There was no sound in the void.
No stars.
No time.
Only two forces, intertwined like opposing thoughts in the mind of eternity.
Bakudou floated—still, silent, bound within the core of the Hollow Singularity.He was not dead.He was holding it.Containing it.Being the seal.
Where once the Singularity threatened to erase the Ultraverse, now it was locked inside the one soul capable of defying it. But the cost was everything—Bakudou had sealed himself away from reality. A living prison for the oldest force of oblivion.
Yet somewhere beyond the shroud of entropy, a flicker of light pulsed.Emma's voice.Not a whisper.A calling.
"You were never meant to fade, Bakudou. You chose to save what you could. But I remember who you are."
From the distant edges of the Ultraverse, where memory and design first intertwined, Emma's restored presence began crafting something new.
She could not bring him back.But she could build a pathIn the aftermath of the Remaking War, silence had become sacred.
The gods who survived retreated, reshaping their fractured realms. Mortals told tales of the great light that had pushed back the nothingness. They spoke the name Bakudou like a hymn, not as a god—but as a guardian, a being who made the ultimate sacrifice not to rule, but to preserve the right to exist.
In Eleutherion's ruins, Xareth knelt where the Tribunal once stood. He no longer wore armor. The Warden of Lost Eons had become a humble keeper of memory.
Seraphene walked beside him, her wings now folded in quiet reflection."He didn't destroy the Singularity," she said. "He understood it."
"He became the balance," Xareth replied. "And in doing so, he became more than any of us."
The skies above them shimmered—restored not by divine decree, but by Emma's careful hands
She walked the Ultraverse again—not as the Architect behind a veil, but as herself. Visible. Present. A quiet light among stars.Emma did not rebuild the Ultraverse.She rewrote its future.
No longer would gods sit on high while mortals suffered below. No longer would creation rest on the shoulders of the few.
Instead, she spread fragments of her power—of Bakudou's light—throughout reality. Into mortal hearts, forgotten realms, and wounded planes.
Everywhere that choice had been stripped away, she returned it.And those fragments began to awaken.
Children born with echoes of Bakudou's fire. Planets forming with latent resistance to oblivion. Entire civilizations developing faster, stronger, more compassionate—each seeded with a sliver of what had been forged in the Hollow Throne.
And still, in the place where time dared not tread, Bakudou drifted.He was neither sleeping nor awake.Just watching.And through the veil, he saw Emma—her soul blazing across the threads of space.He did not speak.
But if he could, he would have said:
Thank you.
For letting him choose.For helping him become.For remembering him not as a god… but as a man who stood still when the universe nearly fell.
Centuries passed.Then millennia.
And then, the impossible.
The Singularity stirred—not to escape, but to speak.A voice, dry and ancient, echoed in the void:
"You changed me."Bakudou remained silent.
"You do not erase what I am. But you have shown me what I lacked."A pause.
"What now, Guardian?"Bakudou's eyes opened.Slowly.Deliberately.And for the first time since the war, he smiled.
"Now… we watch together."And from within the containment of entropy, the Hollow Singularity became something new.
Not a force of destruction.
But of understanding.
A warning. A counterweight. A silent witness to the choices that would shape forever.On the edge of creation, Emma looked up.A ripple in the stars.A change.She felt him—still there.Still Bakudou.
And so she lit a single lantern of celestial fire, and placed it in the sky above every world.A symbol.Not of worship.But of legacy.For in that light lived a name remembered by all:
Bakudou
The One Who Chose.
The Flame That Held the Dark.
The Guardian of the Ultraverse.