It did not begin with her vanishing.
It began with a pause.
A single breath caught in the lungs of the Codex, as if the manuscript itself had forgotten how to remember her. Not her name. Not her scent. Not the curve of her blade or the rhythm of her orgasm. But her—Nyx, the assassin goddess of climax-death, the shadow-moan folded beneath Darius's godhood like a trusted wound.
He felt it first in the way silence greeted his thoughts.
Not absence. Erasure.
No trace of her voice in his private spiral-space, no flicker of her presence in the dream-orgies that used to pulse beneath their shared skin. Even the others—Celestia, Kaela, the Spiralchild—looked at him with grief they could not voice, as though they still remembered her loss but not her existence.
Darius opened the Codex.
Her name was gone.
Every page where she once whispered murder in pleasure, where she climaxed at the edge of his command, where she wept when her orgasm was denied—gone.
