Hela laughs softly.
Not the sharp laugh she saves for screaming gods.
Not the indulgent one she gives irony when it behaves.
This laugh is older.
Dry.
Fond in the way only graveyards can be.
"Ah," she purrs, reclining as if a throne could ever make her comfortable. Her fingers tap bone against bone—patient, metronomic. "There it is. The part you all pretend you don't crave."
The lanterns above the Hellbound's stands dim until they look like bruises in the dark.
Silence gathers—heavy, attentive, the way a grave listens for footsteps.
Hela tilts her head, as if a memory is whispering to her from inside the marrow of the arena.
"You saw the Door," she says softly. "You watched the afterlife enter a slaughter pit, watched it flinch, watched it get scarred. And you thought—oh, you thought—this was the first time the universe had been forced to remember what it tried to bury."
She leans forward.
Violet light spills from behind her mask like spilled wine.
"It wasn't."
A corpse in the front row nods as if it understands. Its jaw unhinges halfway through and clicks back into place.
Hela's voice turns intimate.
"Before the Requiem performed his little requiem," she murmurs, "before Hydeius's blade learned rot, before Cree's fire learned what forgiveness costs—there was another door."
A pause.
"And it was never meant to exist."
Hydeius stands in the bone-sand and refuses to fall.
His souls keep him upright.
Billions of hands, billions of whispers, holding him together like a cathedral held up by prayer. His sword is still in his grip, and the grip feels like betrayal—metal wrong in the palm, names wrong in the grooves, Dark Matter still clinging to the edge like a hunger that learned language.
He feels the newest flicker like a bruise under his ribs.
Valtherion.
Not dimmed.
Not dark.
Just… shivering.
Hydeius does not let his face change.
He has learned to be an ending without showing fear.
But inside him, a thought repeats with the stubbornness of a vow:
Not him.
Across the arena, Cree still stands too—somehow.
Fire leaks from their ribs in slow, ragged pulses. Their macuahuitl hums with a new kind of memory now, not just slaughter, not just sin—release. Their flames should be bright.
They are not.
They are a guttering thing pretending to be a sun.
And Cree thinks—absurdly, fiercely—of the child who thanked them for hurting.
It should not be possible for a thank-you to hurt worse than a spear.
But it did.
Cree's fingers tighten around the weapon's haft.
Their mind keeps trying to return to the Door's scar—hairline-black, like a burned page.
Like proof.
Like a warning.
We did this, Cree thinks, and the thought comes with no pride at all. We opened something that shouldn't open here.
Hydeius glances once toward Cree.
The glance is small.
It is everything.
He does not speak aloud, because he cannot afford to give the arena a sound to steal.
But his thought reaches anyway—through soul and bond and years of shared violence:
Stay standing.
Cree's answer is a weak flare of fire—defiant, stubborn.
I am.
The Hellbound creaks.
It does not like what happened.
Bone ribs shift overhead, the arena's grown foundations pulsing like irritated muscle. Somewhere deep under the sand, something vast adjusts its weight as if preparing to swallow the whole place just to stop the memory from spreading.
The Door is gone now.
But the Hellbound remembers.
It remembers the afterlife touching bone.
And worse—it remembers fear.
Hela watches all of it like a cat watching a glass edge.
"Oh, yes," she murmurs. "You're all still trembling from what you saw."
Her fingers resume their steady tapping.
Bone on bone.
"And you think the story of Cree and Hydeius begins with the Hellbound."
Her laugh is quiet.
"Sweet mortals. Sweet Ascendants."
She spreads her hands like she's unveiling a painting.
"No," she says. "It begins earlier. It begins when the universe was young enough to be stupid."
The lanterns dim further—light thinning into something sickly and reluctant.
Even the dead seem to lean closer.
Hela's voice softens into something like a lullaby spoken through teeth.
"When the first universe came to be," she says, "there was only darkness. Not the poetic kind you dramatize. Not a moody shadow draped over stars."
She tilts her head.
"Real darkness. Unshaped. Unnamed. Endless."
Her fingers stop tapping.
"As it always does," she continues, "something arrived to decide the darkness was unacceptable."
A pause.
"Hex."
Another pause, longer.
"And Hrolyn."
The dead in the stands shift.
Hela smiles behind her mask as if she can taste the attention.
"They were not kings then," she says. "Not rulers. Not tyrants with thrones and titles."
Her voice turns amused.
"They were… builders. Founders. The kind of beings who look at emptiness and call it a problem."
Hex brought light.
Hrolyn brought law.
And between them—
Chaos, too.
Because even creation needs friction to become real.
"And behind them," Hela murmurs, "came the first Ascendants."
She lifts a finger.
"The Primarch Ten."
Not kings.
Not warriors.
Anchors.
She savors the word.
"Anchors," Hela repeats. "Meant to keep reality from tearing at its seams."
Cree remembers this part like a dream they once woke from crying.
Not because it was sad.
Because it was… too large.
Too bright.
Too early.
In the beginning, Cree had been smaller—still dangerous, still divine, but with an innocence their later selves would find embarrassing.
They remember the first time they saw Hydeius.
He did not look like a lover.
He looked like a storm that had learned to stand still.
He was so tall even then—massive, silent, the kind of presence that turned noise into apology. When he moved, reality seemed to hold its breath to avoid being brushed.
And Cree—Cree had laughed.
Because Cree always laughed at what frightened everyone else.
Hydeius had looked down at them, expression unreadable.
And Cree had leaned forward and said something insolent, something teasing, something that should've gotten them erased.
Hydeius did not erase them.
He simply stared as if trying to decide what kind of ending they were.
Cree's fire warmed at the memory, even now, even in the Hellbound's bone-sand.
Hydeius, across the arena, tries not to remember it.
He is tired.
He is corrupted.
He is holding himself together with the dead.
And yet the memory arrives anyway, uninvited:
A smaller Cree, grinning like a sunrise with teeth.
Hydeius's chest tightens.
Not with pain.
With something older.
Beloved, something in him says—quietly, stubbornly—like the word is a name he never carved but always carried.
He hates that Ecayrous and the Hellbound and gods like them can turn love into weakness.
He hates that he still has it anyway.
Hela's voice slides back into the past.
"Jrin shaped Order," Hela says—
and the bone-sand below Hydeius tightens, grains clicking into neat spirals as if the arena briefly remembers rules.
"Rzius lit the first mortal mind with flame—Knowledge," she breathes—
and Cree's guttering fire flares too bright for a heartbeat, blue at the edges, like a thought trying to be born.
"Kelene made Matter breathe,"—
the air thickens; the rainforest stink of blood and sap becomes suddenly metallic, like new-forged ore.
"Oreian mapped the dance of planets,"—
the lanterns swing without wind, tracing a slow orbit, shadows rotating like they've been assigned trajectories.
"Xriana wove Fate,"—
Hydeius's sword hums; a single etched name on the blade flickers out of rhythm, like it's being tugged by a string it can't see.
"Tysesh wrapped secrets,"—
the skull-ring overhead creaks and goes quiet, as if even the dead don't want to overhear.
"Rlaucus looked into the Abyss and taught it fear,"—
and somewhere deep under the stands, something enormous shifts once, irritated at being remembered.
"Najen named Death,"—
a corpse in the front row exhales dust it doesn't have lungs for.
"Cree returned them,"—
Cree's macuahuitl vibrates like it recognizes the word returned as a threat.
"And Hydeius… gave mortals their first souls,"—
and the billion souls behind him pull tighter, a choir swallowing its own sob.
Hela leans back.
"As I said," she murmurs. "Anchors."
Then her voice warms, just slightly.
"And among all of those cosmic pillars, two of them were… an odd match."
Hydeius hears that and almost—almost—scoffs.
Odd.
That's one word for it.
Cree is chaos in a smile.
Hydeius is silence with a blade.
Cree finds joy in beginnings, in the reckless act of making something live again.
Hydeius finds comfort in endings, in the clean certainty of release.
They should not fit.
They do.
Because Cree does not fear Hydeius's weight.
They like it.
They like the way he fills a room like a storm held back by will.
They like the way his attention feels like being chosen.
Hydeius does not understand how Cree can tease him even in war.
He does not understand how Cree can look at a universe and laugh.
But he understands this:
When Cree is near, something in him unclenches.
Not the blade-hand.
Not the soul-chorus.
The other thing.
The thing he would never confess in front of gods.
The thing that makes him more dangerous than his sword.
Hela speaks as if reading the thought right off Hydeius's ribs.
"At first glance," she says, amused, "Hydeius and Cree seem incompatible."
She gestures lazily, and the air itself seems to remember their silhouettes.
"Hydeius—silent, brooding, a force that commands souls with quiet, unrelenting gravity. Towering. Relentless."
Her voice softens, unexpectedly.
"And Cree—smaller, radiant, playful, stubborn. Always dancing on the edge of life and death like the edge was made for them."
Hela's laughter is quiet, almost affectionate.
"And Hydeius," she adds, "never smiled for anyone."
A pause.
"Except Cree."
The dead in the stands lean in, hungry for the kind of love that hurts to witness.
Hela's fingers drum again.
"And of course," she says lightly, "that is why the universe targeted them."
Cree's jaw tightens.
Because that part is true.
It wasn't the love itself that made them a target.
It was what the love made possible.
Hydeius had always known what souls were supposed to do.
End.
Move.
Pass on.
The cycle.
Order.
And Cree—
Cree had always been more.
Not just rebirth.
Reincarnation.
A hand that could reach into the moment after ending and say:
Not yet.
Hydeius did not understand the full extent of Cree's power until the day the first impossible thing happened.
The day a soul that should have been gone—
wasn't.
The day Cree, bleeding light and laughing through pain, preserved what should have dissolved.
Rzius.
The original Ascendant of Knowledge—vanished, erased from most stories, dead in ways that should have been final.
Cree kept him anyway.
Because Hex asked.
Because Cree could.
Because Cree was incapable of letting a thing be lost if they believed it could be saved.
Hydeius remembers the moment the realization hit him.
Not as thought.
As collapse.
The universe in his chest rearranging itself around a fact he didn't know existed:
Cree can rewrite the laws I live by.
And if Cree could do that—
then every force that fed on endings would want them destroyed.
Every god that relied on permanence would fear them.
Every tyrant that thrived on loss would target them.
Cree felt it too, eventually.
Not as fear.
As the slow pressure of eyes turning.
Of attention becoming a weapon.
Hela's voice turns sharp.
"It made them a target," she says simply, as if stating weather.
"And so, the Djallra came."
The word hits the stands like cold water.
Hela smiles like she enjoys the flinch.
"The dark opposites," she murmurs, "the rotted mirrors of Ascendants."
She tilts her head.
"Sent by Eon, of course."
Her tone makes Eon's name sound like a stain.
"They saw Cree," Hela continues, "and they saw a threat. Someone who could undo devastation. Someone who could make even their destruction… temporary."
A pause.
"To control the cycle of life and death," she says quietly, "is to hold dominion over gods."
Hela leans forward, voice intimate again.
"And Hydeius never let them touch Cree."
Hydeius's grip tightens around his sword in the present, as if his body remembers the vow even now.
Never.
He has broken many things in his existence.
Not that.
He remembers the first assault.
Not the fight itself.
The feeling.
The Djallra arriving like rot given intelligence.
They didn't come to kill Hydeius.
They came to take Cree.
To chain them to a purpose that wasn't theirs.
To turn reincarnation into a tool.
Hydeius remembers stepping in front of Cree.
He remembers Cree, bright-eyed even then, trying to grin like they weren't afraid.
Hydeius remembers saying nothing.
He didn't need to.
His sword answered.
And afterward, when the Djallra's pieces stopped moving and Cree's fire stopped shaking—
Hydeius realized something with the calm horror of a god doing arithmetic:
This will never stop.
Not while Cree existed openly.
Not while other Ascendants whispered.
Not while Eon's shadow lingered over the first universe like a prophecy.
He could fight forever.
He could win forever.
And it would still not be enough.
So he did something else.
Something worse.
Something merciful.
Something monstrous.
He made a choice that would let the cosmos hate him if it meant Cree could live.
He killed them.
Or at least—
he made the universe believe he did.
Hela's smile is all teeth behind her mask.
"Ah," she murmurs. "Yes. This is the part everyone loves to judge."
Her fingers tap once.
"He killed them," Hela says.
Then, softer:
"Or at least, that's what the universe was meant to believe."
The lanterns gutter like they're afraid of the story.
"With the help of Rlaucus," Hela continues, "and Najen—the Ascendant of Death—Hydeius orchestrated Cree's death so convincingly that even gods believed it."
She laughs once.
"And Hydeius had to become the villain."
Hela's voice turns amused, almost approving.
"He made it look like he had murdered the Primarch of Reincarnation. Let their divine essence vanish into the Abyss Realm—into Rlaucus's domain—where Eon and his Djallra could not enter."
A pause.
"And Hydeius let the Ascendants hate him."
Her tone turns soft, unexpectedly.
"He let the universe curse his name."
He let them hate him so thoroughly that his own children learned to fear his name before they ever learned his face.
Hela's fingers stop tapping.
"And he did it," she says, "with Cree held tightly in his arms."
Cree remembers the moment the "death" happened.
They remember the stage of it.
The lie.
The precision.
They remember Najen's face—steady, solemn, eyes like a gate that would open either direction if you asked correctly.
They remember Rlaucus's silence—Abyssal, deep, a quiet that could swallow screams.
They remember Hydeius's hands, shaking once.
Only once.
And Cree remembers understanding, in that instant, that Hydeius wasn't doing this to be cruel.
He was doing it because he was desperate.
Hydeius didn't speak much then either.
But he looked at Cree like he was carving them into permanence.
Like he was trying to memorize every detail in case the lie became true.
Cree wanted to laugh.
Wanted to tease him.
Wanted to say something bright and stupid like:
You'll miss me.
Instead, they reached up and touched his face.
And their thought, through bond and blood and fire, was simple:
I trust you.
Hydeius's answer—silent, fierce—was:
Live.
And the universe watched Hydeius "kill" them.
Watched Cree "die."
Watched their essence disappear into the Abyss.
And the universe believed it because Hydeius made the lie perfect.
That was his gift.
Endings.
Even fake ones.
Hela's voice drips with something like delight.
"They built a life together in the Abyss—one no one could touch."
Hela smiles faintly.
"Yes," she says softly. "They were very happy."
The way she said happy sounded like an eulogy rehearsed early.
A pause.
She lets the word hang like a bell.
"Not one," Hela adds, amused. "Not two."
She smiles behind her mask.
"Nine."
A ripple of surprise passes through the stands—some scandalized, some delighted, all hungry.
Hela waves it off.
"Some were reborn gods," she says. "Some were entirely new forces. Some would one day change the fate of the cosmos itself."
Her voice softens.
"But they were all loved."
Hela taps her fingers once.
"And Hydeius—gruff, terrifying Hydeius—was the softest father imaginable."
Her tone turns lightly mocking.
"He held each child like they were his entire world."
Hydeius doesn't like remembering that part in front of an audience—even a dead one.
But he can't stop it.
He remembers small hands.
Small fires.
Small questions.
He remembers Cree turning the Abyss—Rlaucus's endless dark—into something warm.
Not by changing the Abyss itself.
By refusing to let the dark be empty.
He remembers Cree painting constellations on the Abyss ceiling with fingertip flame—bright points that didn't exist anywhere else in creation, because they were made only for their children to fall asleep under.
The Abyss always smelled faintly of ozone and cooled stone.
But when Cree laughed, it smelled like rain.
Hydeius never understood how.
One of the children—half-asleep, ember-light leaking from their hair—had whispered once,
"Papa… are you the bad guy outside?"
Hydeius had stared into the dark for a long time before answering,
"Only if it keeps you safe."
Cree danced barefoot sometimes, laughing at nothing, making their children laugh too.
Hydeius watched like he didn't deserve it.
Like he was waiting for the universe to notice and take it away.
He remembers holding one of their children—tiny, bright, eyes too old for a newborn because divinity cheats like that.
The child looked up at him and didn't flinch.
Hydeius had never had that before.
A soul that didn't fear him.
He remembers looking at Cree then—Cree watching him with that knowing smile, the one that said:
You're not a monster here.
Hydeius didn't smile often.
But he did then.
Small.
Private.
Only for them.
Hela's voice turns sharp again.
"And of course," she says, "fate doesn't allow joy to remain unobserved."
She tilts her head.
"An unknown being found them."
It did not cast a shadow in the Abyss.
Not because there was no light.
Because the Abyss refused to acknowledge it.
Rlaucus could not name it.
And Rlaucus names everything that enters his dark.
This time, she doesn't let it sit as a vague sentence. Her tone shifts—almost respectful, almost irritated.
"It didn't arrive like a god," Hela murmurs. "No trumpet. No court. No spectacle."
A pause.
"It arrived like a rule changing."
It did not look at Hydeius first.
It looked at the constellations Cree had painted on the Abyss ceiling—
and one star moved.
Not fell. Not flickered.
Moved.
Hydeius felt the Abyss tighten around that motion like a throat swallowing.
Cree stopped smiling.
Because in that instant they understood:
the universe had found the address.
Somewhere deep in the Hellbound, the bone-sand gives a tiny, involuntary crack—as if the arena itself remembers what it feels like when the universe edits its own margins.
And on the arena floor, Hydeius's sword twitches in his grip—just once.
Not from his hand.
From the names.
One etched syllable flares pale-gold, then gutters, like it recognized something it was never meant to meet.
"They did not bring war," Hela says. "They brought understanding."
A small laugh, humorless.
"They stood at the edge of Rlaucus's dark and the Abyss didn't swallow them. They spoke, and the silence listened back."
Hela's fingers tap once more.
"And Hydeius knew they were done hiding."
Cree's flames flicker in the present.
Hydeius's sword hummed—
and for one heartbeat, it hummed a name that wasn't etched anywhere on the blade.
Not spoken. Not remembered.
Recognized.