The war ended so quietly, the silence itself felt wrong.
From the airships of Tekyonix, the orange banners fluttered like patient fire. The world was whole again rebuilt, ordered, peaceful. No demons. No chaos.
Just silence.
Hevan walked through the rebuilt streets of Elaria, now renamed Tekyon Prime. Children played, merchants smiled, priests preached logic instead of faith. The people bowed when he passed, whispering prayers not to gods, but to him.
"Thank you, Savior Hevan."
"You ended the darkness."
"You restored the light."
He smiled when he had to, but it felt like smiling into glass.
Because everywhere he looked, he saw no fear, no passion, no sorrow just efficiency. Humanity had survived, but its pulse had faded.
The nights were worse.
When the stars dimmed and the streets emptied, he'd hear faint whispers from nowhere. The same words, repeating like a memory refusing to die:
> "Peace without feeling… is just another kind of death."
He didn't know whose voice it was at first. But after weeks, he remembered — the man he'd slain in the crater, the one with tired eyes and a broken soul.
Rion.
The "False Savior." The "Demon King." The man who tried to give heart to monsters.
---
One evening, Hevan stood at the edge of the rebuilt volcano, the Grave of the Sixth Continent. The crater had been sealed with reinforced glass and machinery, now a monument. They called it The Fall of Madness.
Yet beneath the layers of molten stone, something glowed faintly violet.
Hevan stared down, feeling something tug inside his chest, not pain, but recognition.
He reached for his Manifesto. It glowed its usual blue, steady and controlled. But for the first time since his summoning, a crack ran through it and within that fracture shimmered a single flicker of purple light.
He froze.
> "Impossible…" he whispered.
The glow pulsed again, faint, weak, but undeniably alive. It whispered across the crater's glass, barely audible.
> "You're no different from me."
Hevan clenched his hand, crushing the light of his Manifesto until it dimmed. But the whisper lingered inside him, beneath his ribs, in the hollow place where something should have been.
---
The next day, Hevan attended a council meeting in Tekyonix's citadel.
The High Chancellor praised him. "The world is whole again. No gods. No kings. Only progress."
Hevan nodded. "Yes. Whole."
"Your duty is done," she continued. "Now we begin the next age the Era of Control."
Hevan's jaw tightened. "Control?"
"Yes," the Chancellor smiled. "Peace is fragile without control."
The words echoed like a wound opening.
Peace. Control. Silence.
He looked out through the glass walls of the citadel, over the endless horizon of orange lights, mechanical, perfect, lifeless.
And for the first time, Hevan wondered if this world, too, had been devoured not by demons, but by reason itself.
He thought of Rion again. Of his broken plea, of his longing to give souls to the soulless.
Perhaps he hadn't wanted to destroy the world. Perhaps he'd only wanted to make it feel alive.
Hevan turned from the Chancellor, from the council, from the city. He walked until the walls vanished behind him.
The night wind carried a single ember from the crater far below faint, violet, flickering against the dark.
He watched it drift skyward.
For a moment, he raised his hand not to destroy it, but to catch it.
And though he didn't say the words aloud, the thought burned in him like something he shouldn't have been capable of feeling:
> "If peace requires emptiness… maybe he was right."
The ember floated away, vanishing into the horizon.
The Savior watched it go.
And for the first time since his summoning. Hevan felt human.
---
- THE END