The war did not end with silence.
That was the first lie recorded.
It ended with order—clean, measured, enforced. The heavens stopped trembling. The void ceased its screaming. Reality stabilized into something usable, something governable. Hands that claimed mercy stitched the skies back together, renaming the scars necessary imperfections. I was there when the last echoes faded.
Not as a warrior. Not as a god. I was appointed after the blood cooled—tasked with remembrance, not judgment. A scribe does not choose sides. A scribe survives them.
And what followed survival was rule.
The Voices emerged from the remnants of the Flame, not as conquerors, but as heralds of continuity. They spoke of balance, of prevention, of a universe that could no longer afford unchecked creation. Where one will had once shaped existence through instinct and wonder, seven now spoke in harmony—measured, deliberate, absolute.
For a time, they were right.
The storms ceased. Collapsing realms were sealed instead of reborn. Entire species that should have gone extinct were preserved under divine decree. Time flowed cleanly again. Space obeyed its edges. Mortals stopped dying by the millions to cosmic accidents they could neither understand nor escape.
Peace returned.
But it was a different kind of peace.
Creation no longer reached for the unknown; it was meticulously guided, curated with precision, and contained within defined boundaries.
Where there had once been a presence—vast, unseen, undeniable—there was now a hollow pressure. A shape in reality where something should have been. Not absence like emptiness, but absence like a pulled tooth: pain remembered even when the bleeding stops.
No name was spoken for it.
Names give power, and power was now regulated.
Centuries passed before anyone noticed the wound bleeding again.
At first, it was subtle. A fluctuation in mortal resilience. A child surviving an impact that should have crushed bone and soul alike. A wanderer touching a fracture in space and not being erased. The Voices called it adaptation. Evolution accelerated by stability.
They were not wrong.
But they were not honest.
Cosmic energy did not emerge immediately. It could not. The universe needed time to remember how to breathe without its heart. Decades turned to centuries, and only then did fragments of the old law resurface—not as inheritance, but as defiance.
Mortals began to touch the residue left behind by creation itself.
Not gifted. Taken.
It manifested unevenly. In a fire that burned without fuel. In bodies that refused to break. In minds that bent probability through will alone. The Voices permitted it—at first. They framed it as progress, proof that order could still allow growth.
But growth is not obedience.
Those who wielded this power learned quickly that it did not come from the gods. It responded to intent, not prayer. It obeyed imagination, not decree. And once that realization spread, worship thinned.
Opposition followed.
The first dissenters vanished quietly, their entire bloodlines erased overnight, cities swallowed by sanctioned voids, coldly labeled as containment failures. History was edited. Names were removed from records—including mine, more than once.
Still, resistance returned.
They called themselves many things at first: breakers, freebound, oathless. None survived long enough for the names to matter.
Until one did.
Daredevils.
A mockery, originally—spoken by divine enforcers watching mortals charge gods with nothing but burning will and fractured power. Those who dared challenge inevitability itself. Those who refused to kneel even knowing the cost.
The name stuck.
And so did the bloodshed.
The Daredevils, far from heroes, were a fractured group, often failing more than succeeding, torn apart by infighting, conflicting ideologies, and pervasive fear. Some wanted freedom. Some wanted revenge. Some only wanted proof that the gods could bleed.
They were hunted relentlessly.
Yet with every generation, they returned stronger. Not because of training—but because the universe itself responded to their defiance. Cosmic energy deepened. Took root. Adapted again.
The Voices tightened their grip.
That was when Terrosia burned.
It was not the first world sacrificed, nor the last. But Terrosia had already been dying—a broken sphere clinging to remnants of a past age. Its skies were thin. Its lands were fractured. A relic allowed to persist because it no longer posed a threat.
Until it did.
A divine meteor shower was authorized under the pretense of cleansing unstable residue in the expanse. Fire fell like judgment. Shelters collapsed. Oceans boiled away what little life remained. The last echoes of a once-living world screamed into the void.
I was recording the annihilation when the sound changed.
Not destruction.
Birth.
A scream tore through the fabric of reality—raw, alive. Then another, overlapping. A third harmonized in discord.
Three cries, impossibly close, impossibly young.
I felt the wound in creation react.
In the ruins of Terrosia, amid fire and falling stone, three children had been thrown together—not by design, not by blessing, but by the collapse of everything that had once pretended to be order.
One of them cried.
It was raw and relentless, tearing through the chaos like a wound that refused to close. His small body trembled as he clutched at nothing, lungs burning, voice hoarse from screaming at a world that did not listen. The sound carried farther than it should have, echoing strangely through turbulous air.
Beside him, another child did not cry at all.
His eyes were wide and unfocused, tracking movement where there was none—falling ash, distant light, shadows that vanished when he tried to understand them. His expression shifted rapidly, as if thought chased thought faster than instinct could keep up. Even in terror, he seemed awake.
The third was silent.
He stood unsteadily between them, ash smeared across his face, gaze moving slowly from one brother to the other. There was no panic in his eyes. Only confusion—quiet, searching—as though he sensed something wrong but lacked the words to name it.
One cry cut through the ruin—demanding, unyielding.
One mind raced—restless, refusing stillness.
One gaze lingered—calm, observing.
Nothing more.
Nothing yet.
The Voices turned their attention too late.
Records were sealed. Coordinates erased. Survivors reassigned or executed. Officially, nothing of note occurred in that annihilation.
Unofficially—
The wound pulsed.
And for the first time since the war ended, I wrote something I was not commanded to record.
Creation has not forgiven its jailers.
I sealed the chronicle and hid it between expanses, where even gods hesitate to look.
Because the universe did not only scream that day.
Someone cried back.