The Graveyard groaned again—once more, but this time not from battle.
Not from grief.
The air was dense. Not with breath—but with memory. It pressed down on their skin like the gravity of a thousand unfinished prayers.
Cold.
Thin.
But alive with echoes. Every step felt too loud. Every silence, too full. Above them, the sky stretched in impossible layers—blacker than void, but scattered with half-burned constellations. Some spiraled inward, devouring themselves.
Others blinked like dying nerves in a brain too large to grieve all at once.
Beneath their feet, the terrain was a cracked mosaic of dead starlight—shards of burned sanctums and charred divine glass.
Every step rang hollow, like walking across a shattered cathedral floor littered with the teeth of gods.
The sound was wrong. Not absence—but distortion. The groan of torn space, the fractured hum of spinning halos. Sound lagged, as if time were dragging it behind—a mourner too tired to grieve.
One rib jutted from the ground like a spire; another arched overhead, big enough to cast shadows across ruined star-fragments.
His eye socket alone could've housed a city. A cathedral of broken divinity, now hollowed by something that had not simply killed—but claimed.
From arrival.
The air buckled, not with heat—but hierarchy.
Ayla staggered, eyes dragging upward. Shadows bled into the stars, coiling like thought made cruel.
The Graveyard held its breath. The air stilled—not with peace, but with expectation.
Ayla shifted her stance beside Qaritas's trembling form. Komus took half a step forward—just enough to place himself between her and whatever came next.
To their flanks, Cree's fire dimmed, as if tasting something ancient. Hydeius straightened, the soul-lights dimming into still orbit. Orhaiah angled her staff toward the black horizon.
Above them, Niraí crouched atop a crumbling shard of divine bone—gate-magic crackling softly beneath her fingers.
Then he stepped through.
Ecayrous.
No ripple. No flare.
Just presence, old and undeniable—like law rewritten in the bones of existence.
Cree's flames faltered.
Hydeius went still.
Komus looked away—not in fear, but because the shape of Qaritas's agony mirrored something else. A boy. A cell. Ecayrous's hands, carving destiny into Lexen's spine. Some screams you never forget—not because of their volume, but because you once made them, too.
They stood like fragments of a broken compass:
Ayla closest to Qaritas, one knee still in the dust.
Komus flanking her right, poised in silence like a sword without its sheath.
Hydeius at the perimeter, his soul-orbit flickering with doubt.
Cree hovering near the burned glyphs, flame curling around their wrist.
Orhaiah off-center, her cracked scale slowly spinning.
Niraí behind them all—watching from above.
Ecayrous's voice was silk dipped in rust. "How pathetic you've become."
The curse ignited in silence.
Not a symbol.
A sentence, spoken in geometry.
At its heart:
A diamond-shaped core, pulsing with molten violet light—an impossible hue between amethyst and bruised void. This wasn't ink or flame—it was memory, liquified.
In the center of the diamond floated a single massive eye, lidless and gleaming with cruel lucidity. Its iris was fractal, spiraling inward like a black star collapsing into thought. It didn't blink.
Surrounding the diamond in concentric, shifting motion were smaller eyes—each orbiting at its own maddening rhythm, each etched with a faint echo of consciousness. They didn't just watch. They remembered. Every sin. Every hesitation. Every version of you that could have chosen differently.
The entire curse circle hovered mid-air, etched in flame and void-dust, whispering truths not meant for mortal minds.
Lines bled outward from the diamond—twelve angular runes, pointed like daggers, their language ancient and predatory. Between them stretched circular bands of magma-veined script, language of the Fragments, vibrating with power that made the stars in the sky above them twitch.
And beneath it all—barely visible—a shifting pattern of chained geometry, subtly coiled, like something that wanted to open. A lock. Or a jaw.
When the curse was complete, the diamond eye rotated once.
And every small eye blinked.
Reality groaned.
Qaritas screamed.
Above, constellations spiraled inward, devouring themselves. Others blinked like dying nerves in a brain too vast to mourn.
His scream pierced the fabric of the dead stars, a high, soul-twisting wail that ricocheted through celestial bone and memory. Metal stars cracked under its echo. Light itself seemed to recoil.
His body convulsed, folding in on itself—then expanding with terrifying grace.
Skin split.
Not with blood—but with light.
Molten violet bled from his pores in jagged rivers, hardening into fractured patterns that crawled across his form like volcanic obsidian pulsing with forgotten equations. His entire body warped, reshaped—no longer built for human breath, but for something older. Crueler. Truer.
He towered—nine feet tall and still stretching—his limbs now sheathed in skin that looked like molting lava rock, constantly shedding and reforming as if his own flesh couldn't decide what truth to settle on.
His chest cracked open for a moment, exposing a glimpse of something burning within: a heart that wasn't beating, but rotating—a slow, spiraling engine of fractal geometry, pulsing with the gravity of dreams not yet born.
His hair whipped in all directions, black-purple strands glinting like voidsilver razors, caught in the orbit of his awakening.
His mouth opened again—and the scream didn't stop.
It climbed.
It fractured the air.
Those who heard it too long began to bleed from the ears—not from volume, but from meaning. The scream wasn't sound anymore.
It was a sentence in progress.
A prophecy trying to finish itself through flesh.
Cree fell to one knee, their fire sputtering in disbelief. Orhaiah reached for her cracked scale—then stopped, hand trembling. Even Komus looked away. Not out of shame. Out of recognition.
For a breath, Cree almost believed. Not in the man—but in the fire. In what Ecayrous had once promised them before the lies. The thought flickered—and burned away. But for a heartbeat, they remembered why gods used to kneel.
This was not what gods were meant to become. This was something older than divinity and crueler than law. A scream carved from the first fracture in the universe—and none of them could un-hear it.
As if his blood remembered blueprints never drawn. As if his soul knew exactly what it was becoming—and agreed.
As if his soul had simply waited for the body to catch up.
In the flicker between pulses, he remembered a name he had never spoken. Not his. Not yet. But waiting.
Inside the scream, Qaritas felt… Not pain. Not loss. Recognition.
No fear.
Just truth, finally catching up.
Niraí stepped back, one hand flaring with gate-energy—ready to close off the space between them, though she didn't. Not yet.
Cree's lips parted, flame flickering out from the corners of their mouth in involuntary awe. "He's not becoming," they whispered. "He's remembering."
The scream rattled Hydeius's soul-ring. Not just volume—souls. Hundreds. Thousands. Not past. Not future. Just truth—too loud for time.
"Souls this loud don't come back quietly."
Around her, the others recovered.
"Ecayrous," whispered Orhaiah.
Ayla turned—hadn't realized she was here. Hadn't felt her presence. The Ascendant of Law looked shaken.
Komus didn't speak at first. His eyes lingered on Qaritas—still screaming.
"He's not the first we've lost to memory," he muttered, barely audible.
Ayla reached for him—then stopped.
The light coming off Qaritas wasn't heat. It was memory.
And she didn't know how to hold that.
Then louder, more deliberate: "Well, we've got more pressing issues," and gestured toward Ecayrous with a flat hand.
The Fragment smirked.
"You always were the pragmatic one, Lexen."
Ecayrous raised a hand. A spear of bone-laced voidfire carved through air toward Orhaiah.
She dodged.
Just.
"Fair point," she muttered. "I was hoping not to run into this Fragment again."
Ecayrous's head tilted, acknowledging her with a smirk of recognition. "Law. Good to see you haven't lost your arrogance."
Qaritas—still burning, still unraveling—spoke. His voice cracked, but it held.
"Why now, Ecayrous?" he rasped. "Why grace us?"
Ecayrous's smile thinned.
"You have one more day."
The silence went heavy.
"One day to decide if you'll take my offer. But that was before I saw your performance. This"—he gestured at the carnage—"was embarrassing."
He chuckled.
"After watching this... I'm not sure you'd last a breath against the Fragment I want dead."
Hydeius growled. "Then tell us which one."
Ecayrous turned slowly.
Orhaiah answered instead.
"The other Fragments are alive."
Fear. Anger. Realization.
Ayla's breath hitched. "We'll explain everything later. The others will need to know."
Orhaiah's face stayed unreadable. "Yes. But it would've been nice to know before we sacrificed everything for ashes."
She was quiet a moment.
Then: "...Does that mean the first Eon lives?"
Ecayrous sighed—almost sincere.
"No. Our creator is still a ghost. For now."
He turned to Cree and Hydeius.
"Oh, you two know this one very well."
He grinned—cruel and slow.
"She tortured your grandsons."
A beat.
"One warmed her bed. The other had his legs cut off and was told to crawl to his brother."
Cree's flames detonated outward.
"That's impossible." Their voice cracked. "She's dead."
Ecayrous didn't blink. "She's very much alive."
"The Fragment of Universe 1990."
"The chainmaker."
"The one who learned how to bind what could not be killed.
The one who turned Ascendants into weapons by making them beg.
Eirisa—the Fragment who broke mercy."
And somewhere beyond the Graveyard, the other twenty-one had just arrived—drawn not by light, but by the echo of something older.