The change began with a breath.
He inhaled, and the breath was different. Eos had breathed ten thousand ways in his life, the shallow, frightened breaths of a dying prince in a room of bodies, the slow, deep breaths of cultivation in the Nexus, the unnecessary but retained breaths of a Primordial who kept breathing because his soul still recognized the habit.
This breath was none of those. This breath was the first honest breath of a body that had, at last, stopped needing to become something.
In that moment, phantoms of all he was in the past appeared all around him, all of his lives, all of his Incarnations, and they all inhaled alongside him, before they vanished. It was a circle that had finally reached completion.
He exhaled, and the exhalation rebuilt him.
His flesh, which had been scarred by a hundred million years of war, did not heal. He had already decided, in the moment of his fusion, that the scars were records and not damage.
