The Hollow Crown had begun fusing to Kaelion's skull.
He felt it with each step along the corpse-road - not pain exactly, but the terrible intimacy of silver filaments threading through his parietal bone, the crown's jagged points drinking from the rivers of thought beneath. The weightless circlet should have been cold against his brow, yet it burned with absence, a hollow fire that left frost patterns spreading across his right temple.
The sky above the obsidian path was a dying thing.
Great arterial rents tore across the firmament, each pulsating wound revealing glimpses of the celestial machinery beyond - silver threads thicker than mountain ranges, vibrating with the strain of holding creation together. Kaelion's corrupted eye (the other now permanently sutured shut with filaments that twitched in time to the crown's whispers) perceived what mortal vision could not:
This was no mere path, but a vein.
Black ichor pumped sluggishly beneath the road's glassy surface, each surge carrying the liquefied remnants of broken laws toward the distant heart-chamber. His boots left temporary voids where they touched the ground, the obsidian refusing to remember his passage.
The air smelled of burning hair and divine offal.
And something else beneath it - the iron-sweet stench of the Godforge's birth pangs, the same scent that had clung to his father's robes after long nights crafting impossible edicts. The memory came unbidden, sharper than it should be given all he'd sacrificed: his father's ink-stained hands guiding his own to mix the nine forbidden pigments, the old man's voice murmuring about balance between creation and unmaking.
The crown's whispers slithered through the recollection, tainting it:
"A name for the nameless..."
"A law written in the Maker's blood..."
"The last memory of flesh..."
Each demand left frost crystallizing along his jawline.
His shadow's absence ached worse than any wound. The space where it should stretch behind him instead pooled into a perfect void, swallowing not just light but sound, heat, even the occasional thought that wandered too close to that hungry edge. Only the crown's murmurs filled that emptiness, their cadence matching the arrhythmic pulsing of the Godforge Core in his chest.
The heart-chamber emerged from the haze like a half-remembered nightmare.
Not a temple, but a colossal ribcage - each bone the color of tarnished silver, curved inward like the fingers of a grasping hand. Between the ribs hung tattered remnants of the original celestial script, fluttering laws that bled ink where the wind (though there was no wind here) worried at their edges.
Three thrones remained occupied amidst the ruin of lesser seats.
To the left slouched the God of Unmaking, his form an ever-eroding sculpture of salt and static. The right hand throne flickered with the unstable presence of the Goddess of Fractured Time, her body oscillating between childhood and decay so rapidly it hurt to perceive.
Between them, enthroned upon a seat of screaming faces that melted and reformed with each blink, sat the First Scribe.
Not a god.
Something older.
Kaelion's silver-threaded arm spasmed violently, the filaments beneath his skin forming words against his will.
"YOU ARE THE INHERITOR"
The First Scribe stood in a rustle of unraveling identities - first an old man with eyes like dying stars, then a starved child clutching a broken stylus, finally resolving into a mirror of Kaelion himself, but with pupils that contained entire collapsing universes.
"We feared this day," it said, its voice the sound of ten thousand pages turning in unison. "The moment an Arcanthus would return to claim their birthright."
The revelation unfolded like a poisoned lotus in Kaelion's mind:
The Arcanthus line had never been mere scribes.
They were erasers.
The Pantheon's living weapons, bred to undo creation itself when the laws grew corrupt. The "massacre" of his clan had been a desperate attempt to stop the cycle - not an extermination, but a failed pruning.
The crown's whispers became a scream.
"WRITE THE LAST LAW"
Kaelion understood now - the final edict would require not ink, but the unmaking of the scribe who wrote it. To fix creation's flaws, he must become both pen and executioner.
The First Scribe moved first.
Its attack was not physical, but existential - an attempt to rewrite Kaelion from the inside out. The battlefield shifted through three realms,
The Blood-Scriptorium
Where each drop of Kaelion's blood became a competing law as it struck the ground. Edicts warred in midair, their collisions birthing temporary realms that collapsed screaming into nothingness. The walls here were lined with living vellum, their surfaces blistering with the pain of containing such truths.
The Hollow of Might-Have-Beens
A place where every choice branched into screaming futures. Kaelion saw himself a hundred times over - some crowned kings, others broken prophets, one particularly horrifying version wearing the First Scribe's melting face. His double's laughter echoed through the chaos, the sound of it peeling layers from Kaelion's resolve.
The Moment Before First Dawn
Where the First Scribe's original sin pulsed like a rotten heart. Here, the air was thick with unborn potential, every breath tasting of might-be and never-was. The tools of creation floated untouched - the knife of what-might-have-been, the inkwell of unborn gods' blood, the parchment that was also a mouth.
When the final blow came, it was not with the Oblivion Sceptre, but with the crown itself.
Kaelion plunged its jagged points into the First Scribe's chest, feeling the ancient being unravel through his fingers. The scream that followed was not sound but the absence of it - a perfect silence that unmade everything it touched.
As the Pantheon's heart-chamber collapsed around him, the crown fused fully to his skull with a sound like the universe exhaling.
The last thing he heard before the silence claimed him was his own voice, echoing from somewhere outside time.
"All crowns are cages. This one just fits better."