The axe blade fell in a steady rhythm, meeting the wood at the exact same point every time.
The impact was dry, precise.
Chip after chip piled up beside the cut trunk, forming an irregular mound on the packed earth.
The man breathed in time with the motion.
Black strands slipped loose from the binding at the back of his head, moving faintly—even when the wind died.
When he raised his face to assess the cut, something golden flared for an instant in his eyes, too intense for the filtered light of the forest.
Strike.
Withdrawal.
Another strike.
Around him, the forest remained alive.
Wind passed through the canopy, birds argued over invisible territories, leaves shifted beneath small animals that did not reveal themselves.
In the distance, laughter.
Children's voices, loose, uneven, mixed with the far-off sound of running footsteps.
There was no urgency in them.
No fear.
Only presence.
The axe fell once more.
And stopped in the air.
Not because the arm hesitated—but because the sound died.
No echo.
No birds.
No leaves.
The world did not fall silent.
It forgot how to make noise.
The man lifted his head slowly.
"…?"
The word did not come out.
Then the scream came.
It did not cut through the air.
It did not vibrate.
It found no resistance. It simply existed, tearing something that should not be touched.
The man ran.
The cabin door burst open with too much force, slamming against the inner wall—the sound was too loud for a dead space.
Inside, something was wrong.
Not immediately visible.
Wrong in the air.
Wrong in the way the space held itself together.
His eyes swept the interior of the room before his body could advance.
The children came first.
They floated, suspended a few inches off the ground, their bodies far too still to be alive.
Their faces open in absolute despair, mouths stretched in screams that produced no sound at all.
Their eyes glazed, fixed on something they could not reach.
The world seemed to tilt.
At the center of the cabin, a woman hung slightly forward.
Hair in shades of deep blue and violet spilled over her shoulders, too heavy to move.
Her chest was open.
Not torn.
Open.
Blood ran in thick strands, dripping from the hand of someone holding a still-pulsing heart.
Each drop that struck the floor sounded too loud.
Too slow.
His gaze traveled up that arm that did not tremble.
The skin was pale, but it did not reflect the cabin's light.
There was a contained, shadowed sheen to it, like something that refused to answer the world around it.
The forearm bore the weight effortlessly.
Blood flowed without altering posture.
His gaze rose.
Along the unmoving torso.
Along a stance far too calm for that scene.
Black hair fell short, bound irregularly, with longer, misaligned strands reaching the nape—motionless, despite the total absence of wind.
Nothing about him reacted to the environment.
It was the environment that seemed to have adjusted its existence around that figure.
Then he found the eyes.
Purple.
Too deep to reflect the cabin's interior.
The pupil was not round.
It elongated subtly, vertical, like the slit of something that had never belonged to human form.
The eyes burned from within, like contained arcane embers—not with fury, but with permanence.
The presence did not threaten through force.
It threatened because it did not need to.
The man felt the iron answer inside him before he understood what he was seeing.
The name tore out of his throat like a cut:
"…Éreon."
Instinct came before thought.
The metal beneath the ground tried to rise.
Nothing happened.
He pushed.
The iron answered…
And died.
It darkened before taking shape, as if reminded of something it could not defy.
The axe vibrated in his hand.
The strike came straight.
No hesitation.
Aimed at Éreon's center.
Before it reached halfway, space folded.
There was no impact.
A simple gesture of the hand.
The world lost priority.
The man was ripped from the ground and hurled out of the cabin like a weightless body.
The wall exploded into planks and dust as he tore through it, rolling across the hard earth until he stopped on his back, air fleeing his lungs.
He spat blood.
Dark.
Thick.
The ground spun too slowly.
Footsteps.
Calm.
Measured.
Éreon exited the cabin without haste.
Behind him, visible through the open door and the shattered wall, the children's bodies still floated, motionless, suspended in the same soundless scream.
The heart was released.
It hit the ground with a wet sound too heavy to ignore.
"You managed to hide for a long time, Telvaris."
He stopped a few steps away.
The purple gaze remained fixed. There was no hurry in it.
"Twelve years isolated from the world. Long enough to forget how it smells when it starts to rot."
A short pause.
Not for effect. For weight.
Éreon spoke:
"It was also the time it took to slip off its axis," he said, with absolute calm.
"And you felt nothing… because you were too far away to hear it when it began to break."
Telvaris, on his knees, breathed with difficulty.
The ground beneath his hands felt farther away than it should exist.
"The wars began small," Éreon continued. "As always. Disputes over symbols, over ancient thrones, over names that no longer carried any weight."
A pause.
Éreon did not need to raise his voice.
This was not an account.
It was inventory.
"Then… the Thrones moved."
Blood ran through his fingers, dripping onto the ground.
"Not out of hatred.
But out of fear of becoming unnecessary."
Golden eyes lifted, incandescent, locked onto Éreon.
Telvaris recognized that tone.
It was not a threat.
It was record.
"No…" Telvaris's voice came out rough, but steady. "Don't do anything to them."
Éreon inclined his head slightly, as one who acknowledges the attempt.
"While you were cutting wood," he said, "empires fell. Oaths were broken. Thrones collapsed over decisions made out of time."
"Even when the world begins to unravel, some choices are still collected."
The children's bodies trembled faintly in the air.
"They have no part in this," Telvaris insisted. "Take me. Do to me whatever you came to do… the children are not to blame."
Silence.
The plea did not reach him.
Not because it was weak—but because it arrived too late to matter.
Then:
"They are not guilty.
They are proof."
The purple gaze met the golden.
"And you know this did not begin here."
"You killed when you still had the option not to."
There was no accusation in the sentence.
Only fact.
Telvaris felt it before he saw it.
Footsteps.
Too close to have begun there.
"Not out of hatred," Éreon continued. "But because you believed you could still choose without paying."
The figure behind him stopped.
The air grew denser.
"You believed you could touch what is mine…"
"…and keep living without paying the price?"
Éreon raised his hands.
Not in threat.
In recognition.
"Nothing that happens now is reaction."
Telvaris tried to move.
His body did not respond.
"Take me…" his voice broke. "Take me."
Éreon did not approach.
"Everything that is taken demands return."
A brief pause.
Irrevocable.
"And what was already mine… will not be recovered."
Sound returned to the world in that same instant.
Not as explosion.
As order.
"Oblivion."
The word crossed space like an absolute command.
The children's bodies lost contour.
There was no visible pain.
There was no time.
The world simply stopped sustaining them.
"DADDY—"
The scream came whole.
Too late.
Telvaris screamed.
But the scream died in his throat.
The sound existed inside him, but found no passage.
He tried to advance.
The ground held him where he was.
Fingers digging into the earth as if he could tear something from it.
Air went in wrong.
Came out wrong.
The world remained there.
The trees.
The wind.
The sky.
All too intact for what had just been torn away.
His hand struck the ground once.
Then again.
Without rhythm.
Without force.
A dry sound.
Useless.
Éreon watched.
The gaze was not cold.
It was final.
"Everything has a price."
Telvaris lifted his head.
"And yours…" Éreon concluded, "…has just been collected."
There was only one movement behind Telvaris.
A short inhalation.
The blade crossed space a single time.
No extra force.
No hesitation.
The head separated from the body before thought could form.
For a single instant—one that should not exist—Telvaris still caught a glimpse of the one who came only to kill him.
The skin was pale.
But did not reflect light.
Black hair fell short, bound irregularly, with longer, misaligned strands reaching the nape.
Black eyes.
Not empty.
Attentive.
There was no hatred in them.
Only contained hunger.
Like that of something that does not chase its prey…
because it knows it cannot go anywhere.
The head touched the ground.
The sound was dry.
Definitive.
Then the world cracked.
Not in fire.
Not in light.
Like glass under ancient tension.
The cabin walls fragmented into broken planes. The forest split into misaligned reflections.
Blood froze in the air as red blades.
Everything shattered.
Telvaris gasped.
Pain drove through his skull like an incandescent nail hammered from the inside out.
He staggered, hand to his temple, as the devastated yard vibrated beneath his feet—not in collapse, but in resonance.
Then something made itself present.
Not in the air.
Inside.
"This was only one of the veils."
The voice did not sound.
It formed.
Sweet.
"Not all of them show what was. Some show what collects."
The world around him seemed to withdraw, as if making space for what spoke within him.
"What you saw is not immediate punishment," the presence continued. "It is persistent consequence."
A pause.
Felt, not heard.
"There are deaths that do not end stories. They only open debts."
The silence remained.
Not as absence.
As waiting.
Something moved inside Telvaris.
Not as thought.
As faceless memory.
The name almost came.
Died before reaching the tongue.
And the well, far away, breathed.
Something ancient—something he already knew—awoke.