POV: Arthur Starlight
It started again—same ache, same impossible pressure behind my skull—but this time, it didn't wait for me to scream.
My vision fractured.
Light poured from my golden eye, not like fire, but like memory unchained. My red eye flickered faster than thought—futures, shadows, angles of a thousand outcomes stitched and unraveling all at once.
My chest burned.
I could feel it again. Not just the mark. Not just the blade.
Something was waking up inside me.
Vanitar gasped behind me.
Then silence.
I turned—too late.
His eyes…
White.
Not glowing.
Empty. Claimed.
His mouth opened, and something stepped into the world using his voice.
"Widowlight."
It wasn't a greeting. It was recognition spoken aloud.
"If you ask another question… you'll die."
The temperature dropped—not in the room, but in the fabric of reality. The silence wasn't still. It recoiled. Widowlight's mourning blade shifted slightly, resonating not with grief… but dread.
"But not death like you know it," the thing inside Vanitar continued.
"Not the kind that bows to you."
He took a single step forward. The stone beneath his foot fractured. Not cracked. Fractured. Like fiction forgetting its structure.
"You won't pass on."
"You'll be erased."
"No afterlife. No echo. No memory."
And then his voice twisted—shifted—not into Vanitar's, not into mine, but into something older than the act of speaking itself.
"You make death kneel, Widowlight…"
"But I created death."
The air didn't tremble. It forgot how to hold itself together.
And I—whatever was wearing me now—spoke in return.
"And I defined the cost."
Then came the whisper—not to her, but to the world:
"We are the echoes born to guard what this world cannot replace."
My body moved without me. I stood tall, radiant, burning not with light—but with meaning. Every breath from my lungs scattered runes into the air that weren't taught, only remembered.
The sword was back.
But not summoned.
Awakened.
The Archangel Firebrand.
Holy radiance licked its hilt, hotter than a million collapsing suns. Every flicker carved symbols into the floor. Time itself began to curl around it like a frightened animal.
The thing in me didn't need language anymore. It looked at her.
Widowlight—unshaken, unreadable—didn't draw her weapon.
She bowed her head… just barely.
Not in defeat.
But in recognition.
Then Vanitar—no, the thing inside Vanitar—spoke again:
"If you tell anyone about this encounter…"
"I'll kill you."
And then a final whisper—so low only the world heard it:
"We didn't come to take them."
"We came to protect them."
And then it left.
Whatever it was—whatever they were—released us.
And we fell.
Not from injury. Not from fear.
But because the story that used us had finally turned the page.