Komus tapped his wrist twice.
It wasn't a tic. It was a ritual. Two soft touches of finger to skin, just below the inner pulse—where grief hid best. A habit older than this life. Older than starlines.
A signal that something had ended.
And something else had begun.
His body remained still at the helm of their star, space unfolding quietly around them in gradients of cobalt and voidsilver. But his breath had already shortened. His chest had tightened.
Somewhere across the cosmos, Hrolyn was dead.
The starlines knew first. Not through sound or flame—but a tremor in their geometry. A slight recoil in the light. Like the heavens had forgotten one of their own, and weren't sure how to carry the silence.
Komus's fingers pressed once more to his wrist.
Two taps.
Then memory cut him open.
The past.
The silk was red.
Not for royalty.
For blood.
Vannah's laugh was the color of warmth Komus hadn't earned, and her eyes were inked with galaxies. She'd never knelt to him, even when she'd been forced to kneel for others. That's why he loved her.
That's why Ecayrous chose her.
"You'll watch," Ecayrous had said, his voice soft as a shroud.
"So you never forget what love costs when you owe me everything."
Komus—Lexen, then—had tried to fight. But he was seventeen, barely divine, half-scarred from wars he hadn't finished losing. Ecayrous pressed a hand to Lexen's chest and held him still. Not with power.
With fatherhood.
And made him watch.
"He hadn't forgotten how Ecayrous smiled while eating Vannah's mind.
Only how long he screamed after."
She hadn't made a sound.
But her eyes begged him to close his.
He hadn't.
He never would again.
And when Zrose— their mother—died, whispering that Kriri was only half-born, not fully divine, not safe, she begged him to protect her.
So Lexen did.
A seventeen-year-old boy, with no future but duty and a blade, became the guardian of a baby sister marked for death.
"If you love her," Ecayrous had said, years later, "you'll let her break.
You'll marry her off and pray her womb survives."
Lexen refused. Once.
Only once.
Ecayrous smiled.
Lexen bled.
He remembered the sound of the blade before it reached his groin.
The silence after it did.
He remembered her tears.
But most of all—
He remembered doing nothing.
Now.
A voice cut through his breath.
Ayla.
Inside his mind.
"Hrolyn is dead."
Niraí's lips parted mid-sentence. Her hand froze in midair where she'd been folding a spatial knot.
Orhaiah's eyes didn't move. But her grip on her staff did.
Komus said nothing for a moment.
He wondered if Kriri still prayed. Or if she had stopped the day he let her marry a monster to save children that wasn't even hers.
Then whispered, "I know."
He tried not to think of Ayla. Of what Hrolyn's death might mean for her. But silence had a weight—and sometimes it sounded like a scream waiting for someone else to answer it.
He didn't blink. He couldn't. If he did, he'd see her eyes again—Vannah, silent. Kriri, bleeding. The dead, still waiting for him to make it mean something. But the stars had moved on. And so would he.
He straightened. Let the memory burn in place of resolve. Then the sky split—Cree, Hydeius, and truth.
A heartbeat later, two stars ignited above them.
One wreathed in smoke and flame—Cree.
The other like the echo of a funeral pyre still burning—Hydeius.
They descended like regrets that refused to stay buried.
Their auras cracked the sky. Their arrival said one thing: the time for silence had ended.
Jrin was already arguing.
His voice cracked—not from volume, but from the strain of impossible math.
"You're saying Ecayrous—a Fragment of Eon—is still alive? And Hrolyn… gave our children from our previous lives to him?"
He gestured wildly, like trying to grasp the edges of a nightmare.
"And the other Fragments—the ones that shattered the 1999 universes, turned stars into hives and thoughts into weapons—they're alive too?"
His voice faltered at the end.
The silence that followed wasn't stillness—it was recoil.
Hydeius nodded. His voice was low, steady. Not calm—contained.
"We thought the other universes were gone. Collapsed into entropy or rewritten by ruin. But they endured. Bent. Scarred. Hrolyn smuggled our children out—before the Collapse fully sealed them."
A pause.
"They live. They're scattered. And now they're bait."
Cree's voice cut in like a flare across ice.
"And now Ecayrous wants a trade. One fragment of Eon—one of us. Kill it."
A breath.
"In exchange, we get the rest back."
Silence.
Like the void had gone too quiet.
Even the stars seemed to lean in.
Then—like poison dipped in honey—
Kelene.
Descending in a crown of silver flame and silk forged from compressed matter-script, her presence radiated disdain so precise it felt like a spell.
Beside her, Oreian, spinning a small gravitational loop around his wrist, yawning like a god bored by mortality.
"Are we really doing this?" Kelene asked, her tone velvet-sharp. "Trusting him?"
Her eyes flicked to Komus—then lingered.
" Ecayrous the one that terrorized his world to the point that were now relying on Ecayrous's ex-spawn—turned god. And another forged from his favorite whore. How poetic."
Komus didn't flinch.
He had heard worse.
He had survived worse.
Cree's smile was sharp.
There was no laughter in it—only heat.
They stepped off Their star.
Landed on hers.
The impact cracked the air beneath her feet, split space for a heartbeat—enough for her balance to falter.
Kelene hissed.
"Get off—"
Cree raised a fist. Pressed it—not hard, but deliberately—against her breastplate.
The metal smoked under their palm.
Not from power.
From purpose.
"There were eighteen chosen," they whispered.
"Eighteen souls pulled from ash and rewritten in fire. Reborn by the Rite."
They leaned in.
"You really want to question the process that made the 18 divine, Kelene?"
"Or are you just trying to make the other Primarch Ten doubt it too?"
Kelene flushed. Not with shame. With rage.
But she didn't answer.
Oreian, still floating nearby, didn't move.
Didn't need to.
Gravitational ripples pulsed from his orbit—subtle, but wrong.
Stars leaned toward him. Planets shifted.
Even laziness, it seemed, had mass.
"I told you," he muttered, rotating slightly, "this was going to turn into work."
Cree turned to the others.
Their voice didn't rise—but the cosmos seemed to flinch.
"Ecayrous lives. they spoke to Hrolyn two days ago. Made his offer: one life for many. One fragment for 1999 broken universes."
He let that number hang.
"Our children. Our legacy. Our sins, if we don't act."
Komus said nothing.
But his hands clenched.
He hadn't let himself speak their names in centuries.
He barely let himself remember their faces.
But he still knew the shape of each loss.
Jrin tried to speak again.
But Komus raised a hand.
The motion was small.
The world shifted around it.
He stepped forward.
Not as a son.
As a starwalker.
And a man done watching others bleed for silence.
"I was born to erase the fragments," he said quietly.
"Because I was once his son."
"But I lost that bloodline the moment I became a god.
The moment I died as Lexen, and lived as Komus."
"Now... I was born to heal what I was told to destroy."
The words didn't thunder.
They resonated.
They didn't plead.
They declared.
Niraí's hand tightened on his shoulder.
Not in support.
In fear.
Not of him—but of what it would cost to believe him again.
Jrin's voice, suddenly small:
"What if he's right?"
"What's one fragment, if the rest survive?"
"If our children... if they really live…"
Komus didn't raise his voice.
"Then we're already dead," he said.
"Because the moment we justify that math, we become him."
Even Oreian blinked—slowly, like gravity itself was listening now.
Komus turned fully to the circle of Ascendants.
The fire behind his eyes wasn't rage.
It was remembrance.
"We've fought long enough without knowing what we're saving."
"If Hrolyn gave our children away to protect them—if they still live—"
"Then we owe them more than silence."
"We owe them our fire."
Orhaiah turned, breaking the moment.
Her voice was a verdict.
"That's a better vow than most of us were ever given," Orhaiah said quietly.
Then louder, firmer:
"We talk later," she said. "Ayla and Qaritas are in trouble."
The star beneath them shuddered—an orbit pulling taut.
Komus nodded once.
Touched the star with two fingers.
It bowed.
Light coiled around his hand, listening.
He had a plan. Not a good one. Not a survivable one. But it wasn't born of revenge. It was born of refusal.
And sometimes, that was enough.
He turned to Niraí. To Orhaiah.
If they were going to fall—
they'd fall like stars that remembered fire.