## CHAPTER 94: _"The Silence After Gods"_
A week passed.
Not the kind of week one counts by sunrises or moons. This was a week measured by the breathless weight of what didn't happen. No battles. No new prophecies. No signs from the skies. The people called it "The Quiet Week."
The earth, once fractured by the Seraph's tears, had stilled. Flowers bloomed in deserts. Ice melted in forbidden places. Rivers turned golden for three days straight.
But Arien? He didn't bloom. He didn't melt. He didn't flow.
He wandered.
Alone.
Lysia had stayed in the Capitol. Something about her blood reacting with the soil—they said it could heal land. She was needed.
And Arien was not.
He walked to the edge of Elira, where the map grew uncertain. There were forests no one remembered planting. Towers that floated in the sky but never cast shadows. A library made of bones that sang when it rained.
There, he found a door.
Just a door.
Freestanding, in the middle of nowhere.
Written upon it in blood were the words:
**"DO NOT OPEN IF YOU HAVE KNOWN LOVE."**
He hesitated. But only for a breath.
He opened it.
—
Inside was a room where time sat weeping. Clocks melted into their own hands. Mirrors showed versions of himself that never lived. In one, he saw a version of Arien who never met Lysia. That Arien wore a crown. That Arien smiled.
He broke the mirror.
From the shards, a voice echoed:
"You are not the cursed one. You are the curse."
—
Meanwhile, in the Capitol, Lysia began to forget things.
At first, small things. Her favorite color. The smell of her mother's hair.
Then bigger things. Her father's name. The reason she once feared fire.
Then, Arien.
She stared at his name in her journal and wept.
"What is this word?" she asked.
The curse hadn't ended.
It had evolved.
—
The gods—if they ever existed—remained silent.
The people made altars. Burned offerings. Sacrificed memories.
Nothing.
And then, a crack in the Capitol's sky.
A letter fell through.
In Arien's handwriting.
**"Do not forget me."**
—
Chapter 94 ends in a frozen moment:
Lysia racing to the forest edge. Her heart calling a name her mind forgot.
Arien stepping through the door again… this time, into her.
Their eyes meet.
But do they recognize?
The curse watches.
And smiles.