The dream had ended.
Not with a fall. Not with a scream. Just a breath — a soft, final exhale as Aeon stepped beyond the threshold, the fading warmth of dreams trailing behind him like mist. Cobb's face, the shimmer of Mal's sorrow, his daughter's laughter — all retreated into silence. In his palm, he still held the folded drawing. A gate, a sun, a child beneath a tree. He kept it close, a reminder of something not fully lost.
The space between worlds was colder now. The stars above were not stars, but scars — slashes across the black, bleeding faint glimmers of forgotten light. This place did not breathe. It watched. Aeon walked in silence, his footsteps swallowed by the stillness. Here, time didn't pass. It waited.
As he moved forward, the air thickened. A weight, subtle at first, pressed against him — like guilt unspoken. His senses sharpened. Emotion, long buried, began to return. Not warmth. Not hope. Only weight. The invisible architecture of the void trembled, and then, with the crack of stone beneath thunder, the ground shattered under his feet.
Aeon fell — not like a mortal, but as a god who had long avoided gravity.
He landed hard upon blackened stone, dust rising from the impact. Before him stretched a wasteland — a battlefield long abandoned, but never healed. Spears rusted in twisted shapes. Banners hung from skeletal trees like tattered prayers. Shattered helms and broken shields littered the ground, remnants of wars fought and forgotten. The soil was ash, layered over bone. The wind carried no scent but blood and silence.
The sky overhead churned with clouds the color of clotted smoke. Distant fires painted the horizon red. No birds flew. No songs endured.
Aeon stood still.
And the land whispered his name — not in reverence.
In fear.
Then the visions came. Blistering, sharp. Unavoidable. He saw himself — not as he was now, but as he had once been: radiant, tall, silent, cloaked in divine detachment. A watcher. A god who walked among the broken and did nothing. He had created this world — not out of malice, but as a question. He wanted to understand pain. Suffering. Humanity's edge. And so he made a realm where cruelty grew like rot.
And then he walked its roads.
He watched tyrants brand children with the names of kings. Watched priests drown daughters in ritual baths to purify imaginary sins. Watched soldiers carve through refugee lines with bored indifference. Watched mothers barter their newborns for bread they would never receive. Aeon bore witness to it all. And he did nothing.
He believed himself beyond interference. A divine mind unmoved by mortal struggle. But every act of evil carved a quiet line through his core.
And then — the moment.
A father and his daughter, no older than six, fleeing a burned village. The father limped, carrying the girl in his arms. Her toy, a carved wooden fox, clutched tightly in her fingers. They were almost free. Hiding. Hoping.
Until the soldiers came.
Aeon had seen this scene a thousand times. But this time, he could not look away.
They beat the father. Broke his arms as the girl screamed. They laughed as they dragged her forward. She looked to the sky and cried out for help — not to gods, not to kings, but to someone.
And Aeon heard it.
He felt the scream in his soul.
When the blade came down, something inside him shattered.
He did not cry.
He did not speak.
He unleashed.
The sky ripped apart with divine fury. Fire devoured the village. The soldiers died screaming, their bodies turned to glass, then to dust. The winds twisted, pulled the stone from the earth, and rained it down on cities that had never heard her name.
He did not stop.
He burned the fortress.
Then the kingdom.
Then the empire.
He raised oceans and dropped them upon holy capitals. He shattered mountains where tyrants prayed for mercy. He tore down temples stone by stone and buried their worshippers alive.
But wrath does not discern.
It consumes.
And so he did not just strike the guilty.
He annihilated cities that harbored resistance and villages that housed the innocent. He crushed those who watched, but also those who begged to be spared. In time, no voice could be heard above the storm — and no soul could say they truly deserved what came.
His power, once a force of balance, became a scythe with no wielder.
And when the flames receded, the world lay broken.
Its gods — dead.
Its people — scattered, afraid.
Its sky — bloodshot and still weeping.
Aeon stood at the center of the devastation, soaked in the ashes of a world he had created, judged, and condemned.
He spoke only once, as the weight of it all fell silent:
"I'm sorry."
And then he severed his emotions.
His memory.
His godhood.
Everything that could remind him of what he had done — he cast into the void.
Now, standing once again on this cursed soil, Aeon dropped to his knees.
The memories did not come gently.
They returned like blades.
He pressed his palm to the ground.
And it recoiled.
This world remembered him. Not as a savior. Not even as a god.
As the flame that burned it to ruin.
He rose slowly. Not in power. But in grief.
"I made this," he whispered.
The sky above moaned as if echoing the dead.
A red eclipse broke through the clouds — casting its light across a desolate horizon.
The world of Berserk had awoken.
And it had not forgotten its creator.