POV: Arthur Starlight
Two years.
That's how long it had been since the world cracked in silence.
Since something older than the gods borrowed our bodies and left a part of themselves behind.
In that time, Vanitar had changed. Elanor had sharpened. Nyriel kept rewinding.
And I…
I had started feeling too alive.
I laughed more. Spoke more. Even argued. But beneath that, something was coiling tighter in my chest every time the sky stood still too long. Like the stars were waiting for me to say a word I hadn't learned yet.
That day, we were in the Ashwood perimeter. Nyriel had dropped her glasses while calibrating some broken spellline. She was panicking. Elanor was muttering about direction fields. Vanitar just stared at the ground like it had insulted him.
And then it came.
A soundless hum. Like the world was remembering something it didn't want to.
A space golem.
Ten feet tall. But size didn't matter. It wasn't made of rock or steel—it was made of gaps. Not darkness—absence.
A walking sculpture of displacement. It didn't bend light. It swallowed location.
One eye. One limb. And a core made of rotating galaxies, caged in geometric lines.
It didn't speak.
It just reached a hand forward.
And we vanished.
We didn't land.
We fell.
Not down. Out.
Through everything. Through when and where and why.
Like the story of our lives had been ripped from the book and hurled across the library of the cosmos.
I woke in air.
Or something like air.
A screaming silence, vast and furious, pulling everything down.
I plummeted.
Then it happened.
The power inside me opened its eyes.
And so did I.
My back arched—bones cracking like scripture being rewritten—and wings tore themselves from my soul.
Not feathers.
Not flame.
They were pages.
Black and white and shifting gold. Each feather was a line of prophecy, charred at the edges, glowing at the roots.
Some were made of swords.
Some were burning books.
Some looked like grief wearing armor.
They spread wide. Terrible. Beautiful.
The wings of an angel who had read every ending—and agreed with none.
My fall stopped instantly.
Time obeyed.
Below me, Vanitar was still tumbling.
Then his body stilled. No motion. No resistance.
Just refusal.
A single, hollow wing uncoiled behind him. Ash-white. Dead-black veins running through it like rot that never stopped learning.
It didn't beat.
It judged.
And judgment made gravity let go.
Vanitar hovered beside me now. His eyes closed. His breath shallow. His wing—a void that remembered how death learned to walk.
Then came Elanor.
She plummeted past us with a scream half-choked by wind—
And the sky broke.
Something massive reached up from below.
Not a monster.
A hand.
A giant.
A hundred meters tall. Carved from red-gold stone and ancient names. Not alive. Not construct.
A sentinel.
It caught her like you catch a prayer trying to escape its temple.
Then vanished without sound.
She floated now. Held by something that no longer existed.
Above us—Nyriel had stopped in midair.
Her feet dangled. Hair floated. Her glasses hovered beside her in a perfect orbit.
She wasn't flying.
She wasn't falling.
She'd been paused.
By time.
The space between seconds had decided to lend her refuge.
She blinked once.
Her voice didn't work.
But the clockwork orbit around her shimmered.
I looked down.
The world beneath us was not a planet.
It was a page.
A vast expanse of starlit red plains, etched with spiraling script. Floating monoliths. Stone wounds. Words half-written. Towers built from forgotten thoughts.
A library that bled.
A battlefield that prayed.
A graveyard that never had bodies—only causes.
We weren't being dropped.
We were being placed.
Set upon a map meant only for those who had already broken it.
We landed.
One by one.
I touched down with my wing curling slightly, pages hissing. The wind around me recoiled.
Vanitar's landing was colder. His feet didn't hit the ground.
The ground touched him.
And apologized.
Elanor stumbled forward, breath wild, the ghost of the hand that caught her still shimmering in her shadow.
Nyriel stepped down as if time had agreed she could borrow one more moment.
We didn't speak.
Because the sky was still watching.
The space golem had vanished.
But the place it threw us to—
Had teeth.
And it had tasted something in us.
And now… it waited for us to take the next step.