"There was no king left to mourn."
The ground split like old circuitry beneath Hina's bare feet. Spellbook fragments drifted through the air — black, red, violet — their ink leaking mid-glyph, mid-scream. She walked the ruins like a glitch in a game no longer being played, and the world around her crumbled in silence.
Her voice was the only thing alive here.
"He said memory would survive the war."
A rusted page landed against her palm. It writhed, glitching with burned-out symbols that pulsed in and out of existence — a language she'd never learned, but always understood in dreams. The center bore a sigil she hadn't drawn, yet it moved like something she had carved into her own soul.
And then — a whisper.
"You shouldn't be here."
Hina turned.
At the center of the dead battlefield, beneath the sky's bleeding static, stood a figure without a shadow. His limbs were still inked with runes, but they flickered, unstable. Half of his face was fading. Veyrun. But not the one she knew — this one looked… overwritten. Glitched.
His voice was warped now. Both thunder and code.
"This is a shard of the timeline that lost. The rebellion failed here."
A low hum rippled through the sky. The Sigil Tree, far above them, was burning. Not with fire — with white void. Pages were falling like feathers made of grief.
Hina stepped closer.
"You said we could rewrite them."
"You said you remembered how."
Veyrun's voice broke like cracked glass:
"We were too late."
"The system adapted. It closed the loop faster than I could decode it."
"And Zatch… made his choice."
A pause.
The static wind tore the last pages from the sky.
Then, Veyrun's left arm vanished. Corruption crawling up his chest. Glyphs flared across his skin — self-erasing, failing.
"I'm not the Veyrun you'll meet… but I was once him. Before the recursion. Before the exile spell."
"This reality has been terminated."
Hina clutched the fragment of the spellbook tighter.
"Then why am I still here?"
His eyes — pale voids — focused, just for a moment.
"Because you're the trigger."
"Even in timelines that collapse, memory finds you."
Suddenly, from behind her — a rupture. A mirror of reality tearing open like a blooming glyph. The sigil burned gold, silver, black — rotating like an eye made of equations.
Inside it: a younger version of Hina asleep. The original Veyrun emerging from the book. The moment before it all began.
"You have to wake her up," the broken Veyrun said.
"Tell her… the king was never the problem."
"It was the book that made kings."
"Rewrite the law, not the war."
The world shook. Time bled sideways.
The page in her hand caught fire.
And Veyrun reached for her — not to pull her back, but to push her forward.
"Go. Begin again. Burn the first spell."