The Emperor did not come with armies.
It came alone.
One year to the day after Lunaros spoke his first word in the language of silence, the sky simply… stopped.
Stars went out like candles pinched by unseen fingers. The moon bled black. Every mirror in Eldoria cracked at the same moment.
Then the palace doors opened by themselves.
And a child walked out into the courtyard.
Lunaros. Four years old by mortal count, but already the height of a ten-year-old, barefoot in a simple white tunic, raven hair stirring in a wind that did not exist. His eyes were pure silver now—no trace of gray, no trace of humanity.
In his small hand he carried a toy wooden sword Kairos had carved for him months ago.
Behind him, the entire family stood frozen in the doorway—Selene's mouth open in a scream that would not come, Kairos reaching with a hand that moved through air thick as honey.
Lunaros had used The Stillness.
One hour.
The whole world paused.
Only he could move.
He looked up at the sky—no fear, only curiosity—and smiled the small, fierce smile that always made Selene's heart ache.
Then he stepped forward.
The Void opened like a mouth.
Not a rift this time. A doorway. Tall and perfectly rectangular, edges flickering with the faces of every soul the Emperor had ever devoured. At its center stood the Emperor itself: no longer a silhouette, but a man-shaped hole in reality, wearing Maelor's face beneath a crown of broken moons. Queen Aeloria's golden hair spilled from beneath the crown like a mockery of sunlight.
It knelt—something the size of a god knelt—to be eye-level with a child.
**"Come,"** it said in Maelor's voice, soft as a lullaby. **"You were born to be nothing with us. To be everything we cannot. Come, little echo. Let me unmake your pain before it begins."**
Lunaros tilted his head.
Then he did something no one—not Kairos with his regression, not Selene with her divine sight—had ever expected.
He hugged it.
Small arms wrapped around a neck made of screaming absence.
And spoke.
Not in the language of silence.
In the language of creation—the word Selene had used to wound the Voice, the word that had never been spoken since the stars were born.
But this time, he added something new.
A name.
**"Mother."**
Because in the endless dark between devoured worlds, Aeloria still screamed.
And a child who could see every dead timeline had found the shard of starlight she had hurled beyond the veil ten thousand years ago.
Her daughter's soul—reborn, over and over, until it became Lunaros.
The Emperor convulsed.
Aeloria's scream tore free—not of pain, but of recognition.
The crown of broken moons shattered.
Light—real light, the kind that had existed before betrayal—poured from the child's embrace, flooding the doorway, the courtyard, the sky.
The Void did not close.
It *shrank*.
Pulled inward, folding like burning paper, dragging the Emperor with it. Aeloria reached out one last time—hand no longer shadow, but flesh—toward the boy who was her daughter returned.
Lunaros kissed her cheek.
Then let go.
The doorway snapped shut.
The sky healed.
Time unfroze.
Kairos stumbled forward, catching his son as Lunaros swayed, suddenly small again—truly four years old, eyes gray once more, trembling with exhaustion.
Selene fell to her knees beside them, tears cutting tracks through the moonlight on her face.
"What… what did you do?" Kairos whispered.
Lunaros looked up, voice soft and sleepy.
"I gave her what she lost," he said simply. "A daughter's hug."
He yawned, curled into his father's arms, and fell asleep.
Above them, the moon shone brighter than it ever had.
And somewhere, in the shrinking dark between worlds, Queen Aeloria of the First Kingdom finally stopped screaming.
The Emperor was not dead.
But for the first time in ten thousand years, it knew what it was to lose.
The coronation was held beneath a sky that belonged to no single moon.
Three moons hung above Eldoria now: the ancient silver one, a second born from Selene's final blessing the night Lunaros spoke his first word, and a third—small, golden, and fierce—carved from the dying light of Queen Aeloria's redeemed soul when Lunaros pulled her from the Void and gave her peace.
The throne room had been rebuilt into an open amphitheater beneath that triple gaze. No roof. No walls on three sides. Only the throne itself remained: moonstone and starsteel, wide enough for a king and all who loved him.
Lunaros stood before it at twenty-four mortal years—tall, raven-haired, eyes shifting between storm-gray and pure silver with every heartbeat. He wore simple black, Remorse sheathed at his side, humming contentedly for the first time in two decades.
Behind him stood the family that had become legend.
Kairos and Selene, ageless by blessing and regression, hands entwined.
Seraphine, silver threading her hair but body still strong enough to break armies.
Lyralei, ears adorned with the coral jewelry of the twins' people.
Amara and Liana, identical as ever, each with a child on her hip—Kairos's daughters, born under the new moons.
Isolde, crownless but queen in every way that mattered, smiling the smile of a woman who had watched her stepson become the axis the world turned on.
And scattered among them: the children.
Seventeen in total.
Some with elven ears, some with island braids, some glowing faintly with moonlight in their veins. All marked. All unbreakable.
The high priest—no longer Selene, who had stepped down the day Lunaros spoke his first word—raised the new crown: a circlet of living starlight, forged from the shards of Aeloria's broken crown and the first light Lunaros ever pulled from the Void.
He placed it on Lunaros's brow.
The triple moons flared.
Lunaros turned to the assembled kingdom—nobles, commoners, elves, islanders, even reformed Void-touched who had knelt and been forgiven—and spoke with a voice that carried to every corner of the realm.
"I do not take this throne to rule you," he said. "I take it to free you."
He drew Remorse.
The blade no longer whispered names of traitors.
It sang a single note of pure creation.
With one stroke he severed the last fragile thread connecting Eldoria to the shrinking Void beyond the stars.
The Emperor—diminished, starving, alone—felt the cut across all of existence.
And for the first time in ten thousand years, it knew fear.
Lunaros sheathed the blade, turned to his family, and opened his arms.
They came to him—all of them—until the throne disappeared beneath a tangle of limbs and love and laughter.
Later, when the moons were high and the kingdom slept safe for the first night in memory, Lunaros stood on the balcony with his parents.
Kairos, gray now only at the temples from choice—he had finally allowed time to touch him—rested a hand on his son's shoulder.
"You could have killed it," he said quietly. "Ended the Void forever."
Lunaros looked out at the three moons and smiled the same small, fierce smile he'd worn at four years old.
"Some things deserve to live," he said. "Even in the dark. Mercy is the only victory the Void can never understand."
Selene leaned against them both, tears of starlight on her cheeks.
Far beyond the stars, in a place that was no longer quite nothing, something that had once been an Emperor listened to the echo of a child's hug.
And for the first time in eternity, it was not hungry.
It was… content.
The regressor's oath was fulfilled.
Not in vengeance.
In dawn.