It began with a sound.
Soft at first like glass cracking under frost.
Then louder.
Until the air itself fractured.
When I looked outside, the sky was falling apart.
Not raining splitting.
Lines of golden light tearing through the horizon like open wounds, dripping fragments of constellations.
The city below glowed faintly, unaware that the world above it had begun to die.
Aster burst into the room, breathless.
"Erian the containment wards are failing. Every seal in the eastern quadrant just broke."
My mark burned beneath my skin, a searing pulse that matched the rhythm of my heart.
"I didn't do anything."
"I know." He pulled me toward the door. "But whatever's causing it is linked to you. If we don't stabilize the ley lines"
A thunderous crack silenced him.
The ceiling above us split open.
And from it, a figure descended cloaked in gold fire, eyes like suns, wings carved from ruin.
It was him.
The one from my dreams.
The first vessel.
Only this time, he wasn't memory.
He touched the ground, and the chamber trembled. "You woke me," he said voice echoing in a dozen tones. "You called across the veil."
Aster drew his blade. "Stay back."
But the figure smiled. "Still protecting him? Even now? You haven't changed, Commander."
Aster froze.
"How"
"You don't remember," the figure whispered, stepping closer. "But you've done this before. Lifetimes ago, when you swore to kill me and couldn't."
The mark on my chest flared. My knees gave out. "Who are you?"
The figure's eyes softened. "I am what remains when gods regret. I am the sun that fell so you could rise."
Aster caught me as I stumbled, his hand gripping mine. "Don't listen to him."
But the world around us began to shift.
Walls bending.
Light bleeding.
Reality trembling under the weight of something older than time.
I saw flashes not visions, memories.
A battlefield beneath a golden sky.
Aster's face, bloodied but smiling.
My own hands, burning with divine fire.
And his voice the same voice as the figure before me whispering a promise:
"If I fall, you must carry my flame. Until the stars remember mercy."
The present snapped back like a whip.
I was on my knees, gasping. The mark burned so bright it illuminated the chamber. Aster crouched beside me, gripping my shoulders. "Erian, stay with me!"
The figure reached out gentle, almost human.
"Don't fight it," he said. "You're not breaking the world, Erian. You're rebuilding it."
And then everything exploded.
A burst of gold.
A scream that wasn't mine.
Aster's arms around me as we were thrown backward through a wall of light.
When the world stilled, I lay against his chest, the ruins glowing faintly around us.
The figure was gone.
But the mark no longer burned. It shone.
Aster looked at it, then at me, horror and awe in his eyes. "It's fused."
"What?"
"The Black Sun it's no longer separate. It's become part of you."
I could feel it too.
The pulse wasn't foreign anymore. It was mine.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, that voice his voice whispered again.
"Now the sky remembers."
That night, when the stars reappeared, they were no longer white.
Every one of them burned gold.
And for the first time since the beginning, I wasn't afraid.
But Aster was.
Because he knew
the last time the sky turned gold, the world ended.