The stars weren't dead.
Just silent.
As if the cosmos had turned its face, unwilling to witness the ruins of its own architects.
Caelum, the Fourth, stood where the heart of creation had once pulsed. The Null Realm—now a drifting corpse of shattered marble, twisted spires, and floating shards of broken dreams. The castle that once sang with divine breath was mute. Dust moved in slow, reluctant spirals, and space itself seemed to hold its breath around him.
He looked like a shadow draped in robes, motionless but not still.
His body bore the weight of catastrophe—torn flesh, scorched symbols carved into skin by ancient judgment, and a missing eye where too much truth had once been seen.
They had called him weak. Lesser. Silent among gods who roared with thunder and flame. But it was he who had broken the sky.
And he would do it again.
He exhaled. Even his breath sounded wrong in this place. Thin. Hollow. Empty.
Her name reached him like a whisper pressed into the cracks of time.
"Nori."
He said it aloud, just once. The sound hit the stones like a blade striking bone.
He remembered her still—eyes clear as starlight before sunrise, her voice low and unafraid. She hadn't tried to change him. She had seen him, even when he barely understood himself.
And because of that, they cursed her.
The others—Vireon, Aelor, Seren, and Drazel—some too afraid, others too ambitious. They sealed her spirit in silence and turned Caelum into a weapon. His grief didn't consume him. It awoke him.
The scream he unleashed that day shattered sixty universes. Entire timelines burned to ash in the heat of his sorrow.
They chained him in return. Buried him beneath their guilt and called it justice.
But not one of them ever spoke her name again.
A tremor stirred the dust beneath his feet. Not sound. Not force.
A heartbeat.
Faint. Fragile. New.
He turned toward it slowly. Somewhere beyond the scattered edge of the old realm, something pulsed with divine rhythm. Weak. But alive.
A flicker of what had been lost. Or what could return.
His single eye narrowed.
He had slept long enough.
"Let them stay gone," Caelum muttered. "If no one else remembers… I will."
And with that, he walked forward—into the dark, toward the echo.
Not to reclaim what was taken.
To begin again.