The Hall of Celestial Accord was silent. For the first time in eons, the great chamber where the Pantheon had once gathered to weave the fabric of reality stood empty. The star-charts etched into the floor, which once shimmered with the vibrant energy of cosmic law, were now dim and cold. I stood at their center, the Supreme Deity, the architect of this order, and felt nothing but the profound stillness of a machine whose purpose had been fulfilled. The Divine Decree—the foundational will that had guided existence—was complete. Its final command had been executed.
A whisper of movement, subtle as a shift in gravity, announced a presence I had not felt in a long age. I did not need to turn. "You have come," I spoke, my voice the only sound in the vast emptiness.
"Did you think I would not?" the voice of the former God of Samsara, now stripped of his title and vast power, was lighter, yet carried a resolve that the weight of divinity had often obscured. "You are witnessing the end of your life's work. I thought you might appreciate the company."
I finally turned to regard him. He seemed both less and more than he had been. No longer radiating the terrifying authority over life and death, he instead possessed a quiet certainty, a clarity that came only with absolute choice.
"It is not an end," I said, gazing back at the dormant star-charts. "It is a conclusion. There is a difference."
"Semantics," he replied, a faint smile touching his lips. "To the realms below, it will feel the same. The great celestial clockwork has stopped ticking. How long before they realize the chains are gone?"
He was speaking of his sister, the new Goddess of Samsara. His masterpiece, and his successor. By the covenant we three had sworn, her reign was now absolute, and his intervention in the cosmic order was irrevocably severed.
"The chains, as you call them, were also the pillars that held up reality," I reminded him, though the words felt hollow even to me. "Without the Decree to guide them, what will fill the void? Chaos? Or ambition?"
"Let it be her will," he said, and there was no doubt in his tone, only a father's pride, a brother's faith. "Let it be the will of all of them. You built a perfect, self-sustaining system. The ultimate achievement for a god. But you never accounted for one variable."
"And what is that?"
"Choice," he said, the word simple and devastating. "You gave them a script, but you never asked if they wanted to act in the play. I have simply returned the script to its author."
He stepped forward, standing beside me to look upon the silent maps of creation. "The 'Final Chapter of the Divine Decree' was not your last command to the universe, old friend. It was my command to you. It was our choice to end it."
A tremor, faint but undeniable, passed through the foundations of the celestial realm. It was not a sound, but a sensation—the feeling of a key turning in a lock for the last time.
The silence of the heavens was no longer passive. It was waiting.
And in that silence, I, the Supreme Deity, understood. My role was no longer to speak. It was to listen. And to witness what would answer when it spoke back.