The war had ended with silence.
Not peace, not triumph, but a silence that stretched across the threads of reality like a held breath. The One Who Erases Because It Must had been defeated—not by power alone, but by the very thing it had sought to destroy. Remembrance. Name. Identity.
Aiden stood at the center of what remained.
Not much remained.
Stars were absent from the sky, as if afraid to be counted. Time itself fluttered like torn parchment, and in the hollows where civilizations once thrived, only echoes dared linger. Aiden could still feel them—those echoes. Not sounds, but impressions. The weight of memory. The cost of survival.
The Blank Sky Pact was scattered.
Some had returned to their fragments of reality, restored in part by their own names, clinging to whatever structure had not been unraveled in the final collapse. Others—too many—had faded before they could be remembered again. But their essence lingered inside Aiden, written into the pages of his mind.
