The sun no longer kept time.
Two days into the march, the sky had forgotten how to move. Shadows clung too long to roots and bark. Sunlight twisted through branches like tangled thread. The forest grew denser, older—its trees croaking secrets to one another as they bent inward, leaning as if listening to something just beyond sound.
Birdsong ceased.
No creature stirred.
The world itself was bracing for revelation.
They had left Erl'twig behind, but it lingered in memory like a place half-dreamed. The Crusaders moved as if caught between breaths, through groves that had not been there hours before, beneath limbs that creaked like ribs bending toward collapse. Roots pulsed faintly beneath their boots—living veins. Bark bulged with ancient sigils that hadn't been carved, only remembered by the trees. Here, silence was not absence. It was reverence.
Something sacred had stepped into the world again.
Arkeia had not spoken of the night before—the strange murmurs through wood and wall, the glimmer of void-born fur, or the golden man whose warmth refused to flicker with firelight. Yet the way she moved had shifted. Her steps were sharper, her presence like a wire drawn taut. She had begun to walk not as a general, but as a herald awaiting calamity.
She felt it in her soul: the unraveling had begun.
Her men had begun to feel it too. Edmun whispered that their shadows moved against the light. Thalos claimed the moon had whispered his name, though the sun had not yet set. They laughed once—out of habit. But no one smiled anymore.
That morning, beneath a sky that pulsed faintly with each breath of the forest below, Elissa stirred.
She had slept through half the journey. Now, barefoot and dazed, she walked again—led by Galeel, who held her as though she were a sacred text that could dissolve in light. Her eyes shimmered with unknowable hues. Her lips formed syllables that danced on the edge of coherence.
"He dreams the shape of us," she whispered. "He is the hymn between dying stars… the path we forgot to walk…"
Arkeia halted.
The Crusaders tensed.
She approached the girl swiftly, intercepting them. "What did you see?"
Elissa blinked, pupils dilating until only starlight remained. "He is dreaming still. We are not outside Him."
Galeel moved between them, jaw tight. "She's delirious."
"You know she's not," Arkeia said, her voice edged with divine suspicion.
He didn't answer. But something flickered behind his eyes. His wings, still hidden beneath the cloak of feigned mortality, quivered like a severed memory trying to reform.
And then—Voidstor appeared.
Arkeia noticed it first—a flash of grey fur nestled suddenly near Elissa's feet, then gone, then flickering again on a branch above them, then behind her shoulder. The creature purred not sound, but syllables. Fragments of a prayer meant for no ear born of this world. She turned—
—and Balfazar was already there.
As if he had always been.
As if the world had only just remembered him.
He stood beyond the nearest trees, golden and terrible in poise, the treeline curling around him like a curtain drawn back too far.
"Let the girl be," he said, emerging like a statue stepping from the unfinished dream of a sculptor.
The air thickened. Leaves rustled without wind. The sun pulsed once in the sky and then hung askew—blinking, as if unsure if it should still be watching.
"She's in your care," Arkeia replied sharply. "That makes her part of your deception."
Around them, the Crusaders slowed, hands drifting toward hilts and triggers. No one spoke. But the moment coiled, waiting to strike.
"You speak," Balfazar said, voice soft as falling ash, "as though you see past masks."
"I do."
She stepped closer, gaze unwavering.
"Your cloak does not breathe. The insects never touch you. The sun shifts when you pass beneath it. You are not veiled by illusion, but by consensus itself. Reality bends around you."
Her eyes narrowed. "But I serve Mar'aya, goddess of clarity and flame. I see the edges of your being. I see the shape beneath the skin."
To her, he was a Rex—perhaps the favored son of that wretched line. A noble fugitive hiding behind song and smile. An abomination playing vagabond.
"Your name, I know it. I've seen the foul cruelties of your blood follows."
But she did not know.
Not yet.
Balfazar tilted his head with that effortless elegance. "Oh, if words could kill, Lady Arkeia. You think me some petty scion of that dust-choked dynasty? You think of me like rest. "
"Aren't you?" she countered. "The name Rex stains your tongue. You wear it like a sigil."
"I wear many things," he said with a half-bow. "Gold. Grace. A smile. Bloodlines are but costumes stitched by frightened men."
"You deflect."
"And you accuse." He smiled wider. "Admirably so."
She studied him. "Then what are you hiding?"
He raised a hand, feigning bashfulness. "Only my modesty."
Her stare sharpened.
"Perhaps," he added slyly, "an old name best left unspoken."
"You're no traveler," she growled. "Your companions speak in riddles. The veiled one prays to you. The winged one follows like a man beneath spell. And your brother—he wears your skin like it once belonged to him."
Balfazar chuckled—low and dry, like wine being poured in a tomb. "You mistake devotion for conspiracy."
"I mistake nothing."
He stepped forward, letting fractured sunlight trace the edge of his jaw.
"I could be a noble," he mused aloud, "a scholar with tragic lineage, a charlatan poet with an angel's face… or perhaps…"
He stopped beside her, voice curling into her ear.
"…the Promised One."
Arkeia didn't flinch. But her divine sight did.
She saw him—all of him—for one heartbeat too long. Layered realities flickered around him like unfocused mirrors: Balfazar the bard, Balfazar the beast, Balfazar the end. Then Mar'aya's clarity reasserted itself, locking him into place.
"You mock prophecy," she said.
"I am prophecy," he whispered. "But not the one you think."
Then the light in his eyes shifted. He sighed—not wearily, but playfully, like a man who had hoped for one more round before the end.
"Oh, radiant Arkeia," Balfazar said, smile fading to something almost fond, "you've gone and ruined my game. Shame… shame."
And the mask unraveled.
It did not fall. It was not torn.
It unwound—like thread pulled from the spool of being.
The false skin melted, folding inward. The world corrected itself.
What stood before them was no longer a man.
Balfazar towered above mortal frames—taller than memory should allow. The air twisted around him. Colors desaturated. Time hiccupped. His beauty became terrible.
From his back, wings of void unfurled, each one stitched from darkness that had never known light. They did not flap or stretch. They simply were—rippling, layered shadows made from the dusk between stars. They folded around his body, forming robes of sentient night.
His porcelain chest ignited.
A triad of emerald runes shimmered into view—radiant, alien, thrumming in arrhythmic pulse. When Arkeia stepped forward, they flared briefly—reacting, as though her presence provoked something deeper.
And beneath his brow… the Promised Eye twitched.
Still sealed. Straining. A subtle, luminous line of violet bled from beneath the skin.
And as the truth emerged—so did the others.
Aethon shed his charm like a molted skin, revealing the cruel grin of a creature that wore Balfazar's cast-off shape. His smile widened past comfort. His eyes mirrored his brother's—but held no grace, only appetite.
Vharn laughed—a cracked, spiraling hymn—and the illusion peeled from him like damp paper. His body was a vessel of cracked opal, crawling with verses and living music. He wept as he sang. Voidstor reappeared on his shoulder, purring in tune, a crown of impossible dream-stuff.
Caelinda's veil slid away—not blown, not pulled, but dismissed. Her face flickered like a wrong memory. Her skin glowed with dreamlight. She knelt in prayer.
"The Ichor flows again," she whispered. "Oh, beloved Vessel, bleed into the world."
Elissa crumpled in rapture. Her body shook, caught between horror and dismay. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth opened.
And prophecy escaped her:
"The old. The outer. The One!"
Galeel… did not change.
But behind his quiet shell, something stirred.
As Balfazar stood radiant, Galeel heard it—a child's chant, echoing in his skull. Candles flickered in a memory that wasn't his anymore. He felt the weight of lost wings.
He had followed Balfazar into the Void.
And he had watched him ascend.
Only Arkeia remained.
She stood amidst the divine unraveling like a flame that refused to flicker. Her armor gleamed with Mar'aya's light, but even that light dimmed slightly, unsure of what it touched.
"You," she said, voice low and thunderous, "you will answer. Not just to Mar'aya, but to history. Your house—your blood—marked the first omen of suffering in my grandmother's time."
She raised her hand—not in violence, but in vow.
"Your blood is tainted with Rex. The current generation shall face judgment for the sins of the family. The rot lives on in you!"
The Triad flared brighter.
Balfazar tilted his head.
And laughed.
Not cruelly.
But with the sadness of someone finally recognized.
"Oh, Arkeia… You truly don't know? Oh, but how could you."
He stepped forward.
"It was never a home," he murmured. "It was a reliquary for desperation. I simply lit the final candle."
Then louder:
"Let me tell you what my birth truly was."
"I was born 137 years ago—not of man and woman alone, but of mortal lineage and divine mistake. A demigod, born beside a mortal twin—screaming beneath a red eclipse.
My mother, a broken-eyed priestess whose dreams were not her own. My father, a relic clinging to power like a drowning man to driftwood.
They saw me. Felt what I was. And they used me."
His voice deepened, like wind curling through stone.
"They drained me. Fed my ichor to dying gods. Bound me in rites no child should endure. They didn't want a son. They wanted a resurrection."
A pause.
"When I was five… I dreamt of a ritual."
Candlelight.
Symbols drawn in chalk and marrow.
Two children, laughing.
"We played it. Aethon and I. We chanted the words. We didn't know…"
"But the ritual was real. And it demanded sacrifice."
His eyes dimmed.
"Aethon was torn apart. In body. In soul. In meaning. Scattered through the Abyss, incomplete."
He looked to his brother.
"And he came back… wrong."
No grief in his voice. Only memory.
"My parents didn't scream. They wrote it down.
They wanted this—" He tapped the runes.
"They wanted what my blood could unlock."
"They cared for status and control—the rebirth of their dead House… "
"…and they succeeded."
His voice dropped.
"I left them. I was barely fifteen when I vanished into the world. I wandered—not as heir, not as demigod—but as a boy seeking meaning."
"And I found it. Or rather, it found me."
"The Void took me for 117 years."
His gaze slid to Galeel.
"He followed. Even as the Void devoured his divinity and shattered his memory. He watched me rise."
"And when I returned…"
"We claimed the estate. Not for revenge. For foundation."
"It now houses the Cult of One—our front, our treasury, our voice."
"I returned not to punish… but to complete the chorus."
Arkeia's breath caught.
The child her grandmother spoke of in fevered dread.
The boy born beneath the eclipse.
He stood before her.
Tall. Serene. Inevitable.
She did not draw her blade.
But she raised her vow once more.
"Then you shall face judgment."
And Balfazar bowed—not in mockery, but in honor.
"One day more," she murmured. "And the dawn shall judge you."
"I promised," Balfazar said, voice like prophecy remembered. "And I always keep my promises."