The Sleeper was no longer asleep.
It unfurled not like a beast awakening, nor a god returning, but like a thought remembering itself. Its essence spilled into every corner of the chamber, rewriting gravity, unraveling meaning. Where it passed, walls folded into colors that had no names. Murals became movement. Sound became weight.
Zeirion stood at the center of it all, a statue of stillness against a tide of becoming.
Aralya was behind him, blade drawn, her expression carved in resolve. But even her strength quivered beneath the Sleeper's presence. Not from fear but recognition. The Sleeper was not evil, nor good. It simply was.
Pure potential, unchained.
"You reached into the Spiral," the Sleeper said, voice woven from every version of the past. "You unbound the fates. You should not exist. Yet you do."
Zeirion stepped forward. His eyes blazed not with power, but purpose. "Existence is not permission. It is defiance. I exist because I chose to. I stayed because she asked me to."
He glanced to Aralya.
The Sleeper pulsed. "She anchors you."
"She frees me," he replied.
Silence then sudden collapse.
The chamber shattered like glass, reforming into a limitless void filled with fragments of every world Zeirion had ever touched. Floating cities. Dying stars. Battles paused mid-strike. Tears unshed. Promises made and broken. Every soul he had saved or destroyed.
The Sleeper wove them into a storm.
"Then show me."
"Show me you are worthy to reshape what I once dreamed."
A duel began not of swords, nor sorcery, but essence. Zeirion's soul stood naked before the Sleeper's storm, and for every memory it flung at him, he answered.
The screams of the Skyborn Dominion he bore them.
The betrayal of the Echo-Kings he accepted them.
The peace he'd longed for but never claimed he embraced it.
Every scar became his armor. Every regret became fuel.
And at the eye of the maelstrom, the Sleeper paused.
For the first time, it felt.
Zeirion floated there, burning with truth. "I don't ask to rule your dream. I ask to shape a world where no one needs to wake up screaming."
The Sleeper was silent for a long, eternal moment.
Then
"So be it."
The storm collapsed into a singularity. From it bloomed a seed no larger than Zeirion's palm, pulsing with warmth. The Last Dream. A gift.
A beginning.
Zeirion held it, and for a moment, he was neither conqueror nor Sovereign.
He was a man who had endured the unendurable… and chosen love anyway.
The Sleeper vanished, returning to slumber not out of defeat, but faith.
And Zeirion turned to Aralya.
She stepped forward, her eyes full of all the quiet hopes the world had long forgotten.
"What now?" she asked.
"We plant it," Zeirion said. "Far from war. Far from power. A place where no throne will ever grow."
Together, hand in hand, they left Olyndros.
And in the silence that followed, the stars realigned one final time not to herald dominion, nor ruin…
…but peace.