The silence that followed the destruction of the tear was not the absence of sound. It was the bated breath of reality itself, an expectant void that weighed more than all the dead stars in the cosmos. Kael found himself standing over an abyss of shattered nebulae, the eleven empty thrones floating around him like teeth in the jaw of a dying god. In his palm, the name "Lirya" burned with a cold fire that consumed not flesh, but memory, devouring the memories of who he once was before the mercury sang in his veins.
"Thirteenth," a voice echoed from the void between the atoms. "You have broken the crystal cage. Now face the gardener who pruned the Tree of Ways."
The thrones shattered in a shower of cosmic splinters. From their fragments emerged the Eleven Successors, but no longer in recognizable forms. They were living distortions:
The Weaver was a whirlwind of broken timelines mourning lost centuries.
The Singer was a forest of femurs intoning funereal psalms in forbidden tongues.
The Judge was a giant floating mouth with teeth of dictions written in stellar blood.
"Insolent!" roared the Judge. His words materialized as obsidian daggers honed to the edge of oblivion.
Kael didn't dodge. He extended his quicksilver arm and stole the very concept of "attack." The daggers disintegrated into cosmic dust that smelled of chalk and ash.
"You learned new tricks," the Singer hissed, her bones resonating at a frequency that vibrated Kael's bones like cursed violin strings.
"No," he corrected, as the quicksilver wove living runes into the air. "I only remembered that even gods bleed when a lie is ripped from their throats."
With a slow gesture, he summoned the echoes stolen from the Devourer:
The primordial darkness that devoured sounds.
The hunger that shattered galaxies.
The Successors fell back. For the first time, something like fear crossed their forms.
"He cannot contain that power!" the Weaver cried, their timelines entangling like dying snakes.
Kael smiled. Quicksilver bled from his eyes. "I will not contain him," he said. "I will clothe him."
The quicksilver on his arm unfurled like a war cloak, absorbing the Devourer's shadows. For an instant, he was both: the Thief and the Devourer, a god of contradictions.
The plane cracked. Kael followed the burning trail of the name on his palm, piercing layers of reality like wet paper. What he found stopped him in his tracks:
Lirya, chained at the center of a pulsing chamber, mercury roots driven into her back and connected to a pulsating mass that hung from the cosmic ceiling. It wasn't a spring. It was a gaping wound the size of a solar system, necrotic edges pulsing with diseased light.
"Kael..." her voice was a broken thread. "The Source is not power... it's a scab! Break the—"
A shadow rose behind her. The face of the Source-Wound: a thousand open eyes on the skin of dead galaxies.
"Welcome, Thirteenth," it echoed in his bones. "Come claim your prize. She was always the perfect bait."
The Mirror-Child appeared, floating beside Kael, its tiny hands pressed against an invisible wall. "Beware, Mercury. Some chains are backbone."
The Eleven Successors burst into the chamber:
The Judge spat out the word "Nullity," creating a void that devoured light.
The Singer intoned the Song of the Broken Femur, making space-time bleed.
The Weaver cast a beam of failed futures where Kael died on a loop.
Kael raised his cloak of mercury and shadow. "Do you know what I stole from the universe's first scream?" he asked, not of them, but of the wound itself.
"The silence that preceded it."
He clenched his fist. The cloak imploded.
Climax: The Broken Heartbeat
The sound that followed had no name. It was:
Rip: The Successors burst like blown glass, their essences sucked into the wound.
Release: Lirya's chains turned to stardust.
Revelation: The Wound-Source bled pure time, a golden liquid that smelled of childhood.
The Mirror-Child floated in front of Kael, its reflective eyes displaying the same instant repeated endlessly: "See? This isn't the end..."
An all-too-human heartbeat echoed from the wound.
BOOM-BOOM.
BOOM-BOOM.
Lirya screamed, "It's a heart!"
Kael ran toward her as the ground gave way. His quicksilver hand touched her skin just as the chamber imploded.
The Mirror-Child smiled sadly. "It's the first heartbeat. Now it will learn to bleed..."
Everything went white.
In the void between the destruction and the new tremor, Kael felt Lirya's weight in his arms. Her breath was warm against his neck.
"What you stole..." she murmured, weakened. "...was it really silence?"
Kael looked at his arm. The quicksilver now had golden veins.
"No," he confessed, as they fell toward an ocean of broken mirrors. "I stole the scream that will break the next cycle."
Below, in the largest reflection, eleven figures stood waiting for them in black waters.