The stygian silence of the Vile Thieving Bird's nest was heavy, broken only by the wet, rhythmic thud of necrotic gore sliding off the black chitin walls. The air was thick with the oppressive tang of divine blood and a spiritual gravity that made the very atmosphere feel like lead.
Within the Loom of Fate, the golden runes of the Nightmare Spell flickered violently, struggling to reconstruct a truth that was being actively suppressed by the Lord of Shadows in the present.
Rain stood amidst the legends of humanity, her breath coming in shallow hitches. But beneath her fear, a cold, sharp clarity was beginning to take root. She watched the Blur — the scrawny, desperate youth inside the memory, and the feeling of familiarity was no longer a whisper.
It was a roar.
He is too short, she thought, her eyes tracing the way the Blur moved even in his agony.
Nearly the exact same height as my teacher.
The dark, messy hair, the way he carried his weight with a deceptive, predator-like grace — it all matched the mysterious apparition that resided in her shadow. She remembered her teacher's ridiculous stories, the ones she had dismissed as the ramblings of a brazen scam artist or an eccentric dark deity.
He had claimed to be her long-lost brother, a war hero whose fate had been stolen by a vile, odious, very nasty, no good bird, and even the secret boyfriend of Princess Nephis. Rain had spent years assuming her teacher was some sort of "evil god" playing with her, but now, the impossible logic of his stories began to click into place.
The feat... her heart hammered against her ribs. Slaying a Great Devil as a Sleeper.
Her teacher had once told her: "Your teacher happens to be the man who killed a Great Devil with a dull piece of steel while he was still a Sleeper". She had laughed at him.
But there it was.
In the center of the carnage, the scrawny boy was withdrawing the [Drop of Ichor] from the remains of a Great Devil.
That was exactly the kind of "heroic deed" her teacher would brag about while feeding her nonsense about the estuary of the river of time. She knew her teacher couldn't lie due to his strange Flaw, yet she had convinced herself his stories were just nonsensical answers meant to tease her.
Now, the logic of her life shattered.
He wasn't lying. He really is... my brother.
Tears welled in her eyes, hot and stinging, trailing through the ash on her cheeks.
Effie, standing beside her, noticed the girl's trembling frame and the tears falling into the black mud. The amazonian Saint placed a heavy, comforting hand on Rain's shoulder. "Don't worry about the Sovereigns, kid," Effie whispered, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "They're just bullies with bigger sticks. The Princess, me, and the rest of us... we're right here. No one is touching you."
Rain looked up at Effie, then at Nephis, who was watching her with a gaze of quiet, steel-grey concern.
Princess Nephis... Changing Star...
Rain's mind drifted to her teacher's arrogant claim about being her boyfriend.
If he wasn't lying about being my brother... then technically... she's my sister-in-law?
The thought was so absurd amidst the phantom carnage of the Great Devil's nest that Rain felt a hysterical bubble of laughter threaten to break through her grief.
In the past, the Blur lay motionless upon the brittle silk of the nest, which time had made as pliable as sand. His skin began to smoke, acrid and sharp, as the golden liquid he had consumed began to rewrite his mortal frame from the inside out.
There was no blood.
The [Blood -Static-] lineage was already sealing his essence, refusing to let even a drop of his vitality escape despite the immense pressure.
Suddenly, the Spell's voice boomed, sounding vibrant and expectant.
[You have acquired a new Attribute: Blood -Static-.]
[Attribute Description: You have inherited a part of -Static's- forbidden lineage. Your blood has been altered and imbued with odd tenacity.]
The Loom turned arctic.
Anvil of Valor stood like a mountain of cold iron, his Supreme Will causing the illusory branches beneath him to groan. "Forbidden lineage..." he rumbled, his voice heavy as falling iron. "To possess the blood of the one who wove the prison of the world... if it truly is Weaver's forbidden lineage, he must die."
Morgan of Valor watched with a mix of envy and dread, her red eyes tracing the golden runes.
Beside the Queen, the Song Sisters — the Transcendent daughters of Ki Song — shifted with predatory intent, their gazes as cold as the graves they commanded.
Solvane, the ancient Saint, narrowed her eyes in sharp recognition, while Nightwalker and the Saints of the House of Night remained in a state of professional, terrifying silence.
The Blur opened his eyes and examined his [Puppeteer's Shroud], seeing through the physical fabric. He perceived five glowing nexuses — remnants of the Awakened Tyrant's cores — shining like miniature stars assembled into a constellation. He saw the diamond strings weaving a logic of durability and resilience beneath the fabric.
"Weaving," Noctis whispered, his usually manic eyes clouding with a rare, somber focus . "An unnatural and ancient form of sorcery made up of strings that defy the natural laws of existence. It was created by the Demon of Fate, Weaver. Their sorcery was not something gods, let alone mortals, could easily learn. Yet..."
Noctis's expression shifted in a heartbeat, his eyes igniting with a sudden, jagged flare of manic excitement as he leaned closer to the silver strings of the Loom.
"...this scrawny thing, a mere Dormant, is already peering past the veil. He has the potential, doesn't he? To not just see the threads of the world, but to pluck them."
Ananke stood submerged in a pocket of absolute religious reverence. Her breath hitched, her wide eyes filled with an awe that transcended simple fear. While the Sovereigns saw a threat to their power, she saw the fulfillment of the ancient murals of her order.
To her, he was the True Heir of the one who had braided the stars.
Suddenly, the environment shifted.
The audience was pulled into a dark expanse of still, black water beneath a starless sky, dominated by a lightless sun pulsing with a cold, gravitational pull.
"Where... where are we?" Chief Bethany asked, her voice small against the crushing silence of the abyss.
Jet looked around, her cold, blue eyes tracking the motionless figures standing at the border of the light. "We are inside a Soul Sea, Chief Bethany," Jet answered, her voice dropping to a low, guarded hum. "But..." she looked at the silent shadows, "this one is not normal."
Beth shivered, the phantom cold of the black water seemingly seeping into her bones. "I've always wondered what the Soul Sea of an Awakened looks like. I didn't expect it to be so... lonely." She looked at Jet and managed a weak smile. "Soul Reaper can call me Beth."
Jet turned to her, her expression softening for a fraction of a second. "Jet."
They stood on the surface of the black water, watching as the dim light of the Memories flickered over the trophies of the Blur's journey.
Nephis stared at the void, her jaw tensing as she compared it to her own radiant Soul Sea — a calm ocean surrounded by golden clouds and illuminated by seven brilliant suns.
Mordret's mirror-bright eyes danced with a sharp clarity. He looked at the black water and thought of his own somber expanse, where five pale suns shone like cold stars through a veil of storm clouds.
The hulking, abhorrent shadow of the Mountain King loomed in the darkness. Beside it stood the grey, silent shadow of the Vile Thieving Bird's Spawn.
"A Divine Shadow, truly," Eurys let out a dry, rattling laugh from his perch. "But this soul... it is a very bad version of the Shadow Realm."
"The Shadow Realm?" Professor Julius asked, his voice hushed. "Is that why his soul is filled with the dead?"
"The Shadow Realm is where death truly lives," Eurys rasped, his ghostly red flames flickering. "It is where the shadows of the dead are ground to essence by the soul storm to be cleansed from the Void's Corruption. Shadows go there to die. But look at him. He does not grind them. He keeps them. His soul is a weak, tiny seed of a new Shadow Realm."
The Witnesses fell into a deathly silence. The idea that a single soul could serve as a cradle for death itself was more terrifying than any Great Devil.
Daeron of the Twilight Sea rumbled, his voice carrying the weight of ancient oceans. He pointed to the silent, waiting shadows. "He has been building this unknowingly since his first kill. This is no mere soul storage. This is a nascent Domain."
Anvil narrowed his eyes, his voice a low vibration of grinding metal. "A nascent Domain... in a Sleeper. It is a fundamental violation of the natural order. He is not merely ascending. He is claiming authority before he has even earned the right to stand among us."
Ki Song let out a melodic, mocking hum, her dead eyes fixed on the lightless sun. "How terrifying, Anvil. You fear the order is broken, but I see only the hunger. He has turned his soul into a vessel for everything he has ended. He isn't just a shadow. He is a monarch in waiting."
Noctis clapped his hands, his manic grin stretching wider. "A nascent Domain! Oh, simply marvelous! He doesn't just weave strings. He is weaving a world! Can you feel it, Solvane? The weight of it? It's a tragedy in the making — a king with no kingdom, building one out of the ghosts of his enemies!"
Solvane grunted, her eyes narrowed in sharp revulsion. "It is perverse. A soul should be a sanctuary, a place of peace and solitude. This... this is a graveyard pretending to be a realm. There is no honor in a domain built upon the preservation of rot."
Standing apart, Mordret remained in absolute silence, but his mirror-bright eyes danced with a sharp clarity. He looked at the black water and thought of his own somber expanse, where seven pale suns shone like cold stars through a veil of storm clouds. A monarch born of silence and death, he thought, his reflection rippling with a dark amusement. He didn't wait for permission or a crown. He carved his path out of the abyss, one kill at a time. And if his domain was this established then... how much has it grown now that he is the Lord of Shadows?
Nephis also remained silent, her expression a cold mask, but internally her thoughts were a storm. She compared the void to her own radiant Soul Sea — a calm ocean surrounded by golden clouds and illuminated by seven brilliant suns. I have fought to manifest even a spark of my domain, to find the logic of my supremacy... and yet he... he has been building an empire of shadows without even realizing it. Was he always meant to be my shadow, or was I meant to be the light in his realm?
The Blur returned to the physical world, but his perception remained altered. He looked at the Puppeteer's Shroud, and for the first time, the Witnesses saw what he saw — not just the object, but the Memory Tier and its Enchantments rendered in golden runes.
[Memory Tier: V.]
[Memory Enchantments: [Enhanced Durability], [Doubtless]]
The Blur's eyes fixed on the Roman numeral. Five, he thought, and the word felt like a physical shock. Five soul cores in a tyrant. Tier V memory... five nexuses. For some reason, the number tore through the blissful haze of his mind like a jagged blade.
He summoned his runes and looked at his Attributes: [Fated], [Mark of Divinity], [Child of Shadows], [Blood -Static_].
"There's five... there's five Attributes!" he whispered, but his mind could only see four. Every time he reached for the fifth, the Soul Tree's hex snatched the thought away.
The Blur sat alone, biting his lip until a burst of pain cleared his mind.
In the Loom, Nephis and Cassie stood paralyzed. They watched the memory of their past selves, lobotomized and happy under the tree. But more importantly, the present Nephis watched the Blur with a cold, guarded mask. Based on the vision of the angel being consumed, she assumed that the moment he regained his senses, he would betray them and flee.
Instead, the shadowy figure descended the tree and woke the blind girl huddled between the roots. He used her Aspect sight to reveal the hidden truth.
"Five! It's five! There's five of them, damn it!" the Blur shouted in the past. The invisible veil fell. He remembered everything — Cassie's warning, her terror, and the day they killed the Carapace Demon.
"Look at him," Noctis chuckled, leaning back. "Most mortals would have succumbed to the sweetness. But he? He uses agony as an anchor to keep his mind from snapping. Oh, I truly adore this boy's commitment to pain."
The memory fast-forwarded. The audience saw Nephis and the youth butchering the Carapace Demon on the ashen sands. They stripped plates of armor from its back, fitting them together with golden rope to build a vessel. They fashioned a mast from the demon's spine and ribs.
The youth was the only one who knew the true purpose of the boat, bearing the full weight of the Soul Tree's corruption alone to avoid alerting the hex. His face was white with exhaustion, his arms covered in ghastly bite marks where he had used pain to keep himself lucid.
Finally, with the evening approaching, the boat was ready. As the youth tried to think of what they had to do next, an invisible barrier appeared in his mind, blocking his intent. He bit down on his mangled palm, but the pain wasn't enough.
He smiled darkly and kneeled on the ashen sand, placing his hand on the ground. Summoning the Midnight Shard, he raised his other hand and brought the heavy pommel of the sword down without hesitation. With a sickening crack, the brittle bones of his ring finger shattered.
The wave of agony obliterated the mental barrier.
'Now we get the hell out of here!'
The shadowy figure's undiscernible thought echoed throughout the Loom.
Standing on the ashen sand, the present Nephis felt a sharp, sympathetic jolt in her own hand, her fingers curling instinctively. Her grey eyes were turbulent, fracturing the cold mask she had maintained.
How? she thought, her pulse thundering.
If he is a monster, why does he destroy his own body just to drag us out of this grave?
Beside her, Cassie clutched her cloak, trembling. She remembered the syrupy peace of the island, but she had never known the silence was bought with breaking bone.
Daeron of the Twilight Sea rumbled, his gaze fixed on the youth's deteriorating state. "He has the means to leave. He has the boat. He could evacuate this island right now, leaving the dead weight behind to be consumed. Yet he breaks his own bones to keep them in his mind."
But as they began to doubt their image of him as a traitor, Mordret spoke up with a cold, poisonous smile. "Don't be fooled, Changing Star. He is building a boat for his own escape, and he kept them alive because two pairs of hands are better than one when butchering a titan of steel. He isn't a savior. He is just using them as labor until the moment he can cast the ballast aside."
Noctis clapped his hands in agreement. "A master of deceit knows how to play the hero until the knife is already in the back! He needs her strength to drag that boat to the water! After that? Why share a seat in a vessel built for one?"
The escape began as the sun touched the horizon. The youth returned for the past-Cassie, who was repeating "I'm hungry" like a broken doll. When she resisted, he was forced to grab her and throw her over his shoulder while she screamed for help.
As he reached the beach, the past-Nephis blocked his path, her silver sword appearing out of thin air . "Let Cassie go. Now," she commanded with an indifference that radiated coldness.
The youth placed Cassie down. Before he could explain, the past-version of the silver-haired woman attacked, pinning him with her sword at his throat . Looking up at her cold face, the youth shouted in desperation: "Aster, Song, Vale!"
The present Nephis gasped as the names hit the Nephis of the past like a physical blow. Her sword hand trembled, drawing a drop of blood from his neck. "How... how do you know these names?" she snarled.
A mist began to form around the Blur's head, coalescing into a sphere of partially snapped and melted Silver Strings. Suddenly, the audience was plunged into a past memory — a record within the record.
They saw Nephis giving the Blur the names: "Aster... Song... Vale. Say those words to me, and I will listen". The Witnesses were then plunged back into the present memory, where they heard the Blur shout: "Aster... Song... Vale!"
Suddenly, a chilling, ancient awareness attempted to peer through the Loom of Fate.
[CRITICAL WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED WILL DETECTED]
[METAPHYSICAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED]
The Spell's runes flared with a blinding, iridescent light to repel the foreign gaze. This fraction of a second of systemic stress caused a bleed in Fate.
The environment of the memory warped violently. The tree's branches melted away, replaced by a vast, silent bone plain stretching under a grey, cloudy sky. Rain, Beth and the other Awakened collapsed under a soul-crushing pressure.
In this flicker, the Saints and Sovereigns saw a scene that shouldn't exist.
A Supreme version of Nephis, her white flames cold and merciless, standing over a battered figure. She drove her sword down, beheading the form of Anvil of Valor.
"Flawless... you are flawless at last..." Anvil's dying voice gargled.
Ki Song's dead eyes widened as she realized her own absence from the scene. She mocked the King of Swords to hide her own existential chill: "It seems we both failed to survive your 'flawless' weapon, Anvil. How tragic that our war only produced our executioner."
The vision vanished as the Spell re-stabilized. Hel looked at the youth with a grim expression, while the present Cassie turned her gaze toward the shadow at Rain's feet.
"The vision... it isn't possible anymore," Cassie whispered, her voice laced with sickening regret . "The future doesn't exist."
"She is right," Hel added, her voice a melodic graveyard lullaby . "What we just saw was a future once destined to happen when Fate was still intact. It is a ghost of a dead destiny. Because of him—because of the person we are observing—the future is no longer predetermined. He has murdered the destiny we were meant to follow."
In the past, the trio launched their boat of demon bones into the dark sea. As they pulled away, the youth ignited a massive bonfire of demon fat and dry leaves to burn the tree.
The Witnesses stood on the shifting ashen sands of the projection, their hearts heavy with a cold dread that had nothing to do with the Soul Tree. As the boat vanished into the dark waves, a final, unspoken thought from the scrawny youth, the Blur, rippled through the infinite darkness of the starless void, echoing with the weight of absolute malice and a promise of revenge that made the very air of the Loom turn to ice.
'One day... all of them will fear me!'