Time in Ranaesa was never gentle.
What passed as mere minutes in the waking world unraveled into months here—seasons blooming and dying like candle flames in the wind. Qaritas remained, drifting through dreams of forgotten empires, watching echoes of a dead universe play like memory-phantoms across the silver skies.
He saw what had been lost.
Civilizations long since turned to ash paraded before him—species of molten gold and living stone; cities spun from light-music and breath; feasts served in gravity-suspended gardens. He saw lovers of coral and flame; warriors sculpted from stardust; gods who danced only when mortals cried.
It was beautiful.
It was unbearable.
Each vision bloomed, then collapsed. Each life flickered, then died. Their laughter became echoes. Their worship became ruins. Their light became shadow.
And on the thirty-first night, everything changed.
A cold terror ruptured through him—raw and sudden.
Qaritas convulsed in his sleep.
His body, still half-shadow, twisted in agony. His scream tore through the dreamscape like a blade, waking him violently in the bed shaped from moonlight and memory.
"Why does it feel like I'm being torn apart?!"
He wasn't alone.
The silence that answered him wasn't silence—it was pressure. Sentience. Watching. Waiting. Wanting.
The walls around him—woven from dream and star-sand—cracked. Fine fractures, like spiderwebs etched in starlight, spread across the ceiling.
And from those rifts... they came.
Not nightmares. Predators.
Horrors pulled from the marrow of collapsing dimensions.
Cosmic things—faceless, formless, perfect in their hatred.
They didn't walk. They leaked.
Claws of memory. Fangs of regret. Eyes made of devoured truths.
They pierced his essence—not body, not skin, but the very core of what he was still becoming.
Shadow peeled back. Mist shattered. His form quivered, hemorrhaging black-light ichor that hissed as it touched the ground.
A scream broke from him—not of fear, but of revelation.
He was being hunted.
He stumbled out of the bed, breathless in a body that didn't breathe, and floated frantically through the hallway—his shape flickering like a broken constellation.
Then he saw them.
Irteia. Zelios.
Entwined against the dream-tempered wall—legs tangled, mouths fused, lost in the slow burn of ancient affection. Her body curled around him like wind around flame.
He stopped mid-collapse.
"Wh... what are you doing?" Qaritas groaned, voice cracking under pain.
Zelios jerked in shock. As he dropped Irteia. She dragged him down with her.
But Qaritas had already fallen.
He collapsed in the center of the corridor. His form splintered.
Liquid shadow spilled across the floor—thick and pulsing, flecked with stars and glowing veins of corrupted energy.
Zelios was beside him in seconds, panic warping his composed face.
"Why isn't he healing?" Irteia whispered, eyes wide with dread.
Qaritas's wounds pulsed like wounds in a god's memory.
They were not just physical. They were echoes of something deeper—something reaching through the veil of the real.
Zelios's hand trembled.
"This... this isn't a dream wound."
He pressed two fingers to Qaritas's chest, where no heart beat—but something ached.
"He's being attacked in the waking world," Zelios said. "Right now."
Irteia's face paled.
"You mean—?"
"Yes. He's not just dreaming anymore."
Zelios stood. His voice sharpened into command. "Get the Tear of a Titan."
Irteia blinked. "That'll rip him from the dream. He might—"
"He will die if we wait."
She nodded once, and vanished down the corridor.
As Qaritas writhed in silence, eyes wide with agony, Zelios knelt beside him, whispering:
"Hold on, Shadow. You're not alone."
And in that space between a scream and salvation, Qaritas made a choice.
He had been content to drift.
To observe.
To ache.
But now?
Now the void was calling his name in hunger.
Now the stars had opened their mouths and said nothing.
Now the dream no longer cradled—it cut.
And Qaritas was done being silent.
His voice was a flicker—his thoughts unraveling.
He was being pulled apart across realms. Something in the waking world had reached across the barrier. It wanted him gone. Erased. Before he could become.
And as the dream bled into dread, he realized:
He didn't want to die.
Not here.
Not like this.
He wanted—
To live.
To choose.
To matter.
"Let me wake," he whispered.
"Let me become."
And from somewhere, far away...
A sound answered.
A whisper that felt like Ayla's voice—like starlight remembering its warmth.
"Then scream, Qaritas."
"Scream until the void lets go."
He did.
A scream of agony and defiance tore from the hollow of his being. Not a sound—but a rending. A fracture in the veil between Dream and Reality.
The world buckled around him.
His shadow flared.
And he returned to physical world. He returned to himself like a scream swallowed too long.
No breath. No heartbeat. No pain.
Just presence.
Qaritas awoke—not in bed, not in dream—but in the echo of something breaking. The physical world reformed around him in fragments: light bending unnaturally, space writhing like a wounded thing, the gravity of reality whispering his name.
And with it came the ache.
Not his own—but hers.
Ayla.
Something tore at her—not body, but belief. Her name pulsed through his core like a signal flaring across ruined stars.
"Where—" he began to think—
But he already knew.
The moment his awareness settled, he felt it—the battle unfolding across dimensions like a war between thoughts too vast to dream.
He didn't see it with eyes. He didn't hear it with ears.
He knew it.
A storm on a distant asteroid.
Watching her move in supersonic speed.
A woman screaming silently against gods that shouldn't be.
The void itself bleeding as forgotten horrors—Skotosars—slithered out of their unholy cradle.
Ayla stood at the center of it.
And she was breaking.
Not in power—but in purpose.
Her resolve was dimming—fractured by illusions, haunted by image that wore his own, un made body.
Something inside Qaritas twisted—sharper than pain, deeper than rage.
"They made her see me... as them."
That was enough.
He didn't move.
He became.
He didn't travel to her.
He collapsed the distance between needing and knowing.
Between silence... and scream.
The moment he willed it, the veil split.
He stepped through.
To the Skotosars, he was not a god.
He was a reversal.
A thing that should not choose to exist—but had.
And existence obeyed.
The moment he arrived, the laws shifted.
The battlefield buckled as time inhaled. Reality dimmed. Even the void flinched.
Skotosars turned.
Their bodies—twisting cathedrals of grief and rot—arched backward like prayers denied.
They saw him.
They remembered him.
Not because he had come before.
But because the possibility of him had always terrified them.
He raised no weapon.
He wore no crown.
But the void answered to him now.
"She was never yours to haunt."
"You have no claim. She was never written into your hunger."
"I unmake the lies you wear like skin."
His words weren't declarations.
They were corrections.
He edited the Skotosars out of the story—refused to believe in them, and so they ceased to be.
Ayla saw it all.
But Qaritas didn't look at her—not yet.
He couldn't.
Because in her eyes, he saw fear.
Not of the Skotosars.
Of him.
That broke something in him he didn't know he had.
He turned to her finally—no body, no face, just intent shaped into presence.
"You told me to choose," he said.
"I chose to be someone."
But the silence that followed wasn't victory.
It was uncertainty.
It was the moment when a god, freshly born, realized what power looked like—and what it cost.
He had undone monsters with thought.
And Ayla trembled in the aftermath.
Not with awe.
With recognition.
In the core of himself, Qaritas recoiled.
"Am I just another ending pretending to be hope?"
He didn't ask it aloud. He didn't need to.
Because Ayla reached out—not with certainty.
But with hope.
"Then let me hope it means something."
And in that fragile moment, he felt something stir inside him again.
Not power.
Not hunger.
But the echo of purpose.
And then the stars behind her shuddered.
Reality cracked at its edges like eggshells peeling back from flame.
He turned sharply—senses expanding.
Something else was coming.
Something watching.
And Qaritas, for all his newness, knew this truth:
Whatever this story was...
It had just stopped being his alone.
Komus fell to his knees, breath caught in the hollow curve of awe. The space around him still trembled, scarred with the echo of a silence that had devoured gods.
Ash fell from the stars like snow.
He turned his gaze to Ayla, voice breaking the hush like a prayer whispered at the edge of creation.
"...Ayla. Who is he?"
She didn't answer at first. Her eyes never left the figure who stood unarmed at the center of unbeing.
Then, with the reverence of a name spoken once in a thousand lifetimes, she said:
"He is Qaritas."
Komus blinked—once. Twice.
Then gasped, eyes widening like new stars.
"Qaritas?" he breathed, voice nearly reverent. "That's not a name—that's a turning point."
He stood slowly, hands out as if to touch the air he'd just watched rewritten.
"He didn't fight them. He didn't cast or conjure or command. He simply—refused their truth. Ayla, do you understand what that means? He unwrote what should have been immutable!"
His voice climbed like rising gravity, disbelief morphing into ecstasy.
"By the stars, I saw it. He rewrote the void's memory with a thought. The Skotosars were, and then—they weren't."
Komus spun, stardust clinging to his cloak as he gestured wildly.
"He unstitched existence. He told the lie of their being, 'no'—and the cosmos listened!"
He looked to Qaritas now, like a devout before a relic, trembling but unable to look away.
"Do you know what you are?" Komus whispered. "You're the silence between heartbeats that chooses to be sound. You're the pause at the end of prophecy that dares to speak again."
Then he turned back to Ayla, eyes ablaze with an almost fevered joy.
"We can win."
His voice softened, but it pulsed with gravity, like something Zyoku himself might have carved into the bones of a planet.
"Ayla. If he stands with us—truly stands—we aren't just starlight against the dark anymore. We are the threshold. The rewrite. The god the void never accounted for."
He stepped toward Qaritas, slowly, with the cautious awe one might show a black hole that smiles.
"You must come with us," Komus said, voice low with wonder. "To Rygartha. To where the threads of destiny knot themselves and dare not look away."
He began to recite names now, each like an invocation, each like another constellation lighting in the dark.
"Niraí, Gatekeeper of Realms Untouched. Xriana, who hears fate breathing. Tysesh, whose thoughts are deeper than forgetting. Kelene, sculptor of form and formlessness. Oreian, bearer of planetary memory..."
The names kept falling from his lips, not as roll call—but like calling down ancient stars:
"Hydeius. Cree. Jrin, Rzius, Daviyi. Senyn and Yonzei. Zyoku and Erivyane. Ræzun, Skersaus..."
Komus's eyes were glowing now.
"They will feel you before they see you. They will remember you, even if they've never met you. Because your echo touches the thread of everything."
His voice dropped to a hush.
"And they've been waiting for you. All of us have."
Ayla, cheeks tinged with the faint blush of firelight long-hidden, stepped beside Komus.
She looked at Qaritas not as a leader, nor even as an equal—but as someone who dared to still hope.
"If... if you would come with us," she said softly, "Rygartha would open its gates. I would open mine."
A pause. She looked away. "You saved me. And I think... I think the universe remembers when someone chooses to save, instead of destroy."
Komus nodded slowly, eyes never leaving Qaritas.
"You are not a weapon, Qaritas," he said. "You are the story rewriting itself."
Then he smiled.
"And the other Ascendants? Oh—they're going to absolutely lose their minds."