The stars bent, slightly, around his breath.
Not from gravity.
From expectation.
Ecayrous stood alone at the edge of a black observatory spire—no stone, no metal, just will crystallized into throne.
The spire hummed beneath his bare feet—like a pulse borrowed from something long dead. Each breath drew in air laced with star-ash and the faint scent of burned truth.
The cosmos unfolded in front of him like a wounded scripture. He watched
Light brushed across his face like a prayer meant for someone else. It didn't warm. It waited. Like even the stars were asking permission to burn.
Fragments of light twisted in the silence. Screams. Fire. Memory. Power.
He sighed.
Long. Disappointed. Bored.
"This is the best they have left?"
The question wasn't spoken aloud. There was no one to hear it.
Except the universe itself—and it knew better than to answer.
The Graveyard, from afar:
Ascendants surged like living divinity, hurling stars, wielding law, carving silence into verdicts.
Cree danced in flame. Orhaiah rewrote the structure of causality. Komus boxed futures. Ayla shattered prophecy with her scream. Qaritas twisted through himself, becoming something terrible and true.
It looked like glory.
Ecayrous saw waste.
"Surely Hrolyn trained them better than this," he muttered. "Peace made them forget the edge of things."
A flick of his finger. The scene shifted—sliding across voidlight. Moments rewound and replayed like sacred theater, like mistakes under review.
Hydeius's soulfire halo. Weak. Fed by regret, not rage.
Niraí's erasures. Precise. But slow. She blinked twice where she should've blinked once.
Even Komus…
Lexen, Ecayrous thought.
Still mistaking rage for direction.
He turned his head slightly. Focused on her.
Ayla.
Her flame bent stars. She wielded battle like it was choreography. But her heart was flawed.
"Still ruled by memory," he said.
His voice was soft—and cold.
"And still his. Even now."
Ecayrous smirked at that thought.
The Screen Shifts:
Qaritas—kneeling, shaking, becoming.
His body flickered with ancient geometry. His scream split physics. Void bloomed like infection and inheritance.
Ecayrous's smile thinned.
"So the Shadowborn awakens."
He tilted his head.
"A shame."
"He was meant to rise beside me—not against me."
His eyes narrowed.
"And if he cannot be remade… then perhaps he should not rise at all."
His gaze darkened—into cruelty sharpened by intention.
"Perhaps a curse. Something slow. Something earned."
"Monsters birthed in agony always remember their maker."
The pressure in the room shifted—like gravity rearranging its spine. Ecayrous didn't turn at first. He didn't need to. The air behind him thickened with the scent of iron and ice. Not a smell. A memory.
A shadow stepped forward—no sound, no motion. Just existence, becoming undeniable.
Eyes opened in the dark. Not glowing.
Burning.
Red. Ancient. Patient.
"You're late," Ecayrous said.
No reproach. Just inevitability.
The figure said nothing. But the air tightened.
Ecayrous turned. Slowly. Fully.
A moment of silence passed. Not empty. Pregnant.
"I've decided," he said, "that the Ascendants have grown too sentimental."
He stepped closer to the figure. Let his words fall like verdicts.
"Lexen still clings to mercy."
"Kriri burns for others, not herself."
"The Choir have forgotten how to lead."
He lifted one finger. Pointed.
"Even Cree weeps between their fires."
A pause.
"And Qaritas—our perfect orphan—he bleeds loyalty to people who don't even remember what he is."
He sighed again.
Then smiled.
"I gave them peace. They turned it into a lullaby."
"Now I'll give them pain again."
He stepped away, voice softening.
Once, he had offered peace. Not as a lie—but as an experiment.
Let them live. Let them burn their names into new stars.
He'd even carved a place for the heir to return.
But they squandered it. And the heir forgot him.
"So I'm leaving the rest… to you."
The figure stepped forward once more.
Something ancient curled around their feet—memory given muscle, shadow given shape. The light recoiled from them—not in fear, but in acknowledgment.
Their eyes were crimson equations. Their silhouette wore fragments of gods long forgotten—not armor. Inheritance.
Ecayrous tilted his head slightly.
"Do you understand the plan?"
No answer.
He smiled wider.
"Good."
"Make them grieve what they called power."
He gestured to the dark beyond the Graveyard. Something stirred—an echo of a storm that hadn't begun yet.
"They thought the Rite ended with them."
"But the Rite was only the spark."
"Ascension was never the goal."
"The goal… was return."
"Let Komus remember what it meant to beg."
"Let Ayla remember why she left me."
"Let Qaritas break… before he believes he's whole."
He turned back toward the stars. A single Skotosar fragment floated into view—half-alive, half-ash.
He crushed it between two fingers. Effortless. Thoughtless.
"Time to remind them what they're fighting."
"Not monsters."
"Me and the rest of the Fragments of Eon."
Far beyond the Graveyard, in a place where time curled inward, something stirred.
A heartbeat unaligned. A pulse that didn't match the rest.
Not god. Not fragment. Not yet claimed.
Just a name, waiting to be remembered.
The figure in the shadows knelt.
But not out of reverence.
Out of readiness.
The figure tilted their head—just enough to suggest thought, or memory.
Ecayrous watched, and—for a flicker—there was something close to pride.
Then it was gone.
Their voice, low and cold and filled with a future already bleeding:
"It will be done."
Ecayrous's smile sharpened into something almost kind.
"Let them burn."
"Let them think they've won."
"They'll think this was about legacy. Or vengeance. Or fragments."
He turned slightly, as if listening to a thought the stars refused to speak.
"But it's always been about inheritance."
"And the one who remembers what they were born for."
"Even if the others forgot his name."
A long pause. The stars around him began to fracture—not from attack.
From memory.
"Because soon…"
His eyes glinted like knives dipped in fatherhood and cruelty.
"…they'll remember what they were made for."