The silence after the singularity was deafening. Lira knelt in the crater's heart, Alex's smoldering scar pulsing like a dying star in her palm. Her right eye socket was an empty void, weeping liquid shadow. Her left arm fused sunsteel and Eclipse Shard hung limp, veins of gold and void throbbing up to her shoulder. Around her, the Sanctum lay in ruins, survivors staring in hollow silence.
Veya approached, her cultists bowing. "The Mother of Embers… the prophecy is fulfilled. Nothing has saved us."
Lira's voice scraped like stone. "Alex isn't nothing." The scar flared, searing her skin.
Yara shoved through the crowd, her gaze locked on Lira's ruined eye. "What did it cost?"
"Everything," Lira whispered.
At dusk, the horizon cracked. Not with creators or drones—but with gravity. Trees ripped upward. Stones hovered, then imploded. The sky peeled back like burnt skin, revealing a swirling vortex of fractured realities.
"THE ECLIPSE WAS A DOOR. YOU OPENED IT."
The voice wasn't the creators'. It was older—the First Flame's true maker: The Weaver of Realms.
Lira's scar-arm ignited, Nameless Flame roaring. "Show yourself!"
A figure coalesced from the vortex—a humanoid shape woven from collapsing stars and unraveling time. Its face shifted: Alex's anguish, Lira's defiance, the heir's arrogance. "YOU ARE THE SCAR. THE ERROR. NOW YOU WILL BE UNMADE."
Yara rallied the survivors. "Barricade the inner sanctum! Kinetic-shielders, form up!" Rebels and cultists clashed even as reality warped.
Lira charged the Weaver. Her scar-arm unleashed a torrent of Nameless Flame, but the Weaver absorbed it, threads of golden fire stitching into its form. "FEED ME. MAKE ME STRONGER."
Do it, hissed the Flame in her mind. Burn the world to ash.
Lira recoiled. The recoil shattered her collarbone. She screamed—not from pain, but from the void where Alex's presence once lived. "Alex! If you're in that scar… fight!"
The scar pulsed.
The Weaver's hand closed around Lira's throat. "YOUR FLAME IS MINE—"
A blade of pure voidfire speared its chest.
Alex stood behind it, his body remade—not flesh, but living shadow interlaced with starlight. The Devourer's scar blazed on his chest like a black sun. "Get. Away. From. Her."
The voidfire eroded the Weaver. Reality screamed as threads of time snapped.
"Alex!" Lira gasped.
His eyes met hers—one star-white, one infinite black. "The singularity didn't kill me. It freed me." He yanked the blade. "Now let's kill a god."
The Battle:
Alex moved like liquid night. Voidfire poured from his scar, corroding the Weaver's threads. But each blast cost him: his shadow-form flickered, destabilizing. Starlight leaked from his wounds like blood.
Lirafought with brutal precision. Her scar-arm shattered the Weaver's limbs with Nameless Flame, but the corruption spread with every strike. Gold-and-black veins climbed her neck. Her remaining eye glowed hellish gold.
The Weaver retaliated by warping space. It hurled fragments of the Sanctum like missiles. Rebels died screaming as time-loops aged them to dust or regressed them to infants.
Alex took a direct hit meant for Lira. His shadow-arm dissolved. "Don't stop!" he roared, reforming it with a surge of voidfire—but his star-eye dimmed.
Lira shattered the Weaver's knee. The Nameless Flame backlash charred her ribs black. She tasted ash, felt memories fray—her mother's face blurred.
Yara's voice cut through the chaos. "The Shard! Use the Eclipse Shard together!"
The Weaver loomed, threads knitting its wounds. "YOU ARE STILL MORTAL. STILL WEAK."
Lira locked eyes with Alex. "Now!"
They slammed their scarred hands—Lira's fused Sunsteel-Shard arm, Alex's voidfire-wreathed shadow—into the ground.
- The Nameless Flame and Voidfire collided.
- The Eclipse Shard embedded in Lira's arm detonated.
- Light and shadow consumed the Weaver.
Lira's arm shattered below the elbow. The Nameless Flame roared out of her, tearing through her soul. She felt her humanity shred—compassion, fear, hope—burned away. Only purpose remained.
Alex's shadow-form imploded. He collapsed, his body corporeal again but ravaged. The Devourer's scar split open, voidfire hemorrhaging. "Lira… it's… killing me…"
The Weaver shrieked as the Eclipse energy unraveled it. "THIS REALITY… IS A SCAR… WE WILL RETURN—"
It dissolved into threads of dead light.
The sky healed. The survivors emerged, weeping.
Veya fell to her knees before Lira. "The Mother has ascended!"
Lira looked down at her ruined arm. At Alex dying at her feet. At the scorched earth. The Nameless Flame within her was silent. Cold.
Yara gripped her shoulder. "Lira?"
Lira's voice was hollow. "The Flame's price was my soul. Alex's was his life." She knelt, pressing her remaining hand to Alex's scar. "But I'm not done paying."
Alex's breath gurgled. "Lira… don't…"
"I made a promise." Lira's golden eye bled light. She tore the Devourer's scar from Alex's chest—a piece of living void—and pressed it into her own shattered arm socket.
The void scar fused with the Eclipse Shard remnants in her bones. Her arm regrew—not flesh, not metal, but raw cosmic power: veins of starlight, muscle of void-thread, skin etched with the Eclipse sigil.
Alex gasped, whole but unconscious. The Devourer's mark was gone.
Lira stood. Her new arm pulsed with terrifying potential. The Weaver's voice echoed in the wound:
"YOU HAVE BECOME THE SCAR. YOU WILL ATTRACT THEM ALL."