The world they knew no longer turned.
It bled.
Lyra stood upon the remains of the battlefield—if it could still be called that. Where once there had been war, there was now silence stitched with cracks in meaning. The very laws of the realm had buckled under the aftermath of Orion's ascension. Above her, the sky churned—not with clouds or stars, but with vines of thought and arterial strands of ancient possibility. A blood sky, the scholars would one day call it.
But no scholar would live long enough to name it.
Kael walked beside her, his blade humming faintly, as if confused by the absence of things to erase. Reality wasn't holding steady—it was coiling, rewinding, skipping in place.
"He's not just rewriting fate," Kael muttered. "He's feeding it to something else."
"Or becoming it," Lyra said. She held her sigil-gloved hand out. Threads of flame danced across her fingertips, hesitating—as if unsure whether the concept of 'fire' still applied here.
They moved forward, tracing the wake Orion left behind. Each step took them through memories not their own—worlds that flickered into existence for seconds, then withered.
A city made of breathing stone.
A forest where each tree whispered the moment it died.
A tower that only grew downward, toward a root older than time.
In each place, Orion had passed through.
Not walking. Planting.
Then they reached the edge of it.
The Root-Spire.
It rose into the sky in ways that broke scale, pierced through color, rejected gravity. It looked like a tree, but no tree had ever grown from the wound between realities. Its bark shimmered like mourning glass. Its leaves were unwritten metaphors, shivering with meanings no language could hold.
Kael staggered at the base of it, his blade quivering.
"He's not building a garden," he said. "He's building a new multiverse."
"And tearing out the ones that fail to bloom," Lyra finished, voice raw.
The moment they stepped closer, the air trembled.
A presence unfurled from the Spire—not Orion, but something that wore a memory of him. A shade with thorns for veins and eyes like collapsing stars.
"You shouldn't have followed," it said. Not in words, but in implications that throbbed in their bones.
Kael raised his blade. "Bring him back."
The shade smiled.
"He was only ever a seed. Now he's taken root in something larger."
Then it attacked.
Not with force. With doubt.
Kael's limbs twisted, his intentions crumbling mid-thought. His blade flickered in and out of existence, as if unsure it had ever been forged.
Lyra screamed, flaring her sigils in defiance. Fire surged, but the shade drank it—consumed her rebellion like nectar.
"Even your resistance is nourishment," it hissed.
But then—
The Sprout pulsed.
Not the original. A fragment, hidden beneath Lyra's ribs, unnoticed until now. A gift left by Orion. Or perhaps a trap.
The pulse struck the shade.
And it wept.
"You remember him," Lyra said, advancing now. "You're not him. Just the part that broke off."
The shade tried to reform—but she grabbed its arm, and with a whisper, burned it into light.
Kael stood beside her, weakened but alive. "That wasn't him."
"No," she said. "But it means he's still splintering. Becoming… everything."
They turned back to the Root-Spire.
And it opened.
Not like a door.
Like a wound.
Inside, voices sang—not in unison, but in disagreement. Futures argued with each other. Possibilities tore at one another like jealous ghosts.
And somewhere within, Orion—whatever he now was—waited.