The battlefield wasn't made of soil and stone—it was memory. Every step Almond took, she sank into visions of who she used to be. The girl with cracked palms and a hunger for vengeance. The lover who never learned how to be loved. The villain in everyone's bedtime stories.
Now, she was war made flesh.
Aeren's grip tightened around her hand as they stood before the shrine—the final anchor of the curse that tethered them to this dying loop. It wasn't just glowing. It was screaming. Bones of the old gods circled its base, whispering with mouths that had long decayed.
"This is it," he murmured. "The origin. The first betrayal."
Almond's voice cracked like thunder through dead skies. "Then let's betray them back."
She walked ahead, her boots pressing into the skull of a long-dead deity, her magic unraveling like black lace in the wind. The air thickened. Time paused. Even the universe knew something irreversible was about to happen.
The first blade appeared from thin air—hovering, trembling. A relic forged from the spine of the god who bled for creation. Only the cursed could wield it. Only the broken could understand it.
"Touch it," Aeren said, his voice hoarse.
Almond stared at the blade. It shimmered like a memory refusing to fade. She reached forward—fingers shaking, heart pounding.
When her skin brushed the handle, everything split.
A scream ripped from her throat as visions flooded her mind—her past lives, each one more violent than the last. A queen who burned her own kingdom. A priestess who kissed her assassin. A demoness who cradled the corpse of her lover for centuries.
It was her. All of it. Her sins, her softness, her truth.
She didn't let go.
"I remember now," she whispered. "I chose this. I chose him. Again and again."
Aeren stepped closer. "Then we rewrite it. For real this time."
The blade pulsed.
The curse trembled.
And the gods?They watched, terrified.
Almond didn't just hold the blade. She became part of it. The metal drank from her rage like wine, hissing against her palm as if thirsting for the blood of anyone who'd dared to forget her name.
In the shrine's dim light, she was no longer a lost soul wrapped in vengeance. She was prophecy fulfilled.
The gods had etched her story in reverse—starting with her damnation and hoping no one would ask how she got there. But fate had never been a straight line. It curved. It burned. It bit back. And she, the cursed child of time, was its rebellion.
The shrine began to hum—low, like a heartbeat buried beneath centuries of silence.
Aeren turned to her, eyes gleaming with both awe and terror. "They'll try to stop us."
She tilted her head, a half-smirk dancing on her lips. "Let them come. I've been bored."
As she raised the blade, a storm ignited above them—not one of weather, but of memory. Specters fell like rain. Old lovers. Dead friends. Enemies with unfinished curses carved into their teeth.
And they wept. All of them.
Not for what she had become… but for what they had made her.
The blade extended, curling with sigils that only the cursed could decipher. One rune pulsed brighter than the rest—"Vetra." It was her forgotten name in a timeline where she hadn't been broken.
"You remember that name?" Aeren asked, stepping closer.
Almond blinked slowly. "I buried her. But now I'm digging her up."
The shrine cracked down the middle like a jaw snapping open. Light spilled out in rivers of golden blood. And from that wound came a whisper that didn't belong to any god they knew.
"Rewrite us," it said. "Rewrite everything."
Her breath caught.
This wasn't about vengeance anymore. It was about resurrection—not of bodies, but of truth.
Almond stepped into the shrine's center, the blade thrumming in her hand. She looked up at the sky, which was now unraveling in threads of starlight, like a canvas being torn from the heavens.
Behind her, Aeren's voice reached her like a prayer wrapped in guilt. "If you do this… we can't go back."
"I never wanted to go back," she whispered. "I only want forward."
And so she cut.
Not flesh.Not time.But the very script of their existence.
She sliced through the lines written by gods who thought themselves poets. She tore through destinies like silk. And with every stroke of the blade, she wrote something new.
A world where love didn't come with curses.
A story where immortality wasn't a punishment.
A timeline where she and Aeren didn't just survive—they thrived.
By the time the sky resealed itself, the shrine was gone. The bones had turned to dust. The blade had vanished into her bloodstream.
And Almond?
She was no longer a pawn in a game she never asked to play.
She was the author now.
The earth beneath her didn't tremble—it obeyed. Every step Almond took was an echo rewritten, a prophecy retwisted at the roots.
Aeren watched her with reverence and fear; not the kind that makes you run—but the kind that makes you kneel. And he did. Not to worship her, but to witness her rebirth.
Because this wasn't a girl chasing vengeance anymore. This was a deity made from undoing.
A new constellation blinked into existence above them—one shaped like a bleeding eye. The sky had changed. The world had blinked. And somewhere in the corners of the cosmos, even the gods whispered to each other in panic.
"She's not supposed to remember," one voice echoed.
"She wasn't supposed to wake," said another.
But Almond was awake. Alive. Aware.
And she wasn't kneeling anymore.
She was rising.