Heaven was not ready.
The reactivation of the seventh syllable — Lu-Men — ruptured more than time and language. It echoed into the Void, into the spaces between creation where no prayers were ever meant to reach.
And something answered.
A being awakened in the Cavum Caelestis, the Hollow of Heaven. It had no name in the tongues of men, only a title in the forgotten tongue:
The Nullifier.
Born from God's first regret, it was shaped in silence, clad in absence, and commanded to erase any being who dared speak all Seven Syllables.
Its arrival would not be heralded by fire or trumpet—but by the loss of meaning.
Córdoba – Days Later
Calistius sat inside a broken monastery outside the old Andalusian city. Aline tended to him, her hands shaking as she applied ointments to his wrists, which now bore the final glyph — Lu-Men — glowing like a cold flame beneath his skin.
He hadn't spoken since they left Alexandria.
Because every time he tried, reality bent. Glass cracked. Birds fell from the sky. Light slowed.
"You can't speak anymore," Aline said gently. "You're no longer a man with language. You are language. And language should never speak itself."
A New Mystery Emerges – The Eighth Syllable
That night, as Calistius dreamt, a new page etched itself into the air before him. The Thesaurus of St. Philip—though long since burned—now existed within him, and it still wrote.
"Seven to remember the beginning.
One to forget the end."
Beneath this line, a glyph he had never seen before slowly appeared—one not listed in the Primordial Tongue.
A forbidden eighth syllable.
Sha-Tei — The Unword.
A syllable never spoken. One believed to erase even God's own voice.
The syllable that ended the previous universe.
Rome – Cardinal Augustus's Final Gambit
In the Apostolic Vaults of the Vatican, Cardinal Augustus di Serpente watched sacred texts fade before his eyes. Words vanished from pages, prayers turned to gibberish. The Psalms had become void. Even the name "Christ" blinked on and off in the illuminated manuscripts.
The activation of Lu-Men had triggered semantic entropy.
He summoned the last Keepers of the Custodes Linguae Dei. Only five remained alive.
"It has begun," he told them. "We cannot kill him. We cannot silence him. But we can slow him. Delay the unraveling."
"How?"
"By awakening the Nullifier."
The others gasped.
"That would be the end of all grammar," one whispered.
"Yes," Augustus replied. "But better that than a world where men become gods through words alone."
The Descent of the Nullifier
Somewhere between dimensions, between breath and thought, the Nullifier stirred.
Its arrival was not visible to the eye, but felt — in stammering voices, in language breaking apart, in mothers forgetting their children's names, in alphabets rearranging overnight.
It descended without a face, without a sound, as a rip in meaning.
A hole in the sentence of existence.
It headed for Calistius.
The Trial of Sound
Back in Córdoba, Calistius opened his eyes.
"I can hear it," he whispered. "The voice that doesn't speak. The silence that consumes."
"You've gone too far," Aline said. "You'll unmake the world if you go further."
"I didn't come this far to save the world," he replied. "I came to read it. And maybe… rewrite it."
Suddenly, the air turned to static.
The ground cracked.
And from the shadows stepped a being cloaked in reverse-light, wrapped in syllables unspoken, covered in glyphs not written—The Nullifier had come.
Final Standoff
It did not speak.
It simply existed, and in doing so, all nearby meaning began to unravel.
Calistius fell to his knees. Blood poured from his ears, his tongue twisted inside out, thoughts collapsing in on themselves. Aline tried to shield him, screaming ancient chants from the Silent Sisterhood—but they dissolved before leaving her lips.
Then Calistius did something impossible.
He reached deep into himself.
Not into the Seven.
But into the Eighth.
Sha-Tei.
He opened his mouth.
Not to speak.
But to unword.
And as he whispered it, the Nullifier hesitated.
For the first time since the beginning, the silence itself had been answered.