Peace was a strange, ill-fitting garment. In the sun-dappled library, surrounded by the quiet rustle of pages and the impossible, living presence of their dead friends, a profound sense of unreality settled over them all.
Draven flexed his hands, whole and unscarred. The phantom pain of his crushed bones was a distant, fading nightmare. "I… remember," he said, his voice thick with confusion. "Fighting. And then… this."
"Best dream ever, then," Kael said with a shaky grin, running a hand through his perfect hair. He looked at Mira, and a genuine, uncomplicated warmth passed between them. It was easy. It was right. It felt… scripted.
Selvara stood apart, her sharp mind trying to stitch together the disjointed tapestry of their final moments. It didn't make sense. The pain, the terror, the overwhelming power—it couldn't just resolve into… this. This quiet, gentle peace. She instinctively reached for the Deceiver's Mask at her hip. It wasn't there. The Key of the Voice was gone from Mira's hand. Their systems, the divine powers that had defined their existence in Eryndor, were silent. They were just people.
Lucian sat at his table, his gaze fixed on the pages of an open book, a study in quiet contemplation. He did not look at them. He did not acknowledge them. He was simply… there. A problem that had been solved.
Only Elara seemed to belong here. She stood by the window, a faint, serene smile on her face as she looked out at a world of rolling green hills. She was the architect of this peace, the catalyst of their salvation.
But as the minutes stretched into an hour, cracks began to appear in the perfect facade. The sun outside the window did not move. The book Lucian was reading, Selvara noted with a spike of cold dread, never had its page turned. The gentle, ambient sounds of the library were a perfect, unchanging loop.
"This is wrong," Selvara whispered, her voice a jarring note in the perfect harmony.
Mira looked at her, her face a mask of confusion. "What's wrong? We're safe. We won."
"Did we?" Selvara's eyes were locked on Elara's back. "Look around, Mira. It's too perfect. There are no scars. No grief. Don't you feel it? All that pain… where did it go?"
She was right. The raw, ragged wound of Kael's and Draven's sacrifices was gone from Mira's heart, replaced by a smooth, unblemished sense of happy relief. It was a lobotomy of the soul.
And then Lucian looked up. He looked past them, his gaze meeting Selvara's. And for a single, terrifying instant, she saw it in his eyes. Not peace. Not defeat. The same, profound, and utterly horrifying trapped intelligence she had seen in her own reflection in the mirrors of his shrine. He was a prisoner here, too.
He stood up, his movement finally breaking the perfect, static tableau. He did not look at Elara. He walked to the center of the room, and he spoke, his real, human voice echoing with the full, divine authority of the god he still was.
"This is not victory," he said, his starless eyes sweeping over the four of them. "This is a cage. A far more perfect and insidious one than I could have ever designed."
The world seemed to stutter. The gentle light from the window flickered. Kael and Draven's forms became momentarily, terrifyingly translucent.
"What are you talking about?" Mira cried, clinging to the illusion. "Elara saved us! She fixed it!"
"She did not 'fix' it," Lucian's voice was sharp, analytical. "She ended it. This place… this feeling… this perfect, unending, peaceful moment. This is her Stillness. Made manifest. She did not defeat me. She did not restore me. She took me, and all of you, her most cherished, painful memories, and locked us in a perfect, eternal, unchanging sanctuary inside her own mind. This isn't reality. It is a museum exhibit of a happy ending."
The truth, when it hit, was a physical blow. Selvara stared at Elara, who was still looking out the window, her faint smile unwavering. She was not their friend. She was their jailer. A benevolent, loving god who had taken their pain and their free will in the same, final, merciful act. Her final gambit had not been to win the war; it had been to declare the entire concept of war a pointless, painful illusion and quarantine them all from it, forever.
Lucian turned his gaze to the silent, serene girl by the window. "A masterful move," he conceded, a note of something akin to genuine, academic respect in his voice. "To use my own lesson of futility against me. To create a prison from my own forgotten desires for peace and silence. But you have made one, critical miscalculation."
He closed his eyes. The perfect, tranquil atmosphere of the library was suddenly violated by an intrusion of pure, unadulterated nothing. A spot of absolute blackness began to grow from his chest, not a violent thing, but a quiet, spreading stain of Oblivion that began to unmake the pleasant, perfect illusion around it. The smell of old books became the smell of sterile ash. The warm light became the sickly twilight.
"You assumed," Lucian's voice was now resonating with his rising, terrible power, "that I would prefer this. That the ghost of the boy would want this peace more than the god desired the truth. You were wrong."
Elara finally turned from the window. The serene smile was gone. Her face was a mask of pure, sorrowful desperation. "Don't," she pleaded, her voice the first true, emotional sound she had made in this false reality. "Please. It's better this way. There's no more pain here."
"There is no more anything here," Lucian countered, the black void around him growing, causing Kael and Draven to flicker like dying projections. "And the one thing a shadow cannot abide… is a perfect, featureless light with nowhere to hide."
The choice was no longer his, or even Elara's. It was now theirs. They could allow Elara's gentle, living death to hold them, a painless eternity as ghosts in her machine. Or they could side with their tormentor, their monster, in a desperate, insane bid to shatter this perfect cage and return to the honest, horrifying, and real war for their broken world.
Selvara looked at the fading forms of her dead friends, a tear finally tracking a path down her cheek. They weren't real. They were just echoes, a reward for giving up. With a scream of pure, grief-stricken rage, she made her choice. She focused the faint, lingering power of her Deceiver's key, not on Lucian, but on the flawless, serene image of Elara, and she lied, trying to find a crack, a flaw in the perfect logic of her friend's self-made prison. "It's not real, Elara! You didn't save us! You buried us!"
Mira, weeping, followed suit, her Voice of Unity singing not a song of harmony, but a discordant, jagged note of pure, ugly, painful truth—the memory of Draven's real death, of his final, agonized moments, a sound that was a direct contradiction to the peace Elara had built.
Their combined assault, aided by Lucian's own rising abyss, was the key. Elara's perfect, peaceful world, unable to contain so many conflicting, painful truths, shattered.
The library dissolved. The green hills vanished. And the five of them were back in the grey, sterile, and horrifyingly real world, standing amidst the ruins of the Shrine of the Titan. Kael and Draven were gone. Elara was on her knees, the Heart of Light in her hand flickering erratically, her power exhausted. And Lucian stood before them, a being of pure, resurgent void, free from his beautiful prison.
He looked down at the three surviving girls, then at Elara, a strange, new expression on his face. It was not triumph. It was not obsession. It was something closer to… pity.
"You see?" he whispered, his voice the cold wind of the ashen plains. "There is no escape. Not even for you."
And from the shadows behind him, a new, far more terrible threat began to emerge. The silence of the world had been a temporary reprieve. Lucian had been distracted. But the true, ancient masters of this broken, chaotic land, drawn by the final, desperate battle and the scent of five powerful, untethered souls, were finally beginning to awaken. And they were far older, and far hungrier, than a boy playing at being a god.