Even as Hrolyn stood in the eye of unraveling time,
one truth endured:
The First would return.
Not as he was—
but as hunger always does:
reborn, patient, inevitable.
So in his final act,
Hrolyn did not curse.
He created.
He poured silence, memory,
and the last ember of mercy
into the Void.
And from that womb of absence,
something stirred.
Not a cry.
Not light.
Not life.
Just... a presence.
A shape made from silence,
a flicker at the center of unbeing.
A seed.
It was not born of light,
but of its failure.
Not forged by law,
but from what law had forsaken.
It did not burn—
it endured.
It did not speak—
it listened.
Across collapsing timelines,
through the graves of gods
and the splinters of broken myth,
it drifted—
a silent witness
to the undoing of universes.
A shadow without a world.
A question without a tongue.
A ghost waiting for soil that no longer existed.
Hrolyn gave it no sword.
Only the burden of becoming.
Not to triumph,
but to endure.
Not to rule,
but to remember.
In the stillness left by fallen gods,
the Shadow would rise.
Not a king.
A question.
Could a god born of nothing
become the beginning
of something worth saving?
In the quiet beyond memory,
the Shadow saw—
not with eyes,
but with something older than sight.
And in the dark,
a vision bloomed.
Oisdara.
Not skeletal and scorched as it now lay,
but radiant.
A realm of harmony,
where stars sang
and gods danced through nebulae like fireflies.
Then it saw Hrolyn.
Not bent beneath sorrow,
but whole—
laughing, spinning with a woman
of impossible beauty.
Her hair shimmered like a living constellation.
Her eyes, amethyst dreams.
Her name was Hex.
And she was pregnant.
"He'll be the new dawn,"
Hrolyn whispered,
resting a trembling hand on her stomach.
"The one who brings peace.
Our son... the next age of gods."
The memory glowed—
until the smoke came.
The next vision struck like a blade.
Blood. Stone.
Hex screaming.
Pushing through agony
as Hrolyn caught their child.
The stars wept.
They named him: Eon.
And for a breath,
joy reigned.
Then the twisting began.
Nine years later.
Eyes too still.
Too bright.
Eon hummed as he plucked the eyes
from his nanny's skull—
like petals.
Hrolyn stopped him.
But something had already bloomed in that boy.
And it was not life.
Then came the cascade:
Genocide. Slavery.
Gods broken on their own altars.
Mortals twisted by worship and ruin.
The Djallra—once titans of justice—
fell into corruption,
becoming generals of ruin.
Their mortal disciples became the Forsaken—
gods born from horror.
Eon bathed in worship...
then in blood.
He built a harem of a hundred—
gods, mortals, titans alike.
He tortured them.
Discarded them.
Their screams became scripture.
His children—the light-eaters—
fed on brightness, on flesh, on hope.
Beings of appetite
without end.
"I should have ended him,"
Hrolyn whispered once,
"before she saw what he became."
One final memory flared.
Hex and Hrolyn,
arguing.
Her cheeks streaked with starlight tears.
"He's our child!" she cried.
"You would kill our son?"
"If it saves a universe..."
he whispered,
"...yes."
Eon had taken a new name.
The First Evil.
Galaxies became graveyards.
Moons cracked like bones.
Light hid from hunger.
And in the silence of all that ruin,
the Shadow heard
the last truth Hrolyn had ever dared admit:
"I waited too long.
Even if she hated me...
I should have done it."
A scream split the void.
The vision vanished.
And the Shadow woke—
alone, drifting in silence.
The clash between father and son echoing through the void.
Hrolyn raised his staff
and conjured the Ashveil Halo—
a ring of seething entropy
forged from the dust of a collapsed hypernova.
Long ago, it had erased civilizations
from even memory.
It screamed as it spun—
a disc of ravenous nothing—
and tore through space,
shredding strands of divine thread from Hrolyn's cloak.
But he did not move.
Across the battlefield,
The First raised a corpse-hand.
From the bones of a fallen Lathian Quintar,
he conjured the Cage of Collideon—
bars forged from infinite time loops and paradox,
a prison so absolute
that even ideas could not escape.
But Hrolyn only whispered a name:
"Zhytheon."
A god-word.
A crack in eternity.
And a memory tore loose—
a wound unhealed across centuries.
He saw her again.
Hex.
Her voice, a song of woven light.
Her laugh, breaking silence like starlight on still water.
Her hands, cradling their son for the first time.
Then—
The scream.
The crunch of ribs.
The First feeding.
He devoured her in pieces:
first her dreams,
then her voice,
then her flesh.
He left her eyes for last—
because they still looked at him with love.
She didn't scream.
She only whispered his true name—
a name he could no longer remember.
That was her final gift.
She became silence.
He became hunger.
The staff in Hrolyn's hands surged,
transformed by the cataclysm of a Thorne–Zytkow collapse—
a star swallowed by another star.
It burned with the heat of gods long dead.
He struck.
Reality screamed.
The Dross Gate opened—
a tear in existence that swallowed light and law.
The First was caught—
half-consumed by the liminal.
His flesh peeled away in black flakes,
revealing eyes,
and more eyes,
and more.
"I HAVE DESTROYED MORE THAN YOU HAVE LOVED!"
he bellowed,
clawing at himself,
ripping bone from soul.
Hrolyn whispered:
"Aun'darion."
The battlefield held its breath.
Even the stars paused.
A dark flame bloomed in Hrolyn's hand—
older than the Big Bang,
hotter than paradox.
It was the First's light—
ripped from his newborn heart
before he devoured it.
Now returned
as judgment.
"Fascinating,"
the First said, smiling through blood.
His laughter cracked like glass
in a dead cathedral.
"You still believe you could have changed something.
It's laughable."
"You were the void's answer to my hope,"
Hrolyn said.
"And all hope must be answered."
"You gave me the void once.
You'll do it again.
All things return to their hunger."
The words echoed like prophecy.
But they landed like a curse.
Reality itself flinched.
Long before the eyes.
Before the bloodlust.
There had been a boy.
He had asked why stars shine.
Hrolyn had said:
"Because they are songs you can see."
That child was gone.
Buried again and again,
across lifetimes.
Each grave carved
in a different age of the stars.
The flame ignited.
It did not burn—
it peeled.
It tore through The First's eyes—
judgment incarnate.
His flesh bubbled.
His crown shattered.
Molten gold wept from his armor.
Each stream
a slow, sacred agony.
The flame stripped memory.
Mercy.
All that he pretended to be.
And beneath it all—
her eyes.
Her scream.
The silence that followed.
No god escapes what lies beneath the skin.
And there,
in the raw marrow of regret,
he remembered her.
The one he unmade.
The First sang a hymn of agony.
Gas giants wept.
Time knelt.
He did not die.
He scattered—
his form unraveling into cursed dust,
his name dissolving before it could be remembered.
He drifted in silence—
curled like smoke in a tomb of nothing.
Listening.
Remembering.
Smiling.
He would wait.
He always had.
The universe did not die in thunder.
Nor in fire.
It kneeled.
Spine snapped.
Mouth open.
A surrender too old to scream.
The Veltraxis Core cracked.
Time convulsed.
Its veins spilled memory like warm blood.
And in its final exhale—
slow, shuddering,
as if the cosmos itself were bleeding—
Silence returned.
True silence.
Perfect.
Unbroken.
And in that silence—
the Shadow awoke.
Not born.
Not made.
It simply became.
No eyes.
No lungs.
No flesh.
Only memory.
Only pain.
Only potential.
It drifted through void—
where light had never lived
and darkness had not yet despaired.
The blood of dying gods
curled around it like incense smoke.
It had no name.
Only a pulse.
A phantom pain
of a war not fought,
a love not lived,
a scream never born.
And for the first time,
the Shadow listened.
Not to stars.
Not to silence.
But to the aching question
at the center of itself.
Why do I exist?
And in that question,
a name began to form.
A name the void itself would one day fear.