SFX: HOOOOOOOH—
The Mother of All Forgotten Names rose like grief given architecture.
First came the sound: a single, wet inhale that pulled every droplet of reverse rain inward, stripping the sky bare.
Then the shape:
A woman taller than mountains, a cathedral of mourning.
Her body woven from black water and screaming faces.
Her arms wide enough to cradle—or crush—the entire inverted city.
Where her heart should have been was a hole that showed the same void they'd fallen through.
Her face was every mother who ever waited by a window that never opened again.
She opened her mouth.
The sound that emerged was not a scream.
It was everything ever screamed being erased.
SFX: tchhh—CRRRRRRRK—
Every suspended mirror shard powdered into glittering dust.
All stolen memories trapped in the reverse rain vaporized.
Rhaen felt it hit him—
a blade sliding between ribs, scooping out the fragile new pieces of identity he'd begun to regrow.
His stele flared.
[Warning: Identity Erosion in progress. 7% → 11%...]
Seere's eyes narrowed to frost-blue slits.
Asha rolled her shoulders, spat blood that burned a hole through the street.
"Thirty-three minutes just became five," she announced, voice bright with murder. "I love when gods lie about deadlines."
The Widow took one step.
The city folded like wet paper beneath her heel.
Rhaen moved first.
But he did not run.
He unraveled.
SFX: shhhk—shhhhk—
Shadow Slave wasn't teleportation.
It was surrender.
He let the darkness inside him take the wheel, dissolved into the lying shadows at his feet, and reappeared thirty meters closer—perched on the bent spine of a streetlamp pointing downward like a spear.
From here, he saw it:
The Widow's weak point.
The hole in her chest pulsed with thirteen faint lights—Divine Fragments, unborn, nesting inside the corpse of maternal grief.
He flicked his wrist.
The obsidian knife spun end-over-end, trailing black flame, and buried itself in the rim of that void.
The Widow looked down.
For the first time, her face showed something other than sorrow.
Annoyance.
A hand the size of a city block swept toward him.
Rhaen let the shadows swallow him again.
He reappeared beside Seere, breath sharp.
"Heart's the target," he explained. "Thirteen fragments. Crack the shell, take the prize."
Seere's smile softened into something small and cruel.
"And if the shell cracks us first?"
"Then we die pretty," Asha replied, already sprinting. "Try to keep up, lovers."
She leapt.
Not high—impossible.
But her crimson cape ignited, becoming wings of living blood.
SFX: WHOOOM—
She shot skyward in a spiral of scripture and fire, greatsword raised overhead. The air boiled around her with the same heat that had once incinerated a goddess.
The Widow raised her other hand to swat her.
Asha met it head-on.
SFX: KZAAAAAAN—
Blade struck palm.
The impact sounded like the death of a sun.
Asha was hurled backward, wings torn, armor cracked, blood spilling between her teeth—her own, for once.
She cratered the inverted ground and laughed through scarlet foam.
"Worth it," she coughed. "Shell's harder than divine bone. We need bigger sins."
Seere stepped forward, barefoot on broken glass.
"My turn."
She spoke a single word.
Not human.
Not mortal.
Older than lullabies, older than screaming.
The word left her lips like white frost and struck the Widow's hollow heart.
For one heartbeat—
everything stopped.
Reverse rain froze midair.
Even the erosion counter on Rhaen's stele hesitated.
Then the Widow looked at Seere.
Really looked.
And smiled with a mother's tenderness.
SFX: RRRRRRTCH—
Countless arms erupted from her back, each holding a child's corpse by the hair.
The corpses opened their eyes and began to sing Seere's True Name in perfect, rotting harmony.
Seere's face went still.
The frost around her palms cracked.
Identity Erosion spiked across all three steles at once.
[Seere: 34% → 61%]
[Asha: 29% → 57%]
[Rhaen: 19% → 44%]
Seere took a single involuntary step backward.
Lips parting.
A ghost of fear trying—and failing—to remember itself.
The Widow's song swelled.
Rhaen felt his own name clawing up his throat, letter by letter.
He bit his tongue until shadow-blood drowned the sound.
Then he did the only thing he could think of.
He walked to Seere, grabbed her by the throat—gentle, almost tender—
and kissed her.
Hard.
Not romance.
Weapon.
His tongue forced the taste of his blood into her mouth—blood that carried the memory of every person he'd ever killed.
Seventeen murders.
Seventeen stolen names.
He fed them to her like poison.
Seere's eyes snapped open, pupils blown wide.
She swallowed the names.
SFX: GGHHHK—
The corpses choked.
Their song fractured into static.
Identity Erosion reversed violently.
[Seere: 61% → 22%]
[The Widow suffers Name Poisoning – 3%]
Seere broke the kiss.
Licked a drop of his blood from her lip.
"You beautiful, broken thing," she murmured, voice trembling with something that was not gratitude. "Do that again and I'll wear your shadow as a wedding veil."
Rhaen wiped his mouth.
His tongue burned, but the hollow inside him quieted.
"Focus," he mumbled. "Four minutes."
Asha was already airborne again, wings half-regrown, sword screaming divine punishment.
"Then stop flirting and help me crack this bitch open!"
The Widow roared—
a sound that peeled memories from their bones.
Hundreds of arms descended.
The real battle began.
Rhaen moved like a rumor of violence, shadow sliding between blows that erased entire blocks. Every time he reappeared he carved another shallow line across the Widow's chest, black flame eating inward toward the thirteen lights.
Asha fought like a falling cathedral—fire, wrath, judgment—breaking herself on godflesh and laughing every time something snapped.
Seere walked untouched beneath the storm of fists, singing her own soft, cruel aria, unraveling the Widow's coherence one maternal memory at a time.
Erosion counters climbed and fell in frantic waves.
Two minutes remained when the Widow finally knelt.
Not in defeat.
In prayer.
She pressed both hands to her heart-wound and began to weep upward—black water cascading into the empty sky.
The thirteen lights in her chest pulsed, desperate to escape.
Rhaen saw it.
The moment.
The window.
The kill-beat.
He looked at Asha—bleeding from every orifice, smiling like apocalypse.
He looked at Seere—hair whipping like moonlit blades.
They nodded.
Three monsters, one heartbeat.
Asha dove—a crimson comet.
Seere raised both hands and spoke a word that ended worlds.
Rhaen let go of every shadow he had ever been and became the knife.
Three strikes hit the same instant.
SFX: BOOOOOOM—
The Widow's chest burst outward in a perfect ring of silence.
Thirteen shards of divine light shot skyward like reverse comets.
The city screamed one last time—
the sound of a mother who had finally lost everything.
Then—
The reverse rain stopped.
Gravity remembered its job.
And the First Nightmare ended.