---
The snow fell harder now, as if the sky were trying to bury the village all over again.
Paul and Lyra stood alone in the ruins of the tavern. Smoke curled from the wreckage where the Grave-Eater had been annihilated. The silence left behind was not peace.
It was a warning.
---
> "You're not like them," Paul said.
"Why didn't the illusion break you?"
Lyra didn't answer at first. Her red-rimmed eyes flicked away from his.
> "Because I was already broken."
She pulled back her sleeve.
Carved into her arm — not inked, carved — was a name. A single word, etched into her skin over and over.
"PAUL."
His chest tightened. Not with fear. Not even with confusion.
But with something he thought had been lost when he died.
> Recognition.
---
> "How do you know my name?" he asked, voice like ice cracking.
Lyra knelt beside the ruined floor and began clearing away broken wood. Paul watched her work — fast, desperate, as if trying to unearth time itself.
She struck something buried beneath the snow.
A stone.
A gravestone.
Paul stepped closer and read the faint inscription:
> PAUL — THE LEGEND THAT NEVER EXISTED.
His eyes narrowed.
> "I never… had a grave."
> "Not in your world," Lyra whispered. "But in this one? You were buried before you were born."
---
She looked up at him now, fire in her eyes.
> "This world remembered you before you came.
Feared you before you breathed.
And killed everyone who spoke your name."
Paul's breath misted in the freezing air. Behind him, the snow began to melt — not from heat, but mana pressure. His aura was reacting.
> "Why?" he asked.
> "Because they were afraid of what you'd become."
> "And what am I now?"
Lyra's answer came instantly.
> "The prophecy calls you: The One Who Breaks Final Death.
The soul that remembers all lives.
The weapon that no god could forge…
and no god can destroy."
---
Paul turned away, eyes scanning the horizon. The sky was darkening unnaturally.
Not night.
Something was coming.
> "You said everyone who spoke my name died."
> "Yes."
> "Then you shouldn't be alive."
Lyra gave a crooked smile.
> "I'm not. Not completely."
She opened her palm.
Inside it flickered a shard of something unnatural — a memory stone, etched with blood and glowing with buried pain.
> "They tried to erase me, too. But I cut my name from my soul and buried it with yours. That's how I survived."
Paul stared at the girl. Young. Broken. Brave.
> "You remembered me when the world forgot."
> "Someone had to."
---
Suddenly, the ground trembled.
A crack of thunder — no, not thunder. A rift.
The sky split open, tearing into a seam of golden light.
From it descended a figure clad in golden armor, with six wings of burning scripture and a halo made of weapons — spears, blades, arrows orbiting its head like a crown of war.
> "INQUISITOR ALTARIEL," Lyra gasped.
A Seraphic Executioner.
Sent by the Radiant Church to erase threats to divine order.
Paul didn't flinch.
> "Guess we've been noticed."
The Seraph raised its blade. Its voice shook the world:
> "SOULBRAND.
BREAKER OF DEATH.
RETURN TO YOUR GRAVE — OR BE PURIFIED IN FLAME."
Paul cracked his neck and stepped forward, white hair catching in the wind, eyes like obsidian.
> "Your flame's not bright enough."
He raised a hand.
The snow stopped falling.
Time paused.
The air screamed as mana flooded the earth like a floodgate snapping open.
> "Let me show you what immortal mana really looks like."
---
[End of Chapter Five]