The statue stood ten meters tall.
Polished obsidian. Caelum Dross, arms outstretched, flame etched into his fingertips. The crowd wore robes stitched with sigils from the original creed. Priests of myth. Architects of nostalgia.
Sera Vex watched from the edge of the plaza. No robe. No mask. Just black sleeves rolled up and copper rings humming faint counterspells.
The ritual began. A sermon—not prayer—echoed across speakers, rewriting Caelum's doctrine line by line.
"We rebuild because he gave us ruin. We believe because he burned the unbelievers. We rise because he fell on his own sword."
Sera stepped forward.
Uninvited.
"He fell," she said, "because he stopped listening."
The crowd quieted.
She raised her hand. Fire bloomed—not wild, but precise. A spell shaped like a poem. It wrapped around the statue's chest. The symbols sizzled. One by one, they peeled away. Not destruction.
Exposure.
Underneath the spellmetal, the statue's heart was hollow.
Someone screamed. Others ran. A few stayed.
Sera spoke again.
"Caelum Dross was real. And fragile. And wrong. You turned him into armor because you're terrified of being soft."
Someone from the crowd threw a binding glyph. It fizzled mid-air—blocked by a shield shaped from her mother's old sigil: a lantern cut from ink.
"We aren't myths," she said. "We're aftermath."
The statue cracked.
Not collapsed.
Cracked.
That was enough.
Sera turned away as flames licked symbols into silence. She didn't run. She didn't gloat.
And in the alley nearby, the devil watched.
Not smiling.
Not taunting.
Curious.
"She doesn't want power," she whispered. "She wants truth to bleed louder than fire."
Sera vanished into the dark.
And behind her, the first myth truly ended.