# Chapter 845: The Squire's Hope
The scream tore through the monastery, a sound of such profound agony that it seemed to shake the very foundations of the world. The vortex of ash that was the Withering King's echo convulsed, its form shrinking, the darkness within it being consumed by the ever-widening star of white light. It was dying. But in its death throes, it was not passive. The scream cut off abruptly, replaced by a silence that was more terrifying than any sound. The collapsing vortex of ash stopped shrinking. It began to expand, not as a storm, but as a void. A patch of absolute nothingness that began to grow, pulling at the light, at the stones, at the very fabric of reality. It was a final, desperate act of erasure. If it could not exist, it would unmake everything.
The Unity of Cinders stood before the encroaching void, its crystalline light the last bastion of existence. It knew what it had to do. It reached past the memories of warriors and protectors, past the pain and the sacrifice, and touched the memory of a boy. A boy with a squire's patch on his tunic and a hero's light in his eyes. The memory of pure, unadulterated hope.
The void pulsed, a silent, hungry maw that sought to devour the last flicker of being. The air grew thin and cold, the scent of ozone and ancient dust replaced by a sterile emptiness that pricked at the gestalt's senses. The stones at the edge of the void began to flake away, not crumbling into dust but simply ceasing to be, their constituent matter unmade. This was not an attack of despair or betrayal; it was an attack on the very concept of existence itself. The Withering King, in its final moments, had become the embodiment of the Bloom's ultimate purpose: to return the world to silent, featureless ash.
The Unity of Cinders did not flinch. The fortress of Boro's protection held firm, a bastion of selfless will against the tide of nothingness. But defense alone would not be enough. The void would keep expanding until it consumed everything, or until the Unity itself was exhausted and unraveled. A final, decisive blow was needed. Not a weapon of force, but a weapon of truth. Something so fundamentally opposed to the void's nature that it could not be erased, only consumed by.
Within the collective consciousness, Soren's will reached out, bypassing the well-worn paths of memory that led to Bren's tactical genius or Lyra's defiant honor. He delved deeper, into the most vulnerable, most tender part of their shared soul. He found the memory of Finn.
It was not a grand memory. There was no battlefield, no last stand, no earth-shattering revelation. It was a quiet afternoon in the sun-drenched training yard of House Marr. The air smelled of sweat, leather, and the sweet scent of cut grass from the fields beyond the walls. The clang of steel on steel was a distant rhythm. In the memory, Soren was exhausted, his muscles screaming from a brutal sparring session, his Cinder-Tattoos aching with a dull fire. He had just been bested, again, by a seasoned veteran, his unrefined Gift proving clumsy against practiced skill. Frustration and shame were hot coals in his gut.
Then, a small hand had pressed a damp cloth to his brow. He looked up. Finn stood there, his face a mask of earnest concern, his squire's patch slightly askew on his simple tunic. In his other hand, he held a wooden cup, water sloshing over the rim. "You'll get him next time, Soren," Finn had said, his voice full of an absolute, unshakeable conviction. "I know you will. You're the strongest person I've ever seen."
That was it. That was the entire memory. No strategy, no sacrifice, no profound wisdom. Just the simple, unwavering belief of a boy who had seen a hero and refused to see anything else. It was a hope so pure it was untainted by doubt, so powerful it was immune to logic or evidence. It was a hope that did not need to be earned, only given.
The Unity of Cinders drew this memory forth. It did not forge it into a sword or a shield. It simply let it be. The crystalline light of the gestalt softened, its hard, defensive edges melting away. The brilliant white warmed, taking on the golden hue of a late afternoon sun. The image of the boy, his face alight with faith, shimmered into existence before the void. It was not an illusion; it was an emotion made manifest. The feeling of being believed in, of being seen as more than your failures, of being a hero in someone's eyes even when you couldn't see it yourself.
The void hesitated.
The encroaching edge of nothingness wavered, its perfect, sterile blackness marred by the faintest touch of gold. The Withering King's echo, now a ragged, tattered storm of ash shot through with holes of light, recoiled as if struck. It could not comprehend this. Despair, it understood. Betrayal, it knew. Sacrifice, it could twist into loss. But this… this was alien. This was a force that did not seek to destroy, but to create. It did not feed on pain, but on joy. It was the antithesis of everything the Withering King was, everything it had been born from in the cataclysm of the Bloom.
The memory of Finn's hope expanded, a gentle, inexorable wave of golden light. It did not crash against the void; it flowed into it, seeping into the cracks of non-existence. And where it touched, the void could not hold. The silence was broken by the faint echo of a boy's laughter. The emptiness was filled with the imagined scent of grass and sunshine. The sterile nothingness was polluted by a feeling so warm, so alive, that it was anathema.
The Withering King's echo convulsed. Its form, already pitted with light, began to disintegrate in earnest. Great chunks of ash broke away, not crumbling but dissolving like smoke in the wind, each mote catching the golden light and burning away into nothing. The creature tried to pull back, to retreat into the core of its own despair, but it was too late. The hope was inside it now, a single, pure memory burning through its corrupted essence like a fire.
It was not a fire of destruction, but of purification. It found the echoes of the world's suffering that the King had consumed and did not erase them, but soothed them. It found the loneliness, the rage, the hunger, and met them not with resistance, but with understanding. With the simple, profound belief that things could be better. That a hero could rise. That the sun would shine again.
The Withering King froze. Its desperate expansion halted. The vortex of ash stopped spinning. For the first time in its existence, the being of pure despair was still. Its form convulsed, not with the violence of battle, but with the tremors of a fundamental transformation. The golden light of a squire's hope burned through it, a single, brilliant point of purity in a universe of grey ash, and in its light, the monster began to unmake itself.