The sky fell.
Not in pieces, not in fire—but in silence.
A silence so perfect it devoured all meaning.
Orion could no longer hear his breath. The world around him faded—not vanishing, but slipping between frequencies, like a dream tuning out its dreamer. The others flickered too. Kael. Lyra. Caldrein. Even the child—they were there, then not, then something else entirely.
He blinked.
And the world returned, bent.
The horizon looped in on itself. Trees wept ink. Stars pulsed from beneath the soil.
And high above, descending through layers of unspoken reality, the god awoke.
Not with form.
But with intention.
The Nameless King had no body to behold. Only a presence. An architecture of dread.
Every thought Orion had ever buried rose to meet it. The god's influence wasn't control—it was exposure. Everything hidden became visible. Everything feared became near.
Kael dropped to a knee, blade shaking in his grip. "It's inside me."
Lyra's flame hissed, not with power but resistance. "It's looking for a shape. A vessel."
Caldrein reached out, fingers trembling. "No—it doesn't want one shape. It wants every shape."
The Nameless King was not a being.
It was a mirror refracted through infinity.
It did not rule.
It remembered what rule was—and sought to overwrite it.
"We need to move," Orion said, grounding his will, "before it finishes its descent."
But there was no path forward.
Only a choice:
To run deeper into unreality.
Or to anchor themselves here, in a world that no longer obeyed them.
The child stepped forward again. Their eyes gleamed—not just with knowledge, but with something fiercer.
Hope.
"There is one law it cannot break," they said. "One memory it cannot consume."
Orion turned. "What?"
"The one we write now."
And with that, the child reached into their chest—and pulled forth a fragment of the Seed.
The one Orion had chosen.
The one that grew, not destroyed.
He felt its pulse. A heartbeat woven of everything they were—failures, love, questions, resistance.
Kael rose.
Lyra flared.
Caldrein's mouth curled into something between fear and reverence.
Together, they planted that fragment—not into the ground, but into the moment itself.
And the Nameless King paused.
Not defeated.
Not yet.
But uncertain.
And in uncertainty, there was time.
Just enough for a beginning.