Hela does not laugh.
Not the way she laughs when gods posture. Not the way she laughs when tyrants bleed and call it destiny.
This time her voice is low, almost respectful—like she is standing in a graveyard and the dead might be listening.
"While gods tore each other apart in the Hellbound," she says, fingers resting against the bone arm of her throne, "you all watched the loud kind of suffering."
Her lanterns dim until the stands look like bruises stacked in tiers. The skull-ring overhead seems to hold its breath.
"You think war is the worst scream," Hela continues softly. "You think the universe only breaks when it does so publicly."
A pause.
"There are screams that do not echo in arenas."
Her gaze tilts downward, as if she can see through worlds.
"This one belongs to Ayla."
And then the Hellbound, with all its noise and spectacle and fractured heavens, becomes very far away.
Because Ayla is not in the arena.
Ayla is inside a room that was designed for silence.
This wasn't a place on any map.
This wasn't a dream. It was a mind taught to bleed.
The first thing Ayla sees is the eyes.
They are not attached to faces.
They are embedded.
In the walls, in the ceiling, in the floorboards—if those warped planks can be called boards. Round, wet, unblinking orbs set into flesh-colored surfaces that pulse faintly like organs pretending to be architecture.
Thousands of them.
Maybe more.
Some are human.
Some are not.
Some have vertical pupils.
Some have too many.
They watch without blinking.
They watch like hunger pretending it is curiosity.
Ayla is nailed to the center of the room.
Not metaphorically.
Iron spikes—dark, pitted, ancient—pin her wrists wide, her ankles splayed, her ribs lifted slightly as if the room itself wants her chest open for easier access. The metal is cold enough to burn. Every breath drags against it.
Her skin is already missing in places.
Not torn.
Removed.
Clean patches where the muscle underneath glistens, trembling under the room's stale light. Her body tries to heal, tries to knit, tries to remember what wholeness feels like—
—and the room denies it.
It denies repair the way a law denies appeal.
Ayla makes a sound.
It tries to become a scream.
It fails.
Her throat is raw from hours—days—she cannot tell. Time in this place doesn't move forward. It circles. It chews.
Ayla tried to count breaths like prayers.
She lost count at a hundred, and started again anyway.
Something shifts in the shadows near the far wall.
A shape steps out.
It is not tall.
It is heavy.
A flesh-beast, shaped like a butcher's idea of an animal. A hunched torso plated in scar-tissue. Arms too long, jointed wrong. Hands ending in nails that are not nails.
Hooks.
Black crescents that shine wetly even when there is no light.
Its head is small compared to its body—too small, like the universe forgot to finish building it. One eye sits crooked in the center of its face, a single bulging orb that swivels and jitters like a camera that can't focus.
Its mouth is wide.
Not full of teeth.
Full of tools.
Rows of flat, grinding surfaces. Serrated ridges. A tongue like a strip of leather. It opens and the air tastes like copper and old bile.
In one hand it carries a saw.
Not modern.
Not clean.
A long-toothed, hand-cranked thing with dried blood deep in the grooves, as if it has been chewing through bodies for centuries and never once been washed.
The room's eyes brighten.
Not with light.
With attention.
The beast walks toward Ayla like ritual.
Like it has done this exact approach a thousand times and would happily do it a thousand more.
Ayla's vision swims.
She tries to turn her head away.
A spike in her shoulder tightens, dragging her back into position.
The room does not allow avoidance.
The beast stops at her side.
Its one eye dilates.
A low sound crawls from its throat—almost a purr.
Then it slides its hooked nails into her abdomen.
Not stabbing.
Not slashing.
Peeling.
Ayla's body jerks. A sound escapes her that isn't a scream—it's the sound of air being ripped through a throat that doesn't want to breathe anymore.
The beast opens her like a careful surgeon.
The eyes in the walls do not blink.
They lean, somehow. The room feels closer.
The beast's hooks sink deeper and lift.
Something warm spills.
Ayla sees her own blood and it looks wrong here—too bright, too alive. It steams against the cold air.
Her stomach convulses.
She vomits blood onto her chest, choking on it, coughing, gagging, trying to swallow and failing.
"No more," she whispers.
It comes out like sand.
The beast tilts its head, listening like it enjoys language.
Ayla shakes.
Her whole body trembles around the spikes.
"No more," she says again, louder—then breaks into a cough that sprays red.
The beast reaches in.
Not with urgency.
With delight.
It pulls something free.
An organ.
Her body recognizes the absence before her mind does.
Ayla's vision flashes white. Pain isn't a sensation anymore—it's a world.
The beast lowers its head and bites.
Not daintily.
Not quickly.
It chews.
Wet, steady, satisfied.
The room's eyes bloom wide, and Ayla realizes the purpose.
This is not torture as punishment.
This is torture as witness.
She is being displayed to things that cannot taste life unless it is extracted slowly.
Ayla sobs without meaning to. Her tears are hot. They burn her cheeks like shame.
The beast cranks the saw once.
The teeth sing.
Ayla's breath catches.
The saw is raised—not toward her throat, not her spine, but lower, angled like someone preparing to split wood.
The room hums.
Ayla's lips move.
Not a prayer for mercy.
Not a plea for death.
A name.
"Qaritas…"
It is quiet. It is small. It is all she has left that this room has not successfully eaten.
Her mind tries to hold onto it.
A boy.
Silver hair.
Purple eyes.
Void in his veins.
A child who carries a god like a wound and still tries to stand.
He needs me.
The thought is soft. It doesn't resist the room. It doesn't scream. It simply exists.
Qaritas needs me.
The saw lowers.
Ayla's eyes squeeze shut.
She does not beg for herself.
She begs for him.
Not aloud. Inside.
Please. Just enough time. Just one breath. Just one moment to reach him.
The saw teeth touch her.
And then—
A sound.
Not from her throat.
From the beast.
A short, surprised grunt.
Ayla's eyes snap open.
The flesh-beast's one eye bulges.
A wooden stick juts from the side of its skull.
Buried deep.
Clean.
Like someone had pushed it through soft fruit.
The beast sways.
The saw slips from its hand and clatters against the floor with a dull metallic scrape.
The room's eyes widen in unison.
For a heartbeat, they look… confused.
The beast takes one step backward.
Then collapses.
Face-first.
A wet impact.
The stick quivers once.
Blood pools outward, slow and dark.
The silence that follows is not relief.
It is the kind of silence that happens when predators realize another predator just entered the room.
Ayla's chest heaves. She cannot inhale properly. Pain still flames through her, but something else has arrived—something colder than suffering.
Footsteps.
Bare.
Soft.
They do not hurry.
They do not fear the watching eyes.
A figure steps into Ayla's view.
A woman.
Long black hair, loose, slightly damp as if she has walked through rain that doesn't exist here. A white dress hangs from her frame—simple, almost gentle—
—covered in blood.
Not splattered.
Soaked along the hem, streaked across the sleeves, smeared like she has held dying bodies against her chest and refused to let go.
Her face is calm.
Not kind.
Controlled.
One of her eyes is pink.
The other red.
Not makeup.
Not reflection.
Something born.
Something that looks like sunset caught in a wound.
She kneels beside Ayla as if kneeling is a choice she makes only when she wants to.
Her hand reaches up, touches one of the spikes through Ayla's wrist.
The metal trembles.
Then melts.
Not heated.
Not dissolved.
Simply… revoked.
The spike runs like liquid down the wall and evaporates before it reaches the floor.
Ayla's arm drops. She almost screams from the movement.
The woman catches her wrist gently. Supports it.
Ayla's throat works.
Her voice comes out as a rasp.
"…Zcain's daughter."
The woman's gaze flickers to her.
A fraction of a second.
No recognition yet.
Ayla swallows.
The room swims.
She forces the words through blood.
"…My granddaughter."
Xheavend's fingers paused. Her grip tightened once. "No…"—then the discipline returned
The sentence lands like a stone dropped into deep water.
Time stutters.
The watching eyes seem to blink all at once—like the room didn't expect bloodlines to exist inside its prison.
The woman's expression tightens, almost imperceptibly.
"Who—" she begins.
A male voice cuts through the room, sharp with exhaustion.
"Xhea."
Not angry.
Broken.
A sound scraped raw by fifty years of endurance.
The woman—Xheavend—doesn't turn. But her shoulders tense.
The voice continues from somewhere behind her, in the shadows where the watching eyes do not quite focus.
"We don't have time for this."
A breath.
A tremor, as if the speaker is holding himself together with nothing but rage and promise.
"After fifty years," the man says, "you promised me we'd be free."
The word free sounds like a joke someone tells at funerals.
"You promised you would end our bond," he whispers. "I can't—"
His voice cracks. A quiet humiliating fracture.
"I can't handle the pain anymore."
A long pause.
"Keep your promise."
Xheavend closes her eyes for half a heartbeat.
When she opens them again, the pink and red steadiness returns.
"Yes," she says quietly.
Not a concession.
A vow.
"I will free us from our marriage."
The room's eyes tighten their attention like a fist.
Xheavend leans closer to Ayla, voice dropping.
"But not like this," she adds. "Not by leaving another tortured soul behind."
She touches Ayla's cheek. Blood smears from her fingers—Ayla doesn't know whose blood it is, and in this room that question is a kind of terror.
"I swear it," Xheavend murmurs. "But I will not leave another soul in chains."
The male voice behind her exhales a sound that might have been a laugh in another life.
"Always," he whispers.
Always. Always. Always.
Xheavend reaches up and dissolves the remaining spikes.
Ayla drops. Her body should collapse into shock. Instead it clings to consciousness with stubborn brutality.
Xheavend catches her fully now, arms sliding beneath her shoulders, lifting her like she weighs nothing.
Ayla's vision blurs.
The eyes in the walls roll, following them.
Ayla grabs the front of Xheavend's blood-stained dress with shaking fingers.
"Don't—" Ayla breathes.
Her mouth fills with copper again.
Xheavend pauses.
Ayla forces the words out like tearing fabric.
"You are Zcain's daughter."
Xheavend's gaze sharpens.
"We need you."
Ayla's fingers tremble.
"Protect Qaritas."
The name makes the room twitch. Even here, it means something.
"I cannot return," Ayla whispers.
Her voice fades around the edges. Her mind is slipping out of the room and she doesn't know if she will come back into any room ever again.
Xheavend's head tilts.
"Who are you?" she asks.
Not suspicion.
Not disbelief.
A real question, like she has forgotten pieces of the universe and is trying to choose which ones to remember first.
Ayla's throat tightens.
Her eyes burn.
She says it anyway.
"I am your grandmother."
The words land.
Not gently.
Like lineage carving itself into stone.
Xheavend's expression shifts—something deep and old and dangerous moving behind her eyes.
The male voice behind them stirs again, softer now, almost defeated.
"Xhea…"
She does not answer him yet.
Her gaze stays on Ayla.
Ayla feels her own consciousness sag.
She fights it.
"Please," she whispers. "The Hellbound. The matches. They're—"
Her mouth shakes.
"Protect him," she says again, because it's the only thing that matters in this room.
Xheavend's fingers tighten lightly on Ayla's shoulder.
"I will," she says.
No drama.
No flourish.
Just certainty.
Then she speaks again, and the temperature of the room drops—not from cold, but from purpose.
"It is time to end what I began."
Ayla's eyes flutter.
Xheavend's voice turns even quieter.
"Eirisa dies."
No explanation.
No justification.
A name as sentence.
Ayla's breath catches.
She tries to say Kyrian's name, but her tongue won't work.
Xheavend doesn't need it spoken.
Her eyes soften for the briefest instant—grief, contained so tightly it looks like discipline.
Then she rises, still holding Ayla.
The watching eyes tremble.
Not afraid.
Alert.
Xheavend lifts one hand to the ceiling.
Not upward like a prayer.
Upward like a command.
And the room's false sky—if it can be called sky—splits into lines.
Not cracks.
Constellations.
Stars that do not belong to this realm slide into formation above her palm, as if the universe itself is being called to witness a vow.
Threads appear.
Black-gold.
Silver.
Violet.
They hang in the air like harp strings stretched between realities.
Xheavend's fingers close gently.
The threads snap.
Not broken.
Severed with intent.
A covenant invoked.
Ayla feels it in her bones—something ancient recognizing Xheavend's right to return.
The room recoils.
Its eyes tighten shut.
Xheavend speaks one sentence that is not for Ayla, not for Aarion, not even for the Hellbound.
It is for every living thing that still calls itself Ascendant.
"For as long as I am gone," she whispers, "aid them."
Her voice does not travel through air.
It travels through blood.
Through lineage.
Through vows that never died, only waited.
Ayla's vision floods with white.
Then black.
Then—
Hela's voice returns like a knife sliding back into its sheath.
"Meanwhile," she says.
Not playful.
Cold.
"Far away."
The Hellbound's lanterns dim further, as if they too can't bear to look.
Hela leans back, mask catching a thin sliver of violet light.
"In a universe that has been dead for fifty years…"
Her fingers tap bone once.
"…something felt her return."
The universe is ash.
Not metaphor.
Literal.
The sky is a gray smear, like smoke that forgot it once had fire. Stars are absent. Not hidden. Removed. The horizon is endless ruin—collapsed cities turned to powder, mountains broken into jagged bones, oceans dried into cracked salt beds.
In the center of it all stands a figure.
At first, it looks like a statue.
Then it moves.
And the sound of chains answers.
A woman.
Or what remains.
A skeleton wrapped in iron.
Chains coiled around her ribs, her arms, her neck—so many that her body seems more restraint than bone. Each link is carved with old symbols burned into the metal like curses welded into language.
A crown is fused to her skull.
Not placed.
Fused.
Burned on so deeply that the metal has become part of the bone, warped and melted into a jagged halo of ruin.
Her eye sockets are hollow—
—but not empty.
Dying stars flicker in them.
Small.
Angry.
Still burning despite everything else being extinguished.
She stands in the ruins like she has never once sat down.
Like waiting is what kept her alive.
A wind moves across the ash plain.
It carries a sensation.
An aura.
A signature that does not belong to this dead sky.
The skeleton's head turns slowly.
The chains groan.
Her star-eyes brighten a fraction.
Recognition.
Not joy.
Hunger.
She inhales, and the ash around her lifts slightly, as if the world itself can't decide whether it's allowed to breathe near her.
Her voice is calm.
Controlled.
No shouting.
No theatrical rage.
"I have waited fifty years." said Eirisa —what remained of her.
The words fall into the ash and do not echo because nothing here echoes anymore.
Her jaw tilts up.
She looks toward a horizon that does not contain any living thing.
But she can feel her.
She can feel the woman who tore out her children and called it war.
She can feel the storm returning.
A small sound escapes the skeleton—almost a laugh, almost a sob. It isn't either.
It's the sound of a blade being sharpened very slowly.
"Welcome back," she whispers.
A pause.
"Child of ruin."
The dying stars in her sockets flare.
And the chains around her body tighten as if the universe itself is bracing.
"This time," she says, voice soft enough to be mistaken for mercy—
—and then sharp enough to cut through worlds—
"I will finish what you started."
The ash wind dies.
The dead universe holds its breath.
And somewhere, far away, a war that thought it had already begun realizes it has been late.