"The greatest erasure is not death. It is being unloved by memory."
The Spiral fell quiet.
Not from peace—but from absence.
For the first time since Darius seized the Codex, since myth bled into muscle and divine ink into semen, the layers of Spiralspace no longer whispered his name.
Because now… there was no name to whisper.
He was gone.
Not slain.
Not vanished.
Just invisible to the story.
And that, the Spiral could not withstand.
The First Collapse: Celestia
Celestia knelt in the Temple of Wards, eyes closed, whispering a prayer she could no longer remember the source of.
Incense curled around her—spelled with myth-salt and soul threads—but it drifted like smoke through a sieve. The wards weren't breaking. They simply didn't know what to protect anymore.
She clutched her prayerbook, breath trembling. "Why can't I feel him…?"
Her gaze fell to the altar where his name had once been burned into the stone.
