——Moment of Judgment——
The Sanctum no longer stood in judgment.
It had ceased to be a hall of law.
It was becoming something else—
A theater of broken verdicts.
A cathedral unraveling mid-prayer.
A reliquary that remembered balance but could no longer spell the word.
Where once it had held truth, it now bore witness only to power.
The air itself had forgotten what breath was—stale, ancient, suspended like ash that refused to scatter. Time clung to the stone like residue from a burnt scripture, unwilling to move forward, unwilling to end. Space pulsed inward, folding upon itself like a wound that had decided it would rather be a mouth. Meaning bled from the floor in streams no one dared to follow, twisting into shapes that had never belonged to language.
The runes along the walls, once carved in gold flame, now wept green ichor. Their holy geometry sagged and ran like wax melting from a candle too long abandoned. The pillars groaned—not from weight, but from memory. They leaned as if ashamed of what they still upheld.
The ceiling dripped light. Not illumination, but liquid radiance, golden tears falling into the void before evaporating mid-air—as though even light feared to touch the ground.
Elissa stood frozen, eyes wide and glassy. She did not blink; she did not breathe. She simply witnessed.
From the shadows, Caelinda's voice floated—a hymn without mercy, sung in a tongue that belonged to no world that still spun. Each note unspooled the last threads of sanity from the chamber, curling through the air like smoke from a funeral pyre. She smiled faintly, as though she already knew the outcome of the story before it was told.
And towering before them all—
Balfazar.
No longer concealed in robes. No longer restrained by mortal dimensions. Bare chest marked with the Triad of Emerald Runes—living geometry pulsing with alien cadence, beating in contradiction to creation. His wings stretched vast behind him, void-born and edged in runes that shimmered with negation. They were not symbols of flight, but instruments of erasure—arched monuments of refusal.
Above his brow, the Promised Eye gazed outward, unblinking. It did not see. It corrected. A starless aperture, swallowing the lies of the world and returning only silence.
The hall was no longer sacred.
Its sanctity lay unstitched, reduced to an edit in progress—
stone rewritten as parchment, columns bent into margins, scripture unraveling into draft.
What once held judgment now trembled like a manuscript caught in the hands of revision.
The Crusaders faltered, torn between the goddess they had sworn to and the godless correction unveiled before them. Their prayers splintered mid-breath; some clutched their breastplates, weeping as though mourning a mother they had suddenly outgrown. Others bowed their heads, unable to endure Mar'aya's eclipse-gaze, yet transfixed by the golden-haired stranger who rewrote them with silence.
The monks fared no better. Their fingers traced scripture only to feel the words melt—letters dripping like candlewax. Their chants fractured into whispers of longing and betrayal. They still feared Mar'aya's flame, but their hearts no longer beat for her.
And at its heart, a maiden of faith knelt before the Author of its undoing.
Her blade lay discarded in the rubble—forgotten, half-buried, as if ashamed to have ever been raised against him. Her hands trembled not from fear, but from the memory of something she could not name, only feel. Something that had already begun to rewrite her marrow.
Aethon grinned deviously in silence, eyes glittering like a thief who had just witnessed the greatest heist in history.
Elissa stood nearby, glass-eyed, paralyzed by awe. She didn't blink.
She didn't need to.
Vharn sang without voice, his lips parted in a silent hymn—yet the hall quivered with his symphony. Tears streaked his cheeks as he rocked in manic joy, the notes pouring through him like an orchestra that only he could hear.
Caelinda hummed a discordant psalm. A tune older than mercy, braided in the cadences of dead tongues. Her smile curved like prophecy itself, cruel and content, as though she alone knew the conclusion of a song the world had not yet begun. She stared at Balfazar—not as priestess, not as worshipper—as a lover staring into the sun that would consume her.
"Golden one…" she whispered, trembling.
And then Galeel, solemn and undone, dropped to a knee in reverence like a knight remembering his first vow. His head bowed low, wings shuddering with forgotten ache.
The Promised Eye gazed still—its starless slit casting down a quiet apocalypse of truth. Whispers bled from it, the hushed sighs of dead realities, the sobs of futures denied.
Across from him, Mar'aya seethed.
Her halo crackled with fractured fire, her ten wings twitching out of harmony. She burned not with holiness, but with desperation—the fury of a law suddenly aware it was no longer loved.
Golden fire wreathed her limbs in divine recoil, each movement lashing the air like a sentence half-carved in flame. Her voice cracked the rafters of the Sanctum's corpse, every syllable a hammer-strike of judgment:
"You filthy abomination… you CREATURE! You trespass—you blaspheme—you dare mock judgment itself? You dare mock ME?" Her voice swelled, breaking into a storm of unbridled fury. "I am the Pillar of Righteous Clarity! I am foundation and flame, the weight that holds the weave in place!"
From the colonnade's shattered edge, standing atop a slanted block of stone, Aethon let loose a cackle—loud, irreverent, sharp enough to split the tension.
"Did she say foundation?" he barked, nearly toppling as he doubled over in laughter. "Oh, gods—someone's been sipping her own sermons!"
Balfazar's lips curved—sharp, gleaming, a grin that cut like silk torn on glass.
Mar'aya spun toward him, fury crackling wild across her wings.
"BALFAZAR!!"
Then—within the fracture of a flash—
she vanished.
And the spark of a duel ignited.
The clash was instant.
And it was glorious.
She struck first—hand ablaze with concentrated light, fingers curled into a verdict, her aim fixed upon Balfazar's eyes.
But his hand was already there.
Not flesh, not shadow—something older, darker, a negation shaped like touch. He caught her strike as though he had been holding it since before it was thrown.
Mar'aya snarled, trying to wrench free.
Arkeia gasped, her knees weakening as steel trembled around her frame. The sight hollowed her faith, yet filled her chest with a certainty she could not deny.
"My… lord," she whispered.
Balfazar only smiled.
And then—as if the world had always known them there—they were no longer bound to the floor. He simply floated, weightless, unbothered, drifting with languid ease. Across from him, Mar'aya hovered by wings of judgment, each beat a thunderclap of fury; but Balfazar remained still, balanced upon nothing, suspended as though gravity itself had rewritten its loyalties.
A shriek of light tore through the air—Mar'aya, aflame with righteous wrath, collided with Balfazar mid-thought. The eastern wing of the Sanctum did not collapse. It forgot it had ever stood. Dust rose in reverse, sucked back into broken stone. Columns twisted like lungs caught mid-breath. Ceiling tiles wept golden light before vanishing into shadow.
Then silence.
Then again.
A blur. A roar. A spiral of burning gold and veiled black, folding through space in a choreography of paradox.
They battled faster than thought.
Mar'aya's wings carved geometry into ruin—slicing arcs of divine justice that bled the very concept of symmetry. Every beat of her wings cracked the sky with verdicts, every step wrote flame across the air. She moved with the cold authority of gods: sharp, final, righteous. Each strike a law. Each motion a claim to cosmic inheritance.
But Balfazar was not contesting her inheritance.
He was rewriting the will.
He did not strike—he interrupted. He folded through skipped time, body stepping out of memory, his shape recalled rather than arrived. Above her. Below her. Behind her. Reality did not react to his presence; it corrected itself around him.
Each time she attacked, the world bent to spare him effort.
His wings flexed, etched in runes that flickered between visibility and erasure—black limbs dragging thought and narrative into silence. Every motion shimmered with discarded realities, his afterimages contradicting one another like overlapping lies.
He moved like a prism of truths unmade—like something glimpsed through fractured veils.
Mar'aya struck through the laws of creation.
Balfazar erased the laws.
From the shattered floor, the Crusaders cried out.
"Her wings—gods, they cut the air itself!" one gasped, shield raised as if it mattered.
Another clutched his helm, voice cracking: "No… no, look! He isn't dodging—he's already there!"
A monk stumbled to his knees, hands shaking over fading scripture. "He moves… like memory remembering itself."
"Which of them is the judgment now?" another whispered, voice thin with awe.
And still the duel raged—
gold and black spiraling in silence and thunder, two absolutes colliding in a storm too vast for mortals to name.
Every clash lit the Sanctum like a battlefield of collapsing stars. The echoes of their strikes did not sound like blows, but like commandments being broken, rewritten, sung in reverse. The walls bled scripture. Pillars bent and straightened, as though uncertain which god they still served.
"You run!" Mar'aya hissed, wings ablaze, each swing carving radiant crescents into the air. Her hands glowed with compressed verdicts, divinity bound into pure judgment. Her voice cracked like thunder, every word a decree. "You hide behind tricks, coward! Face me!"
Balfazar's reply came not from his lips, but from everywhere at once—his voice threading through the clash of steel-light and shadow, resonating in her bones and in the rafters above.
"No. I do not run. I do not hide." His golden hair rippled in the unnatural current of void and flame. His smile sharpened like a blade unscabbarded. "I wander… and you, Mar'aya—" his tone turned almost playful, almost cruel, "—you chase because you must."
Her fury surged hotter, brighter. "You speak like a thief of existence!" she shrieked, forcing her wings forward, blades of burning law cutting through space itself. "You unmake! You erase! You bring only lies!"
"And yet here you are," he murmured, his afterimage flickering before her eyes, then behind her, then nowhere at all. "Screaming at the lie, because deep down you know it fits better than the truth you cling to."
Snarling, she gathered her will and unleashed a torrent—a beam of judgment so vast it could have split mountains, a divine edict hurled with desperation, finality, rage. The very air bowed as it passed, folding into alignment with her command.
The light struck true—
—or rather, it struck the placeholder of where he had just been.
Her eyes widened. The beam tore through stone, erasing a colonnade in its wake, but Balfazar was elsewhere. The space he had occupied shivered, hollow and thin, as though reality itself apologized for forgetting where he had been a moment before.
A voice coiled behind her ear—soft, delighted, almost intimate:
"You missed."
He hovered upside down behind her, weightless, hair drifting like strands of starlight caught in a reverse current. Gravity itself seemed hesitant to claim him, reluctant to measure a being who did not belong. His wings rippled with impossible runes, black limbs inscribed in contradictions, a veil of negation that made the air forget what it meant to move.
"Tell me…" his voice lingered in tones both gentle and cruel, "…do you remember what it feels like to be lost, Mar'aya?"
She spun in fury, eyes blazing. In her palm, a lance of judgment condensed—divinity crystallized into a spear of unyielding verdict. She hurled it with the scream of a dying pantheon, a sound that cracked heavens and marrow alike.
The air rippled with golden intention.
The spear carved a line of godhood through space—
—and passed harmlessly through the void he no longer acknowledged.
Her breath hitched. The weight of her own attack seemed to drag her down. She blinked—
—and the world was wrong.
She stood grounded, panting, her wings dragging long trails of ash across the fractured floor. The sky above her churned with stars in alien order, constellations rearranged into forbidden geometries, burning symbols that should not exist.
The chamber had rotated.
Time had blinked.
Edmun stumbled to his knees, clutching his helm as if it might anchor him. "Saints… it wasn't the world that moved—it was me…"
Beside him, Thalos whispered hoarsely, almost reverently, "No… the world flinched."
The murals wept molten light, their painted saints dissolving into tears of gold. The pillars leaned away from her as though ashamed, stone refusing to bear witness. Even her heartbeat faltered—stuttering, out of sync with the law she was sworn to embody.
And then—somewhere above, impossibly casual—Balfazar laughed.
It was not a cruel laugh, nor a mocking one, but the carefree sound of a child finding delight in breaking his toys.
He sat cross-legged, sideways across a fractured column, perched upon a wall that should never have borne weight. Not by spell, not by trickery—by redefinition. The stone itself had agreed to hold him, rewritten by his presence.
"Sermon's over, godling," he said, his tone amused, almost gentle—like a teacher calling an unruly student back to their seat.
Then he rose with impossible ease, stepping downward.
The step became forward.
Forward became inexorable.
And with casual cruelty—he kicked.
The monks wailed in fractured unison, clutching their prayer beads until blood slicked their fingers. One choked out, trembling, "Is this judgment… or its undoing?" Another sobbed, voice hollow, "No scripture prepared us for this."
Mar'aya was hurled like broken scripture across the Sanctum, her body colliding with a mural of justice painted in ages past. The wall cratered, fresco shattering into fragments that fluttered like feathers torn from an angel's back. Gold fire burst beneath her feet, flaring in reflex—an ancient flame struggling to remember how to burn.
But the flames faltered.
Not from lack of fuel.
Not from lack of will.
From lack of command.
Her scream shook the pillars, raw and jagged, as she rose. Wings blazed wide, her aura of judgment twisting the air into halos that warped and snapped like shattered crowns.
The crusaders staggered back, shields raised though no blow had yet fallen. One cursed under his breath, "That light—it'll take us with her…" Another clenched his jaw, torn between love and terror: "She was our dawn… and now she burns us."
Balfazar did not rise to meet her.
He stood idle, watching with a face that did and did not smile—an expression suspended between cruelty and charm, between mockery and reverence. His voice dripped with playful dismissal:
"I tire of wandering. Now—" his grin cut wider, "make this fun, if you can."
Mar'aya's voice cracked like the last hymn of a dying choir:
"You mock me—still? Even now?"
He tilted his head, the runes across his chest faintly pulsing, eyes glinting with the joy of a predator offered challenge.
"No, Mar'aya. I invite you. Show me your judgment. Show me your fury. Show me why Balance ever mattered."
Aethon threw back his head and laughed, sharp and feverish. "Yes! Bare your verdict, goddess—let us see if it still matters when he laughs in its face!"
Vharn swayed like a reed in stormlight, eyes glazed, his voice spilling into the air in a hymn half-prayer, half-delirium:
"O' Lord of One… let her decree shatter, that we may drink the dust of Balance… and sing its ruin."
She paid them no heed. Her gaze burned on one thing alone—Balfazar.
And she lunged.
The floor betrayed her—stones stuttering, their solidity faltering as though even matter hesitated to remember what it was. For a blink too soon, she plunged through her own momentum, footing dissolving into uncertainty.
From the shadows, Caelinda let out a soft, breathless laugh, almost a sigh.
"Even the ground knows who it belongs to…"
She recovered instantly, wings snapping wide, rustling with the harsh cadence of law restored. But when her eyes darted upward, he was already there—behind her, drifting without effort. His fingers traced idle glyphs into the air, each mark a symbol that described what should not exist, runes that trembled with a meaning even creation could not host.
She screamed, voice like fractured bells, and hurled herself at him again.
And this time—her blow landed.
Or so she thought.
Her palm crashed into his chest, heat searing her hand. She felt resistance—flesh, bone, victory. For a single flicker of breath, it was real. She tasted triumph.
Then it was gone.
He now stood three steps behind her, hands folded neatly, unscathed, unconcerned. The imprint of her palm lingered only in the memory of the stone, not in his body.
Her strike had been remembered. Not endured.
Balfazar tilted his head, his smile both mocking and amused. "Would you look at that… you managed to touch the memory of me." He tapped his own chest with mock seriousness. "I recall that hurting—ouch."
The word echoed like a parody of pain.
Mar'aya spun back toward him, fury gnashing through her frame. One wing twitched out of sync, feathers spasming with cracks of molten gold. Her pupils dilated wide, ringed in fire. With a cry torn from the marrow of her soul, she ignited her wings fully—the Scales of Divine Clarity bursting into living flame, holy judgment roaring down each span.
She glared, her voice trembling with rage, with desperation, with the weight of law itself:
"I am not done! I am Judgment! I won't allow this—I REFUSE!"
Balfazar's eyes glimmered like a boy at play, his voice reverberating with revelry as he spread his arms wide to meet her fury.
"Yes!" he cried, almost laughing. "That—oh, that almost frightens me!"
His grin split across his face, sadistic and shining, reveling in her defiance.
"Now you're beginning to look divine."
She hated his joy. The sound of his mirth was sacrilege. With a scream that made the stained glass quiver, she surged forward—wings ablaze in holy conflagration, each beat casting down searing arcs of gold. She hurled bolts of law with every swing, feathers lashing outward like brands of living judgment. Each one seared the air with the weight of condemnation.
Balfazar met her fury with delight. His void-born wings flexed wide, black limbs veined with runes of contradiction. He parried her radiant bolts with shards of blight, catching judgment in his palms and tearing it apart into screaming shadow. Each clash between them ripped open seams in the veil—rifts that bled void into the world, spilling hungry darkness into her searing flame.
The collision of their powers thundered with aftershocks. Fractals of broken space flashed around them like shattered glass, each fragment reflecting impossible versions of the duel. For a breath, one could glimpse a hundred outcomes, all collapsing into the singular violence of this moment.
Elissa stood in quiet awe, her eyes distant, lashes lowered as though she watched not the battle, but dreams unraveling. A faint smile touched her lips, brittle and serene.
"…so many tomorrows, all burning at once…" she whispered.
"I was beginning to think you'd bore me the whole trial," he called over the roar, his grin widening with every impact.
"Mock—mock while you still have your head!" Mar'aya's voice split the air like judgment itself, her rage echoing through the stone.
He returned her scream with unbridled laughter. The sound was not cruel alone—it was rapturous, the joy of one who found true sport in her wrath.
From the edge of the chaos, Galeel muttered under his breath, voice steady but grim:
"He's getting ahead of himself… again."
His gaze flicked toward Elissa—just long enough to be sure she was safe—before snapping back to the storm unfolding.
Then Balfazar shifted. He countered—not with another bolt, not with the abstracted language of gods, but with the raw finality of his fist. His strike cracked against her ribs, the sound sharp as splitting marble. Mar'aya staggered back, divine fire sputtering from the wound in jagged flares. She gasped, the sound torn between disbelief and pain.
The crusaders recoiled. One whispered, disbelieving, "She bleeds…" Another gripped his helm as though holding his morale in place.
Before Mar'aya could recoil, his wing snapped out. Black, immense, and edged like the memory of execution—it lashed sideways like a guillotine. The impact sent her hurtling across the hall, her body smashing through a marble column that folded into dust before her weight touched it, the stone itself unwilling to oppose him.
She roared defiance, rising even as fractures crawled across her burning form. Soaring high with a shriek that split heavens, she unfurled her wings to their full glory.
And then she shed them.
A storm of holy feathers erupted, each one aflame with law. They rained downward like a thousand falling suns, each feather a beam of judgment too bright to look upon, too heavy to endure. The floor of the Sanctum split into molten trenches beneath their impact, stone liquefying, pillars shattering into rivers of light.
From the ground, Crusaders and monks cried out—some in awe, others in terror.
"She's burning the world itself!" one shouted, falling to his knees.
"No—no, look at him!" another wailed, pointing to the black streaks darting between the descending suns.
Balfazar folded and skipped through her storm, bending space like paper. He slid between detonations of light, reappearing at angles that should not exist, weaving through collapsing geometry as if dancing through her wrath. Each afterimage smirked, each step taunted the goddess herself.
"O' Balance," he laughed amid the firestorm, voice ringing with mockery and glee, "how you do try. I don't blame you…" His golden eyes glinted with cruel affection as flames burned harmlessly at his heels. "…but you're a law long past due."
"You're nothing more than a criminal of nature," she spat, golden fire dripping from her wings like molten verdicts, "and you will die like one!"
She drew her arms wide. Behind her, light bent inward, curving into a perfect circle. A vast halo—no, a cosmic ring of judgment—flared into being, its edges searing brighter than dawn. Her wings spanned out in radiant arcs, feathers igniting as living commandments. The ring pulsed, each throb cascading waves of holy law that rippled outward like a solar tempest, scorching air and stone alike. The Sanctum itself trembled, groaning as if unwilling to host such wrath.
From the shadows, Galeel's eyes narrowed. He did not move, did not flinch. Only his lips parted in a low murmur:
"Has she lost her sanity… I'm sure he's loving this."
He turned then, just briefly, to glance at Elissa—worry etched into the storm-grey of his gaze.
She did not notice. Her eyes were glassy, reflecting the radiant ring that blazed above. Her lips parted in a soft, entranced echo, almost childlike:
"…awesome…"
Balfazar tilted his head back, eyes wide in wonder. He basked in the sight like a child at a festival, his grin splitting wide.
"Woah…" he whispered, hair shimmering in the golden glare. "Look at that! So grand… so phenomenal… so cool!"
But then his gaze sharpened, Promised Eye twitching faintly beneath its seal. He studied the radiance not with fear, but with ravenous fascination.
"Getting desperate, are we?" His voice turned sly, amused. "No need to obliterate the field. What will your precious balance cling to if you leave nothing behind?"
Dark clouds answered her instead. They surged into being as if dragged across the sky by force. The heavens churned, swallowing sun and moon alike. The once-raining starlight ceased. Silence fell, thick and suffocating.
"Silence!" Mar'aya thundered, cutting his words apart with a voice so sharp it split the veil. Her wings burned brighter, her crown of flame widening into a corona of fury. "Hear me!" she cried, each syllable stamping itself into the marrow of existence. "I—Balance incarnate—cast my Judgment upon you…"
Her lips curled as the word tore from her throat like venom: "Rez'xanth!"
The name hung in the air like poison, like blasphemy. Even the walls recoiled.
"I condemn you—TO DEATH!"
The ring behind her convulsed, detonating with impossible brilliance. From the torn heavens above, a pillar of light descended—vast as a collapsing sun, straight as a divine spear, wrath made manifest. It roared downward, splitting clouds, searing the fabric of reality itself as it sought to erase him.
The Crusaders staggered back in panic. One dropped his blade, eyes wide.
"She'll kill all of us!" he shouted.
Thalos, helm dented and cloak torn, bared his teeth. "Then we die standing," he snapped. "We meet the end as we must."
Another soldier covered his face with his gauntlet. "I don't even know who to pray to anymore…"
Aethon broke into hysterical laughter. "Ha! Your holy mother's aiming at everyone! Guess judgment really is impartial!"
Edmun's eyes locked on Arkeia. "Commander… this isn't right—" He tried to move toward her, but Thalos barred his path with a single hand. The silent look he gave said enough: this is fate.
Edmun shook his head, anguish twisting his face. "She doesn't deserve this…"
Out of the shadows, Galeel emerged at last, storm-grey eyes sharp with dread. His voice carried strain, edged with urgency:
"How long will you let this continue?"
And Balfazar only smiled—wide, gleeful, reverent—as though the storm itself had risen to honor him.
"…Too bad death is an old friend," his voice rang clear, cruel and gleaming with amusement.
Balfazar lowered his hand to his chest. Fingers traced the scarred geometry of the Triad of Runes. They flared awake—burning, writhing, pulsing with alien hues that bled into one another like oil across glass. No language could name those colors; they twisted in and out of sight, hues that reality tried and failed to remember.
His skin lit from within, each vein a conduit for the unmade. He shone not with light, but with contradiction—a brilliance so absolute it dimmed itself.
His twin hearts thundered—two beats, never aligned, a discordant rhythm that threatened to tear open the chamber with every pulse.
"We…" his voice rolled low, vibrating with unshaped cadence, "…are…" The runes pulsed deeper, the chamber convulsing as if resisting what came next.
From the edge of the shadows, Galeel's breath hitched. "No…" he whispered.
Balfazar grinned, eyes alight with rapture.
"…Atomic."
His twin hearts struck as one—
—and Oblivion answered."
The explosion bloomed outward—no fire, no flame, but an eruption of unbeing. In an instant, the chamber itself began to return to nothing—colour bled away first, dripping from the air like paint washed from canvas, leaving only the pallor of absence.
The walls shuddered as though straining to remember what "stone" meant, then sagged into ash that had never been born. Columns twisted in lament, their symmetry fracturing before they too unraveled, outlines fading like chalk beneath rain.
Even weight itself faltered—gravity stuttered like a hymn sung backwards, pulling then releasing, each note collapsing into silence before it could resolve.
And above, the heavens convulsed. Stars flickered out of sequence, constellations broke apart like glass dropped in slow motion, reforming into geometries forbidden to mortal sight. The night sky bent inward, as though it too were being folded back into an earlier draft of itself, older and more terrible.
The blast of negation surged on, not destroying, but unwriting—a spectacle of subtraction, as though reality was being peeled to its raw bones, every line of creation erased one stroke at a time.
It rose in a tidal wave of annihilation, colliding with Mar'aya's pillar of holy light.
Reality shrieked. Void tore against creation. A storm of supremacy raged, each side clawing to overwrite the other.
Mar'aya screamed, wings blazing, pouring every ounce of herself into the pillar. Golden skin peeled like parchment. Her hair flared, then singed into smoking threads. Her body shook violently, seams of divinity unraveling as if her frame could no longer remember what it meant to be whole. Yet she resisted—for judgment was all she had left to bind herself to existence.
"Elissa! Get back!" Galeel thundered, wings flaring as he stormed to shield her.
The Crusaders nearest the collision were the first to break. One blinked—and half his face was gone, his prayer cut short into silence. Another reached for his sword only to watch his arm dissolve into motes of false memory, his weapon unmaking before it hit the ground. Monks clutched at scripture that melted like wax, words dripping from their lips as their throats ceased to exist. Their deaths were not deaths at all, but erasures—each soul folded into a silence too deep for mourning.
Arkeia stood frozen, breath caught in her chest, her fingers trembling at her sides. Her eyes widened in mute reverence and terror, drinking in the unmaking with the awe of one who knew she should turn away—and could not.
"Do you still believe this is combat?" His voice cut through the maelstrom, almost tender, almost mocking. He looked at her as though she were already broken.
"You're not fighting me, Mar'aya."
His wings unfurled, vast and infinite, each rune along them pulsing in counterpoint to her fading flame. Their glow dragged meaning itself into their gravity, warping the chamber's heartbeat.
His grin spread, boyish, manic, reverent.
"You're fighting… Us."
Edmun's eyes went wide, his breath caught in his throat. He stared at the figure his oath had sworn to condemn, but could not speak. Terror gripped him—but deeper still was awe.
Arkeia bowed on her knees in reverence, her lips parting on a breathless whisper:
"My lord…"
The runes screamed with him, a choir of silence, and the wave of Oblivion surged forward. It consumed the pillar. Her holy light cracked, splintered, and shattered like glass struck by a hammer no mortal hand could lift.
The balance broke.
Thalos, teeth bared, roared above the unraveling storm. "Then let me die in your name!" His body ignited with defiant faith—only to crumble as Oblivion reached him, peeling away skin, muscle, steel, memory. He vanished screaming into nothing, a prayer lost to the silence.
Edmun could not run. His knees buckled. He lowered his blade, bowed his head, and surrendered. "Mercy…" he whispered, though he did not know to whom. The tide reached him, dissolving his armor, then his flesh, then the very idea that he had ever existed at all. His shadow lingered longest, stretched thin across the floor, before that too was erased.
Mar'aya convulsed, her frame peeling into living fractals, the seams of her being unraveling. Her senses disintegrated one by one—sight collapsed into static, sound vibrated her bones toward nothingness, her very concept guttered like a candle drowning in its own wax. She clung only to judgment, a single burning thread tying her back to reality's edge.
"O' Balance—look at what you've done." Balfazar lifted his arms with theatrical pity, voice echoing like a cruel stage actor. "I thought you could handle this—poor little thing."
She could not hear. Could not think. Only the alien lights of Oblivion consumed her.
From the rubble, Vharn's voice cracked into song, a trembling hymn sung through weeping laughter.
"Unmade… yet so beautiful…"
Caelinda, trembling with fervor, clutched her bleeding palm to her lips, whispering through the taste of ichor:
"Yes… yes, Golden One—let her burn…"
"Too much, Balfy." Voidstor's voice slurred through the veil, tail flicking like a question mark, before the cat vanished into folds of elsewhere.
"Balfazar! Stop!" Galeel bellowed, wings thrown wide to shield Elissa. "You'll unmake us all!"
Aethon yelled from the colonnade, voice teetering between mockery and fear:
"Are you trying to kill me again, brother?"
Balfazar turned to regard them all—expression tilted, uncertain, as if weighing whether any of their fates should matter.
He sighed. "Fun's over… oh well."
His head cocked, and the runes across his chest pulsed—not brighter, but deeper, pulling the marrow out of meaning, draining the room of certainty itself.
A bang of negative light—
—and suddenly the collision was gone. Undone. As though it had never happened.
Or perhaps it had, in another universe.
The crusaders and monks stood paralyzed, breaths caught, their armor rattling from tremors that were no longer there. For one infinite instant, they were certain they had been unmade—souls peeled from bodies, names erased, nothing left but silence. Yet still they stood, trembling in the shadow of something they could not explain.
A monk collapsed against the wall, sobbing openly, clutching at a scripture scroll that now dripped blank ink through his fingers. Another crusader buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, his muffled cries breaking the silence that should have been final.
Edmun dropped to his knees, gauntlets pressed to the floor as if anchoring himself to a world he no longer trusted. His lips moved in broken fragments of prayer that refused to form words.
"I… I thought we were gone…"
Thalos placed a hand on his shoulder—not with comfort, but with the certainty of one resigned. His eyes flickered with awe and dread alike.
"No, Edmun… we are only allowed to believe we remain."
Mar'aya gasped, stumbling back, eyes wide with horror. She remembered being devoured—senses erased, body fractured into nothing—but here she stood, whole and burning. Her breath came ragged, her face contorted between disbelief and fury.
Aethon clapped—too quickly, too sharp—the sound ricocheting off the fractured walls. His laughter came a beat late, edged with strain.
"…That was a new one, brother," he forced out, grin twitching at the corners. "I… don't think I like it…"
Mar'aya glared daggers through the air, fury tightening every line of her divine form. She rallied what fragments of herself remained, wings stretching wide, arms trembling as she prepared to release one last decree. Her lips curled, golden fire flashing at the corners of her eyes.
"I don't care what just hap—"
Balfazar blinked.
And she forgot.
Her breath caught mid-syllable. Her mouth hung open, fingers twitching in vacant confusion. Her wings faltered, one feather dropping like dead ash. A single pause. A single tremor in her poise.
Balfazar smiled—wide, cruel, amused—as though he had always owned that moment, as though her falter had been written long before her wings ever touched the air.
"I must admit," he drawled, his grin splitting into something fever-bright, "I did get a little carried away. Lost sight of the glorious purpose for a second there."
His laughter cracked out—manic, resonant, echoing through stone and soul alike. It wasn't the laughter of a man, but the rattle of creation finding its joke too late.
The crusaders flinched, faces drained of blood, armor rattling faintly though no tremor shook the ground. Hands twitched toward blades, yet none dared draw steel. They stood caught between fight and surrender, horror locking their limbs.
The monks froze, lips parted yet no chant dared escape. Scriptures slipped from trembling hands, parchment sagging, drained of meaning—as if even the words had abandoned them. Their silence carried more terror than any scream.
Mar'aya spoke nothing. Fury still seethed in her eyes, molten and defiant, but disbelief gnawed at the edges of her flame. She lunged—wings rending the air, golden fire roaring from her form. Yet as she surged forward, the chamber thickened, the atmosphere syrup-heavy, dragging at her limbs. Her radiance guttered, flickering like a candle smothered in oil.
Time itself staggered beneath her feet. Seconds stammered. Futures pressed in around her like walls narrowing to a coffin, choices collapsing until there was none left to take.
He raised a hand. Not to strike.
To pause her.
And the Sanctum obeyed.
Her form froze mid-lunge, suspended across possibilities like a syllable caught between drafts, a word left unfinished in the mouth of a god rewriting his speech.
Not by spell. Not by blade.
But by edit.
Balfazar did not stand as a conqueror. He stood as a correction—an eraser dragged across the parchment of divinity.
Mar'aya, for the first time since her flame first kindled, felt the root of a fear older than herself: the knowing that truth was not being revealed—truth was being replaced.
His voice softened, almost weary, though no less cruel.
"Enough. There's no point to it, and you know this. Besides—cleaning up our mess was no easy task. I'm tired."
And then—like a puppeteer stringing the world itself—
His fingers curled.
Not into a fist, but into the shape of something ancient—
something cruel—
something so abhorrent that the world itself tried to forget it the moment memory brushed against it.
Mar'aya—incandescent, divine—was plucked from the air like overripe fruit torn from the branch. No crash. No blast. No force. Only silence. Only absence. The erasure of her agency.
Her limbs wrenched open. Wings locked in unnatural arcs. Her spine bowed backward as though sculpted mid-collapse, suspended not by strength, but by edit.
And then his fingers moved.
One curl of his thumb—her jaw snapped shut, silencing the syllable she tried to summon.
The crook of his index—her right wing shuddered, feathers scattering in spasms of broken law.
A flick of the middle—her arm jerked skyward, reaching for a mercy that would never arrive.
The slow turn of his ring finger—and her spine arched further, vertebrae glowing as cracks of light split her skin.
And when his smallest finger curled—her halo splintered, shedding fragments of gold that dissolved before they touched the floor.
She trembled—not from pain, but from intent. Suspended by nothing, a divine marionette, hovering like a thought half-abandoned, too ashamed to finish itself.
Her light tried to flare, to resist, to roar with judgment. But the air had already been edited. It no longer listened.
She was being corrected.
An error scrawled across the margins of a manuscript that no longer permitted her handwriting.
Her voice broke—not in rage, but in the collapse of certainty itself, a hymn shattering into dissonance, folding inward until it no longer remembered how to be sung.
Balfazar tilted his head, eyes gleaming, fingers poised like a conductor before an orchestra.
"Dance," he whispered—soft, delighted.
And she obeyed.
Mar'aya's body moved with a grotesque grace, not jagged or clumsy, but eerily elegant, every motion impossibly fluid, serene—as though centuries of ritual had been condensed into parody. Her wings arched like a ballerina's arms, her steps traced a prayer in dust, and her halo—fractured, bleeding radiance—swayed like the crown of a performer bowing under stage lights.
Edmun and the crusaders watched in agony. They longed to avert their eyes, to cry out—but they could do neither. Silence chained them, and their gazes remained shackled to the horror.
Aethon exploded into laughter, doubled over, clutching his ribs.
"From divine… to puppet!" His words came between gasps. "How ironic!"
Caelinda laughed along, her amusement cruel and crystalline, finding in Aethon's mockery a joke worth savoring.
Vharn, lost in delirium, sang mad prayers to the rhythm of her enforced movements—his hymn discordant, joyous, insane.
Only Galeel's gaze refused to follow their mirth. He stood close to Elissa, wings trembling faintly, his face hard as stone, his disapproval cutting through the din.
Balfazar, lost in his whimsy, beamed.
"Brother, look," he said, as though showing Aethon a toy. With a casual twist of his fingers, he made Mar'aya bend slightly at the waist, one hand tipping the crown of light above her head as if it were a hat that wasn't.
Her voice broke into a hollow mimicry of courtesy.
"Well, good day to you, sir."
The words left Mar'aya's mouth like a parody of grace, her forced bow grotesquely polite.
Balfazar and Aethon roared in unison, their laughter ricocheting off the fractured stone, an unholy harmony that mocked the sacred silence of the Sanctum.
Aethon doubled over, clutching his sides, tears of mirth in his eyes.
"And a how-do-you-do to you too!" he wheezed, his voice cracking between hysteria and cruelty.
The brothers' mirth erupted like a duet of wolves howling at a broken moon—mockery so loud, so unnatural, that even the remaining Crusaders shuddered as if laughter itself had become a weapon.
Thalos struck the ground with his gauntlet, the sound sharp, echoing his frustration and sorrow. No words came—because none could.
The monks broke, weeping openly, their sobs muffled into silence as though even grief feared to echo too loudly beneath the spectacle.
Then—cutting through their cruelty—
"Enough games, Balfazar."
Galeel's voice carried no mirth. Heavy. Grim. A blade against their laughter.
Balfazar's laughter ceased instantly. He turned, eyes flattening into lifeless stillness.
"Calm down, Galeel," he said, tone razor-thin. "I'm just… playing."
Fear iced down Galeel's spine. His voice faltered.
"Of course… my lord. But—glorious purpose supersedes games. Always. Remember."
Aethon scoffed, rolling his eyes.
"Why must you always sour the air, winged one? Always pitying the weak. What for?"
Galeel's jaw tightened.
"I don't have to answer to you… corpse."
Aethon's expression twisted, offense sharp as a blade.
"What did you just call me, you fu—"
"No," Balfazar cut in, calm but absolute. "Galeel's right. Glorious purpose does indeed take priority." He paused, letting silence sharpen the words. "And Galeel—speak ill as you will about Aethon. But that's my corpse. Respect it."
Aethon bristled. "Oh, no, brother. It's my flesh now…" His grin widened, eyes burning gold as he leered at Galeel.
Galeel's voice broke reluctantly.
"I know… my lord. I just can't stand to look at him in it."
Aethon traced a mocking finger along the scars that webbed his chest, smiling with vile intimacy.
"Oh, come now… it's my inheritance. I'm not so different from him, am I?" He chuckled darkly.
Galeel snapped, his composure fracturing.
"You are nothing like he was. You defile his memory with every breath you steal—"
"Enough."
The word cracked the air like judgment.
"It ends now," Balfazar's voice was serene, final, terrifying. "Or I end it for the both of you."
Both Galeel and Aethon bowed their heads, speaking in eerie unison, their voices subdued.
"As you say—my lord."
They exchanged a glare as if to promise: this was not over.
Balfazar exhaled slowly, smirk returning like a knife slipped back into its sheath.
"Good. Back to the matter… at… 'hand.'"
His fingers curled in a wicked flourish, and the air itself convulsed in obedience.
Mar'aya's body jerked forward, dragged through the void as though reeled in by invisible hooks that tugged at her very concept of form. Her limbs strained, her wings spasmed, her spine arched until she was splayed wide in the air—arms spread, head thrown back, pinned in the grotesque serenity of a crucifix.
No nails. No cross. Only the obscene posture of a goddess made effigy, suspended on the strings of another's will.
Her body shook with the strain, the light of her divinity flickering in uneven bursts, like a lantern drowning beneath black water. She tried to resist, to fold her wings back into herself, but the edit would not permit it. The more she struggled, the more perfect the posture became.
Balfazar tilted his head, his smile sharpened by cruelty and play.
"Better. A proper stance for revelation."
For the first time, he loosened the grip—not in kindness, but in design—granting her voice the space to rise. Her throat convulsed, a cry caught between fury and despair, between prayer and blasphemy.
"Speak," he whispered, reverent, amused, as though daring her to waste the breath.
The Sanctum hushed, heavy with expectation. Even the ruin itself seemed to pause, as though stone and shadow alike awaited her answer. No tongue dared to break the silence.
Mar'aya gathered what remained of her thoughts, forcing them into coherence through the tremors of her form. Her voice cracked like glass under weight, yet it carried.
"You… You think this makes you greater?! You play with things you don't—can't—understand! Without us, reality dies…"
Balfazar's eyes shimmered—not with rage, but with mirth, glinting as though her defiance were the finest entertainment. The runes burned across his chest, each pulse in rhythm with a second heart that beat for nothing mortal. His wings flexed lazily, brushing the fractured columns, their silence so absolute it rewrote the stone into memory.
"Greater?" he echoed, softly, almost pitying. "No. No, no, no, Mar'aya…"
His wrist flicked with childlike whimsy. Her arms jolted wider—pulled past reason, past anatomy—as though her joints had forgotten the language of their own construction. She groaned in fury and pain, her halo sputtering as cracks webbed across its circumference.
"You still think this is a contest."
He stepped forward. Slowly. Deliberately. The floor beneath him did not shift or break—it rearranged itself to accommodate him, as if his very existence corrected reality's footing. Shadows lengthened at his heel, not in darkness, but in absence, a blooming of colorless depth that devoured meaning itself.
The Promised Eye did not blink. It studied. It drank her form like scripture being amended.
"I didn't come to claim your rank," he said, his voice low and indulgent, like a parent explaining to a child why bedtime exists. "I'm not here to compete for a pillar."
The light around her stuttered—separating into shards, unsure whether to reflect her authority, obey her will, or flee her entirely. Fractals of brilliance bled off her skin like broken commandments.
Balfazar circled her slowly. His wings whispered across the air, the sound like brittle pages turning in a book that hated to be read. Wherever he passed, the chamber seemed to rewrite itself to his stride, as though reality were dragging its feet to keep up.
"I'm not a challenger," he murmured, voice brushing her ear like silk over steel. "Nor a heretic."
He grinned—and behind that grin, something deeper, something older, grinned wider, showing teeth not yet born.
"In truth…" His gaze softened, mockingly sympathetic. "I'm not entirely opposed to your purpose." The words lingered with idle amusement, as though her entire existence were an anecdote he had grown tired of retelling.
"Your existence…" he leaned closer, the Promised Eye gleaming like a verdict unsheathed, "…is still needed."
Mar'aya's teeth ground together, the strain cracking like stone under her jaw. Through the agony of her forced crucifixion, she spat:
"Then what are you?! A judge? A god? Or a mistake that refuses to end?"
The words cracked like thunder—but they hung in the chamber like a prayer offered to the wrong altar, swallowed by silence too vast to echo.
Balfazar tilted his head, smiling with a boyishness sharp enough to unsettle bone.
"Wrong three times—in a row, no less," he said, almost cheerfully. "Who knew the Pillar of Clarity was so terrible at guessing…"
He took a single step forward, and the floor edited itself beneath his foot, rearranging to honor his passage. He leaned in until the weight of his breath pressed on her face like the hush before an execution.
Above him, the Promised Eye narrowed—not in menace, but in judgment without judgment, a gaze of pure diagnosis. Its emerald glow scanned her not as flesh, nor spirit, but as entry, as if measuring her essence against a truth she had never been written to withstand.
Her voice broke—not with rage this time, but with a tremor that carried the weight of something unbidden, something like confession:
"Then… then what are you?"
The question hung in the chamber like a prayer sent to the wrong god.
His smile stretched wider—precise, deliberate—an impossible curvature, as though the mask had chosen to wear him.
"Ahh…" his voice lingered like honey over broken glass, "I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever ask."
"I am the Old and Outer made flesh," he said, joy curling at the edges of every syllable, his tone both lullaby and verdict.
"They are me. I am they. And I alone… am the Promised One."
His voice sank—syrup-smooth, knife-sharp—each word sliding beneath her ribs like a secret meant to wound.
"I'm the part that laughs when the play end."
His whisper rose, filling the chamber like a verdict already written:
"Do you see it yet? The truth that doesn't fit your scripture? The one your halo claws so desperately to censor?"
Mar'aya's breath hitched, her body locked in that cruciform mockery as her gaze—desperate, unwilling—rose to the Promised Eye.
And when she peered through it, the Sanctum unraveled.
Columns split into countless mirrored copies, bending into angles that refused to meet. Arches folded sideways into infinities that led nowhere. The banners of justice dissolved into dripping strands of unlettered scripture. The air thickened with copper and ash, coating her tongue in the taste of endings.
The light itself convulsed, moving as though submerged in water too deep to know its own surface.
And beyond that distortion—beyond the crumbling script of her world—she saw them.
Shapes vast enough to blot out suns, their silhouettes stretching into infinities her mind refused to measure. Eyes that were not eyes peered from folds of darkness older than matter, opening and closing like wounds in the fabric of being. Some writhed as if storms had been given flesh, their bodies shuddering in endless revolutions of lightning and void. Others stood motionless, titanic and silent, as though bound in chains of law older than creation itself, their stillness a tyranny greater than any motion.
She felt their thoughts pass over her like tides across a drowning shore—cold, alien, and merciless. No recognition. No judgment. Only the weight of something vast enough to crush meaning itself.
They did not gather as allies, nor scatter as foes. They were not council, not army, not chorus.
They were simply there.
Waiting.
Patient as rot. Eternal as silence.
And all turned—not in voice, not in gesture, but in inevitability—toward the same point.
Toward him.
And in that convergence, she saw the truth:
that he was not their servant, nor their rival, nor even their son.
He was their correction—the truth.
For a moment that stretched beyond the measure of time, she no longer beheld the man before her, but the vastness within him—the impossible immensity his fragile vessel only pretended to contain. A celestial silhouette loomed, humanoid in outline yet draped in writhing tendrils of illuminated shadow and blighted light, shifting like sentient script—each filament glowing like a verse from a scripture too ancient for gods to read. Light and darkness bled together across its frame, script that lived and died in the same breath, half-comprehended in the instant before it slipped into madness.
Two vast violet eyes, as deep and crushing as collapsed stars, opened upon her, and above them, the emerald Promised Eye blazed—a singular beacon, a scalpel cutting through veil and marrow alike. It did not look at her. It looked through her, dissecting every atom of her being, every pretense, every lie of purpose she had clothed herself in.
The longer she gazed, the more the form wavered—folding, unfolding, an infinite gallery of contradiction. It was him. It was them. All the Old. All the Outer. Fused. Entangled. A totality beyond description, compressed into a vessel that smiled with a mortal mouth.
Mar'aya screamed.
Not in pain.
But from revelation—the horror of seeing herself measured against a scale where she did not register. The scream tore from her throat not as defiance but as epiphany: that she was nothing. That she had always been nothing.
Her holy light convulsed across her body, bursting in frantic arcs before guttering into sparks that fell away like ash. The radiant threads of her halo frayed, then came apart mid-air—unraveling strand by strand, as if the crown had only ever been borrowed, never hers to claim.
And in the ruin of that glory, silence pressed in—dreadful, absolute—while his smile remained.
"You're nothing but a parody!" she spat, voice quaking. "A nightmare that thinks it can write!"
Balfazar tilted his head, grin never fading—though it seemed now to belong to something else entirely.
"Oh, my lady Pillar," he whispered, and the air began to hum. Not music—impossible tones, half-formed syllables of thought that had not yet been conceived. Voices not born of breath, but of idea.
"I'm not writing."
His wings stirred like continents, shadows peeling in folds. The floor shuddered. From his heel a single tendril of void crept, tracing the seams of the Sanctum as if to remind it of what it had forgotten—that it could end.
"I'm correcting."
He reached across his chest. His wings parted—not with triumph, but with the quiet certainty of something long-decided.
Three emerald truths burned through his flesh, pulsing not as hearts, but as verdicts. The air recoiled.
The glyph emerged—not drawn, but remembered. Its shape defied geometry, lines bending like words erased as soon as written. It shimmered like regret cast in starlight.
It was not a word.
It was finality.
"End Script…" His whisper cut clean as a blade.
And then, with a smile too soft for mercy—
"Fear."
Reality buckled.
Not with thunder. Not with quake.
But with silence—
the silence after the last god prays, and no one listens.
And all bowed, though none could name why.
Mar'aya gasped—breath seized not by force, but by revelation.
Her mouth opened as if to scream—but silence poured out instead, the air refusing to carry her cry.
Her body convulsed midair, suspended in unseen strings. Limbs spasmed out of harmony, wings folding and unfurling in jagged, painful rhythms. Her skin shimmered between forms—one divine, one broken, one that had no name at all. She flickered like a half-finished verse erased and rewritten mid-line.
The glyph pulsed again—once… then again. With every throb, something bled from her. Not her soul. Not her life.
Her certainty.
Her eyes darted wildly, desperate for an anchor, but every blink stripped more thought away. Her breath fractured into shards, scattered like broken glass.
"Wh–what… what is this—this feeling—"
Her voice cracked. Then faltered.
And then, trembling, softened.
"I… I'm afraid…"
It was not a scream. Not a roar.
It was a confession.
Balfazar stepped into the shadow beneath her, gazing up with a smile—not cruel, not triumphant, but indulgent. Like a teacher at last watching a lesson take root.
"There it is."
Above him, the Promised Eye narrowed—not in hatred, but in cold resolution, as though inscribing a verdict no other soul could read. Its emerald glare pierced through her trembling form, the weight of inevitability pressing deeper than any blade.
"I want you to feel it," he whispered, voice rich with amusement and finality. "Truly feel… what comes next."
Behind him, the ruined Sanctum leaned closer—broken walls bending, pillars groaning, fractured columns twisting inward—as though even the stone longed, in dreadful reverence, to hear what is to come.
Golden blood seeped from Mar'aya's eyes, her lips, the cracked seams of her unraveling divinity. It did not spill as a wound would bleed—it yielded, drawn reverently toward Balfazar's outstretched hand.
The ichor hovered, suspended, trembling in the air. Each droplet pulsed softly as it floated—alive with memory, resistance, and surrender. It shimmered like faith being siphoned from scripture, the weight of centuries torn into liquid light.
Balfazar's smile dimmed into something solemn, though his joy still glimmered at the edges.
"Ah… look at it. Even your essence prays for me."
He turned—slow, deliberate.
His wings rose like temple curtains before desecration, veiling half the hall in shadow. The runes carved across his chest brightened, their glow thrumming in time with the glyph still etched into thought. The second heart within him throbbed without rhythm, pulsing truths the world had not yet learned to endure.
He stepped forward.
Toward her.
Toward Arkeia.
She stood helpless—breath ragged, body trembling, eyes wide with reverence and ruin. Her lips quivered, yet no words came. She could not tell if they had moved to the altar, or if the altar had always been there, awaiting this hour.
The ichor shimmered between them, caught in the air like a question too dreadful to be spoken.
Arkeia whispered, voice breaking between devotion and terror:
"My lord… is this her end… or my beginning?"
Balfazar lowered his hand, the golden ichor spiraling in orbit around his palm—like a miniature sun slowly swallowed by shadow. His grin returned, cruel and tender all at once.
"Yes."
"My rose," he said softly, the words bending the air like prophecy spoken before the world had been born.
Arkeia hesitated—caught between her own will and something deeper, older, pulling her forward.
Then, as though the thought had never belonged to her at all, she stepped toward the altar.
Every footfall felt borrowed.
Her lips parted.
The golden ichor brushed her tongue, and breath shattered. Her spine arched, ribs straining to cage the invasion as light and shadow warred through her veins. Her eyes flared white—not with purity, but with contradiction made flesh.
She cried out—
not in agony, but in arrival.
The sound split into two voices—mortal and divine—reverberating through the broken vaults of the Sanctum, clinging to the stone as if the walls themselves had learned her name.
Held aloft by unseen will, Mar'aya gave voice to surrender twisted against her will.
It escaped her throat like a prayer dragged from iron, a sound meant for defiance but breaking into something that bent toward him despite itself.
"End Script…" Balfazar whispered, his grin widening with satisfaction. "Bind."
Behind her, Balfazar's companions rose as one. No word, no glance—only silence shaped into reverence, as if the bond itself required their witness.
A tether formed—radiant, coiling, impossible. Not a line, but a braid of soul-thread and reversed purpose. It bound them like mirrored prayers abandoned by heaven.
They pulsed in unison.
Light bent around them. The air recoiled, unsure what it was witnessing. The glyph still glowed between Balfazar's fingers, fading slowly as the bond asserted its claim.
Elissa swayed where she stood, eyes glassy, tears sliding unbidden down her cheeks—grief and rapture entwined in a silence she could not name.
Vharn hummed through his tears, a broken melody trembling in the air. From across the veil, Voidstor slipped into being, curling close as if summoned by sorrow, its purr thrumming in eerie harmony with the hymn.
Caelinda whispered in a tongue older than birth, clutching her stomach as if something within her answered.
Mar'aya's form dimmed—not with death.
But with surrender.
Arkeia's burned brighter.
The tether shivered once—an unholy heartbeat.
Then sealed.
Not with sound.
But with recognition.
The stars paused—hung in the void like guilty witnesses.
The Old Ones stirred in their cages, chains rattling with the groan of forgotten law.
The Outer Gods held their breath, vast infinities leaning inward to watch.
Balance—long thought unbreakable—was rewritten.
The Dawnborne Dyad had been born.
One goddess of twilight.
One priestess ascending.
Two voices—now one song.
A hymn neither heaven nor hell had prepared to hear.
Both tethered beneath the Eye of the Promised One.
And Balfazar—
He said nothing.
He only watched.
His wings unfurled but did not move, vast and still as if the night sky itself had chosen to rest upon his shoulders.
The Promised Eye blinked once—an emerald verdict that rippled across existence.
And the Sanctum, knowing it had witnessed its own erasure, collapsed into silence.