The balcony remained.
Long after the stars forgot their names.Long after the Circle fractured into silence.Long after Rael stepped into the space between memory and divinity… and did not return.
The stone endured.
Cracked, weathered, half-swallowed by time — but it endured.No vines grew here. No dust settled. Even decay kept its distance, as if the place itself remembered too much to allow change.
The Null Realm had collapsed into myth.
Scholars spoke of it as metaphor. Children feared it as legend. No map dared mark it, no song dared name it. And yet — when storms pressed too hard against the edges of reality, some swore they heard it: stone grinding beneath starlight, as if the world itself tried to exhale a secret.
And in that breath — he remained.
Caelum.
He stood where the edge of existence unraveled into slow, stuttering nothing.Where even time hesitated to pass.The winds here didn't howl.They watched.
His robes were tattered, yet untouched by age.His hands clasped behind his back, stained with the ink of oaths never broken.He didn't move.
He remembered.
Not just Rael. Not just Nori.
All of them.
The ones who vanished.The ones who chose to forget.The ones who voted to bury love and call it law.
There had been too many names.
He had worn them all.
The Fourth.The Unforgiven.The Chained.The God Who Waited.
But none of them had ever fit quite like the one that mattered most.
He spoke it now — low, broken, as if the sound itself might fracture the stars:
"Nori."
It hurt to say it.
And he wanted it to.
He sank to one knee, fingers brushing the worn stone. Not to pray.
To confess.
"You should have been more than a memory," he whispered."More than what they let you become."
His voice cracked — not from age, but from weight.From carrying the silence for so long.
"You were never the curse."
He stared into the void — and for a moment, it stared back.
No light. No voice. Just a shift in stillness. A suggestion of presence.
And then — the air changed.
A breeze stirred. Faint. Measured.
Not cold.
Familiar.
It brushed his cheek like fingertips tracing a forgotten scar.
And in that stillness, between two beats of a broken heart —He heard it.
"Caelum…"
Not loud.Not even sound.But real.
His eyes closed. Not to hide tears. There were none left.
He smiled — crooked, tired, quiet.
Because creation never began with thunder.
It began with loss.
And in the ruins of gods and silence, in the breath that followed memory—
if you listened closely enough…
you could still hear it whispering.
[End of Volume One]