The ruins of Mount Scripture breathed its last. Ash fell like gray snow upon the corpse of the Arcanthus Scriptorium, that once proud fortress of celestial scholarship now reduced to skeletal towers and melted archives. The air hung thick with the stench of burnt vellum and ozone the aftermath of divine retribution.
Kaelion Arcanthus walked through the devastation with measured steps, his white scholar's robes pristine amidst the carnage. The wind tugged at his silver-white hair, the hallmark of his bloodline, as he paused beside the shattered remains of the Celestial Anvil. Its fractured surface still glowed faintly with the dying embers of a thousand crafted laws.
"How predictable," he murmured, running a finger along the anvil's edge. His voice was calm, but the Godforge Core embedded in his chest pulsed darkly a black sun feeding on his fury.
He knelt, brushing aside debris to reveal a half-melted quill. The Scribe's Lament, they had called it the tool with which his ancestors had penned reality itself into being. Now it was little more than twisted metal.
"They broke the tools," Kaelion observed, "but forgot the hand that wielded them."
His violet eyes unnaturally bright, like fractured amethysts catching torchlight scanned the ruins. Every scorched manuscript, every collapsed pillar told a story. The Pantheon had not just killed his clan. They had tried to erase their very legacy. And they had failed. Because Kaelion remembered.
The tome at his belt shuddered. Kaelion unhooked the Hollow Codex, its cover cold against his fingertips. Bound in the skin of a dead god and inlaid with veins of celestial silver, it was the last relic of his house. The only one the Pantheon had not found. He flipped it open. The pages were blank, but not empty they seemed to breathe, pulsing with a hunger that matched his own.
"Show me," he commanded.
The Codex convulsed. Ink bubbled from its pages, black as void and thick as blood, forming words that burned themselves into his retinas,
"Edict 7,419: 'No Arcanthus shall lift hand against heaven.'"
A laugh tore from Kaelion's throat sharp and humorless.
"Of course," he said, tracing the words with a fingertip. The ink clung to his skin like tar. "They wrote their murder into the fabric of existence. How very... thorough of them."
His smile faded as the implications settled. This was no mere decree. It was a cosmic law, woven into the foundation of reality itself. To violate it would be to defy the universe's architecture. Kaelion's fingers tightened around the Codex.
"Let's test that."
He pressed his palm to a blank page. The skin split willingly beneath an unseen blade, his blood welling thick and dark. The Codex drank greedily. With his free hand, Kaelion took up the ruined Scribe's Lament, its broken tip still sharp enough to carve. Blood and ink mixed as he wrote,
"In this place, silence has weight."
The moment the final stroke was completed, the air shattered. The distant echoes of dying scholars froze mid-scream, crystallizing into jagged shards that hovered like cursed diamonds. The ever-present crackle of godfire stilled, its flames unraveling into visible threads of golden destruction. His own heartbeat manifested a pulsing ruby orb suspended above his sternum.
Kaelion exhaled. His voice was gone, stolen by the law he had just birthed. A fair trade.
He reached out, plucking one of the frozen screams from the air. The sound-shard glistened in his palm, its edges sharp enough to draw blood. Interesting. A footstep crunched behind him. Kaelion turned, already knowing who he would see. Veylis, the Eternal Huntress, emerged from the smoke like a phantom.
Seven feet of sculpted divinity, her bronze skin gleamed beneath the golden tattoos of a thousand perfect kills. The bow in her hands was no ordinary weapon it was carved from a "never-miss" decree, its string humming with inevitability.
Her silver eyes found Kaelion immediately.
"Little scribe," she purred, nocking an arrow. "Did you truly think we wouldn't notice?"
Kaelion said nothing. Could say nothing. But he smiled.
Veylis loosed her arrow. Kaelion moved. He had studied her. Memorized her patterns. Gods were creatures of habit, and Veylis always boasted before killing.
As the arrow flew, he wrote a second law in the air with his blood-tipped quill,
"In this place, all arrows are memories."
The projectile dissolved mid-flight, reforming as Veylis's own recollection of her first kill a mortal child she'd skewered for sport centuries past. The memory-phantom wrapped around her throat like a noose. For the first time, uncertainty flickered across the goddess's face.
Kaelion lunged. The Oblivion Sceptre flashed. Veylis's eyes widened as the black crystal pierced her left pupil.
"Impossible "
The Sceptre erased. Her divine flesh unraveled like rotten tapestry, threads of golden essence screaming as they dissolved into nothingness.
As she faded, Kaelion tore the "never-miss" law from her dying spirit, imprinting it into the Codex. The page darkened, whispering a warning,
"Every law you steal chains you closer to their throne."
His voice returned in a gasp.
"Good," Kaelion rasped, watching the last light leave Veylis's eyes. "Let them feel the noose tighten."
The Codex pulsed with new power. The first of seven hundred and nineteen gods had fallen. Kaelion turned his face to the heavens, where the remaining Pantheon watched in silent fury.
"This," he promised the uncaring stars, "was the prologue."