised both hands. The halos ignited.
Cree caught it mid-air, turned it into a whip of flame and spirit—and lashed it through five Skotosars like a sermon of rage.
Orhaiah sent a ruling—written mid-air in light. Komus boxed it. Niraí blinked the verdict into nonexistence. Synergy, like gods remembering they were a choir once.
One surged through Cree's hellfire, skin bubbling, howling names that weren't his. He learned. Adapted. Each step bent the fire around him—until Cree's own flames hesitated, flickering like shame. 'You're listening,' Cree murmured, impressed and furious.
Orhaiah's law shattered once—only once—when a Skotosar rewrote its own bones mid-collapse, howling clauses from before language.
Niraí blinked to erase, and one bled reality—twisting the air, forcing her to erase twice before it ceased.
Qaritas watched them from the ground—half-formed, barely stable.
The others weren't fighting like Ascendants anymore.
They were fighting like they'd been waiting lifetimes for this exact moment.
Cree descended like a prophecy on fire.
Twin blazes roared from his hands—one holy, one hellborne.
They raised them high, and the stars seemed to kneel. His flames curled into wings behind him—ash and prophecy rising.
"Judgment Pyre."
Their flames curled into wings behind him—ash and prophecy rising.
Skotosars turned to ash before they could scream.
Orhaiah raised her hand. The Law snarled through her fingertips.
Scales of golden law circled her head, spinning faster with each judgment passed. "Final Verdict."
Skotosars shivered—not from pain, but from the legal collapse of their forms.
One twisted inside-out mid-lunge, bones folding like overruled contracts.
Another collapsed backward through time, ribs re-knitting wrong.
Her blood wasn't clean. It dripped in legalese.
Komus didn't move.
The Skotosar lunged.
A scream behind him—someone else falling.
Still, Komus only whispered.
"Mercy's verdict."
The box formed mid-air.
It snapped shut like a sermon.
Niraí blinked to erase—and one bled reality.
Twisting air. Forcing her to blink twice.
Her jaw tightened.
Reality peeled away in cubes wherever her shadow touched.
She raised one hand and whispered—
"Reality Null." One Skotosar bled through the nullfield—half his face erased, but still chanting. Niraí flinched. Reality didn't like hesitation. She blinked again. This time, it stayed gone.
A pulse rang out. A ripple of absence.
Ten Skotosars ceased mid-charge. Not dead.
Unmade. No shadow. No echo.
Just the subtraction of existence.
But Qaritas—Qaritas was still unraveling.
He screamed again.
Light twisted in his mouth. His bones cracked not from pain—but from concept. His face formed—briefly. Eyes nearly human.
Once, she'd promised never to let him become a weapon.
Now the cosmos was trying to break that vow.
But vows made in starlight don't break. They burn.
Ayla reached him.
Dropped to her knees beside his collapsing figure.
His fingers were sparking.
His jaw slack with agony.
"Ayla…" he rasped. "It's happening again…"
She took his hand.
It burned. Void against flame.
He flinched—but didn't let go.
She touched his face. It glowed under her hand—burning with everything he might become.
He wasn't breaking. He was birthing something older than memory.
"You're not doing this alone," she whispered. "Not this time."
His breath caught.
His body shimmered between identities. Between lifetimes. Between selves.
She tightened her grip.
Behind them, the last Skotosar roared.
It rushed Komus, bleeding chaos, claws sparking with desperate ruin.
"We were supposed to be the end," it snarled.
"Not a footnote."
Komus didn't move.
He had heard that before—in older wars, in older lives.
Mercy snapped from its sheath—boxed the creature mid-lunge
The box shrank.
And Skotosar prophecy bled out through silence.
Stillness returned.
The stars flickered above.
Light falling like ash.
Cree hovered beside the remnants of the split star, flames trailing behind him like broken wings.
Hydeius's arms dripped with soulfire. Orhaiah stood like a verdict in motion. Niraí floated above the dead, expression unreadable.
Komus exhaled.
Mercy returned.
The stars quieted. The Graveyard flickered, fractured, and then...
Fog spilled in—not drifting, but deciding.
Not mist. Not cloud. Fog that felt staged. Scripted. Like memory choosing what not to reveal—yet.
And through it came the click of bone heels. The rustle of silk shadows.
Hela stepped into view.
She didn't speak at first. Just turned, slowly, to face you.
Her voice curled like smoke around the edge of the chapter.
"Did you ever wonder where Cree and Hydeius were… during the Rite?"
A pause.
A smile.
"Where Komus and Niraí vanished to? What they saw when you weren't looking?"
The fog rippled.
A voice broke through it.
Ayla.
Tired. Sharp. Urgent.
"Hrolyn is dead."
"There are Skotosars ahead."
Hela's smile widened.
"Oh. So she remembers that now."
But memory always charges a price. And the debt always comes due.
And with that—
The curtain closes.
But the next page waits.