The scout entered the council chamber, his armor battered, his face drawn with fatigue. He knelt before Lord Karl, who stood tall, unmoved.

  “Report,” Karl said, his voice sharp.

  The scout spoke with the gravity of someone who had seen too much.

  “Lord Karl… we saw what we should not have. On the eastern front, where the lines had already collapsed—something, someone—changed the course of the battle.

  Draven fought. But not as a man. Not as a hero. His presence…” The scout faltered, then pushed on. “His presence was otherworldly. The sky split open. Not with sunlight. Not with the radiance of Eos. It was something twisted. A violent surge—not of creation, but of unmaking.”

  Karl’s brow furrowed. His posture stiffened. “What do you mean, unmaking?”

  “Divine Eos,” the scout said, and the words seemed to weigh down the room. “It’s still within him. But it’s changed. Twisted. Like something once bound, now breaking free. The Nyx forces—those that hadn’t already fled—scattered at the sight of him. And as the sky turned dark with shadows, his power surged. But it wasn’t whole. It was cracked.”

  Murmurs stirred across the chamber. Council members exchanged wary glances.

  A noble whispered, “Eos has abandoned him.”

  “No, my lord,” the scout replied quickly. “The power remains—but it flickers. One moment, it’s radiant. The next, it folds into shadow. It’s as if it’s fighting itself. We saw it in the field—light bending unnaturally, eruptions of raw energy. But none of it was deliberate. He wasn’t in control.”

  The scout looked down briefly, then met Karl’s eyes. “We didn’t find him when it ended. Only the aftermath. The fields were scorched. Nyx corpses—turned to stone, or gone. Some... erased entirely. But Draven had vanished.”

  Karl’s lip curled. But not in surprise.

  “He’s the weapon now,” Karl said. “A blade without a master.”

  The scout hesitated. “Some survivors spoke of him. Said he didn’t look human anymore. Not fully. Not anymore. And what he was… wasn’t Eos.”

  The silence that followed felt like the world holding its breath.

  In the chamber’s shadows, Selene Desmara, Minister of Internal Affairs, watched. Her presence was a whisper—just the air shifting wrong. But her eyes gleamed, sharp and distant.

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  She smiled. It was almost kind. But not quite.

  “My boy,” she murmured, so quietly none could hear. “When will you return to me?”

  Ash fell like snow, soft and gray across the battlefield’s ruins. The light was wrong—neither day nor night, but something split between.

  Draven stood in silence, breathing heavy. His blade trembled in his grip. Steam rose from scorched armor.

  From the dying mist, Mer stepped forth.

  Unburned. Unbroken.

  His cloak fluttered softly. His eyes—silver, old, and exhausted—watched Draven not with malice, but with something close to pity.

  “You bleed oddly now,” Mer said, calm and toneless. “It smells like a memory. A memory trying not to die.”

  Draven’s gaze narrowed as he began to circle. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I was,” Mer said, tilting his head. “Then the Great Nyx whispered. And here I am.”

  “You’re just another puppet,” Draven spat. “Wearing borrowed skin.”

  Mer chuckled. “No. I’m not borrowed. I am reclaimed.”

  He drew his weapon—a blade of voidglass, gleaming with violet and black shimmer.

  “I was once human,” Mer said. “I remember warmth. A name. Family. Then Nyx came. My world vanished. I fought her. I hated her. When I died, she offered me a choice: be forgotten... or become her echo.”

  He paused.

  “It is a strange mercy, to be chosen after death.”

  Draven clenched his fists. “You chose annihilation.”

  “I chose continuance,” Mer said. “That’s what Nyx offers. Not peace. Not life. Just the freedom to keep being, long after the world says you shouldn’t.”

  Their blades met.

  Fractured light crashed against smears of abyssal flame. Draven’s strikes were furious, but unstable. Sparks screamed across the battlefield. The ground cracked and buckled.

  Mer flowed like shadow. A memory refusing to die. His movements were deliberate. Measured. Unshaken.

  “You’re not stable,” he said mid-duel. “The Divine Eos in you—it’s splintered. You feel it, don’t you? The hum in your bones. The burn, off rhythm.”

  Draven didn’t answer. He lunged, driving Mer back.

  Mer didn’t resist. He only smiled faintly.

  “Eos never wanted you. She used you. Now that you’ve seen the other side… you’ll come to us.”

  “I’d rather be unmade.”

  Mer laughed. A broken sound.

  “That’s how it starts.”

  With a sudden flash, Draven drove his blade through Mer’s chest.

  Mer’s eyes widened. But not in pain—only recognition.

  “Ah,” he whispered. “The first death.”

  Draven staggered back as Mer collapsed.

  But the body never hit the ground.

  Black tendrils—like ink in water—rose from the earth. They wrapped around Mer gently. Cocooning. Hiding.

  Then they vanished.

  So did he.

  A whisper echoed from nowhere and everywhere:

  “We’ll be waiting, Draven. Not all of us stay dead.”

  The sky pulsed. Not with light—but with a heartbeat behind a veil of twilight.

  Nyxara was a city that dreamed instead of lived. Its towers spiraled where gravity failed. Its streets shimmered with reflections of things that were never real. No day. No stars. Only Nyxlight—endless, subtle, wrong in the way music sounds underwater.

  At the city’s heart stood a palace. No doors. No guards.

  It let you in if it remembered you.

  Inside: seven thrones. Empty. Then full. Then empty again.

  Shadows flickered where no flame burned.

  The space between dimensions twisted. A rift opened.

  Mer stepped through, still marked by the Eastern front. Dried blood. Eos ash.

  He walked to the center and bowed—not in reverence, but recognition.

  A voice, not sound, filled the air:

  “You touched him.”

  “I did.”

  “You saw the fracture.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is he now?”

  “Unstable,” Mer said softly. “Burning. His Divine Eos is cracked in half. What holds him together isn’t Eos anymore. It’s something else.”

  “Does he know?”

  “He suspects.”

  A silence followed. The kind that crushed stars.

  Then another presence stirred.

  “And you... what did you feel?”

  Mer looked up slowly.

  “Pity.”

  A ripple passed through the thrones—like breath held. Then stillness.

  “You are not finished,” the voice behind all others said.

  “I never am.”

  As Mer turned, stepping once more into the rift, a final question followed:

  “What will he become?”

  Mer did not turn.

  But his answer lingered like ash.

  “Ours.”