The sky bled.
Not in metaphor, but in truth.
It tore open like skin, spilling crimson across the black void beyond the clouds.
Aeon stood at the threshold of a dying dimension, the earth beneath him cracked and groaning. The very fabric of reality strained like an overdrawn breath.
He did not understand how he had arrived here so suddenly — one moment walking ash-laden ruins, the next, pulled by a force deeper than memory, darker than shadow. It wasn't a gate this time. It was a wound. And from within it spilled screams.
They echoed across the barren plain, distant and yet soul-deep — cries of betrayal, of grief, of final moments ripped from the hearts of those who did not understand why they were chosen.
Aeon stepped forward. The world around him was wrong. Dimensional space bent like liquid glass. Time skipped, rewound, repeated. And before him, just beyond the ridge of fractured ground, a terrible ritual had begun.
They hung in the air like broken marionettes — the branded soldiers of the Band of the Hawk. Their bodies writhed, suspended mid-air in a grotesque parody of resurrection. Each brand glowed bright red, bleeding endlessly. Aeon could feel the pull of those brands — not just calling to the Apostles, but to something deeper. Something ancient. Something cosmic.
He descended slowly into the outer edge of the Eclipse.
He wasn't sure whether the world recognized him.
But it did not reject him.
Which meant it still feared him.
The God Hand emerged from the dark: massive, ethereal, watching. Their presence cracked the rules of form — they did not walk, or stand, or speak. They existed. Aeon watched them move around Griffith, who knelt half-broken in the center of the sacrificial circle.
And Aeon remembered.
He had stood in places like this.
He had heard the cries of those offered in blood and silence.
He had done nothing.
The woman — Casca — screamed. Guts struggled, his eyes wide with a pain Aeon knew too well. The Apostles gathered, beasts and monsters of desire and sacrifice, snarling with hunger. They did not know Aeon stood at the edge of their feast.
He was no longer known to them.
Not by face.
Only by story.
A whisper crawled through the bleeding air.
"He was fire.
He came when the gods fled.
He burned the world to silence.
And then he vanished."
It was a memory, spoken by no mouth, carried in the bones of the world.
"They called him many names.
The Flame. The Judged. The Scourge.
But never again… did they call him God."
Aeon trembled.
He felt it now — the same ache in his chest as when he saw the little girl in the dream. Only this time, it did not soothe.
It burned.
He had created a world once, meant to learn pain.
Instead, he had become its mirror.
And now, he stood before the God Hand — watching Griffith shed his name, his body, his past. Aeon saw the pain in his choice, twisted by ambition. The sacrifice. The desire for control. And he knew this transformation was not so far from his own.
He saw his past reflected in the monster Griffith was becoming.
And the Shadow… was watching too.
He did not stop the ritual.
But the world had seen him again.
Somewhere beyond the veil, a branded child wept and whispered his name without knowing why.
And deep in the broken core of this world, the Apostles remembered.
The Flame God had returned.