The Library of Knowledge held its breath. Not silence—anticipation.
The kind that vibrates in your molars, hums just below your eardrums, and prickles the back of your neck like air thick with static. Even the marble beneath their feet felt too smooth, too cold—like polished bone touched by prophecy.
From the west corridor, Komus and Niraí stepped into the halo-lit atrium, bathed in the dim echo of starlight still settling in the air. Their boots made no sound on the marble.
Niraí frowned. "Did we miss the part where the stars fell?"
Najen didn't miss a beat. He turned mid-step, spreading his arms dramatically.
"Oh, you know. Star-Rite. Identity crises. Blood revelations. Casual god-trauma. The usual."
He winked. "We're headed to the courtyard. Don't keep us waiting."
With a flamboyant spin, he sauntered out, Rlaucus following behind, silent as a shadow that had made peace with endings.
He hated how easy it was for Najen to joke. Like godhood was a game you could win with enough clever lines and shoulder shrugs. Qaritas wasn't even sure he wanted to be in the game—just to not feel like the forgotten rule they all skipped over.
Qaritas started to follow—but paused.
His foot hovered half a breath above the marble before it landed with a whispering scrape—like polished stone inhaling. The cold bit through his sole. Every step echoed too loudly, like the Library was taking attendance.
No one noticed. But he did.
That hesitation.
That was the shape of Becoming.
Every god here had walked in like the room already owed them gravity. Qaritas had to earn it with every step.
Exhale wrong and someone might remember he was the cosmic clerical error in the room.
His hands itched. Not for action. For escape. For anything to anchor him to a version of himself that didn't dissolve in rooms like this.
Daviyi still quiet, Hydeius and Cree exchanging glances behind unreadable eyes.
Komus gave a slow nod. "Clearly… we missed something."
His eyes lingered—not on the room, but on Ayla. Qaritas noticed it. The way his thumb tapped twice against his wrist, like muscle memory had a secret to confess.
People don't nod like that unless they're measuring what they've lost.
Qaritas didn't ask. Some silences didn't need unlocking—just respect.
And then—he saw it.
Something layered in his presence, buried beneath millennia of forgetting.
Lexen.
Ecayrous's son.
Komus didn't look at him. Didn't flinch. Just exhaled, long and even, like the weight of being seen was an old ache he no longer feared.
Qaritas said nothing. He wouldn't press. Not today. Komus's silence wasn't a wall—it was a wound. And maybe Ayla never spoke of it because it wasn't her place to.
Cree rose, brushing ash and memory from their cloak.
"Najen's right. We shouldn't keep the others waiting."
Hydeius nodded silently.
They walked.
________________________________________
The hallway ahead opened wide, like a throat ready to sing.
Vaulted ceilings shimmered with threads of starlight and dreamfire. The walls curved with glowing sigils, humming low—like old language warming its throat. The air smelled faintly of scorched ink and ancient parchment, tinged with something metallic, like starlight left out too long.
The air thrummed. Not from sound—but from meaning.
As they walked, Cree's voice cut through the quiet. "This time, I want to win."
Hydeius chuckled—once. A mountain's laugh. "Last time felt like a lie. Though this will be Ayla's first time participating in the Rite. "
Qaritas blinked. "Wait… This is Ayla's first time too?"
Cree glanced back. "Yeah. She never entered before."
"Why not?", Qaritas questioned
Komus, just ahead, slowed. His smile thinned. "No partner."
Qaritas frowned. "She could've chosen anyone."
Hydeius's voice was a low drum. "But no one saw her, as their partner."
The words landed like dust in an open grave.
Qaritas didn't fully understand. Not yet. But his chest ached in the way it always did when truth was near and not yet ready to speak its name.
And Lexen—Komus—had once stood where Ecayrous now ruled. Gods, what did that make him? A future? A threat? A warning?
He turned to Komus. "Did you?"
Komus nodded. "Me and Niraí are always partners."
Niraí smirked. "Last Rite, my brother tried to dismember him."
Qaritas blinked. "Brother?"
"Nysaeon,The Ascendant of Dimensions himself," Komus muttered. "And He didn't want to hit me. He just wanted me to… explode a little."
Niraí laughed. "More like rearrange your organs."
Komus sighed. "Semantics."
Qaritas watched them joke like gods didn't bleed.
He wasn't sure what annoyed him more—that they could joke about near-death like it was sport, or that part of him wanted to be in on it.
He thought about matching their energy. Saying something light. Something clever.
Instead, he stayed quiet.
Because he wasn't sure if he was supposed to become like them—or become something entirely else.
Maybe Becoming wasn't mimicry.
Maybe it was deciding which silences you stopped apologizing for.
Part of him wanted to say something. To ask how long it took before pain became a punchline. But his voice snagged on silence—because maybe what he feared more than sounding weak was sounding like he still needed the pain to matter.
Komus nudged Niraí with his elbow and she caught it like it was choreography.
Even their friendship was seamless.
Qaritas's stomach tightened. He looked at his hands. One still curled like it was waiting to carry someone else's sword.
Like the universe hadn't carved scars into them just for the drama. He didn't envy their power. Just... how natural it looked. How they weren't afraid to laugh, like they'd already earned the right to belong here.
What did he have? A name that sounded like an unfinished sentence and a partner whose silence carried more prophecy than he had blood.
The freedom to joke about gods and siblings like nothing had ever broken them.
________________________________________
The hallway unfurled into the Front Courtyard—a vast, star-swept amphitheater. Wind brushed his face with dry warmth, carrying the faint scent of ozone and crushed petals. The grass beneath their feet wasn't just soft—it yielded, like velvet soaked in memory. Leaves rustled above, each sound like a whisper choosing not to speak his name.
Trees lined the edges—tall and ancient, their bark pulsing faintly, their leaves shifting color with each breath of wind: sapphire, gold, blood-red, obsidian. The grass shimmered like moonlight poured across velvet, soft and soundless beneath every step.
Flowers grew in impossible neon hues—luminescent blues and singing greens that pulsed faintly in the dark, as if they breathed starlight. Above them, the sky stretched black and infinite, dotted with slow-moving stars and ink-smears of galaxies, Rygartha itself floating on the edge of known space like a forgotten dream orbiting divinity.
It wasn't a place. It was a question, written in light and color and silence.
And every god who entered had once answered it.
Others walked like statues carved from music, or fog shaped into memories—one with a voice like glass breaking backward, another who left frost in his wake with every step.
There were wings, fangs, shadows, halos. No order. No hierarchy.
Just power, waiting.
And then—familiar faces.
Jrin, the Ascendant of Order, stood near Daviyi left the group and walked towards him.
Jrin didn't move much when Daviyi got to him, they stand so close they could almost touch—but Qaritas caught it. The lean. Just half an inch, barely there. A lover's gravity that didn't ask for permission.
He wondered what that cost—loving someone in silence when the stars were always watching.
A reach without reaching. He knew that kind of ache. The kind that never asked to be healed—just noticed.
His eyes didn't leave her. Their silence crackled.
Xriana, the Ascendant of Fate, leaned against a mirrored pillar beside a tall man whose cloak rippled with slow waves of sleep.
"Hello, Shadow-born," a voice called, light and teasing.
Qaritas gave a stiff nod before realizing nodding wasn't the expected response. Should he have bowed? Smiled?
Did it always have to feel like a test? Like every move he made was a reminder that he hadn't read the right script? He wasn't broken. Just… unfinished.
Gods, even breathing felt like something he was relearning.
Qaritas turned—just as a cascade of dream-laughter reached him.
Irteia. Ascendant of Dreams.
And beside her—Elios, the Ascendant of Sleep.
He looked like midnight woven into grace, his robe stitched with constellations that shifted as he moved.
Irteia grinned. "Don't worry, we're not here to nap through this one."
Qaritas stared. They were real. Not dream-scars, not phantom memories, not poetic hallucinations. Real.
He stood among them like a sentence that hadn't found its verb. A myth waiting for its metaphor.
Fantastic. Breathing 101, in a room full of beings who tuck galaxies in like bedtime toys.
Act normal, he told himself. Then realized he didn't remember what normal was supposed to feel like.
Elios lifted a hand lazily. "Well. Maybe one nap."
________________________________________
Behind them, the stars shimmered. The courtyard's ceiling peeled open—like the sky itself had remembered how to exhale.
A shimmer buckled mid-sky—just a flicker, like a thought interrupted. For half a breath, Qaritas thought he saw a figure behind the stars. Watching.
Above, the fourteen starlines pulsed across the heavens—each one different. War-songs, lullabies, memories. Blades, names, prayers.
Each a path. Each a vow.
Each waiting.
Fourteen stars. Fourteen bonds. No two will fall the same path, but all will fall.
Paired not by skill—but by resonance.
Memory. Pain. Becoming.
Qaritas watched as the stars above continued their slow arc, like blades being unsheathed in silence. The celestial threads shimmered, fourteen paths etched in living light—but one question coiled inside him like a knot that refused to loosen.
He turned to Ayla, voice steady but small. "Everyone here… they have a beloved?"
A pause.
"Yes," someone answered behind him—Cree, or maybe Daviyi. "Each is paired with the one their power resonates most with. Cosmic symmetry. Old magic."
Qaritas's brow creased. "I don't have one."
A few glanced at him. No mockery. Just silence.
Then a dry voice cut through the hush.
"Neither does Ayla."
It didn't come from her. But it landed like prophecy.
Qaritas's breath stilled.
Ayla hadn't flinched. She looked toward the sky instead, raising her hand—and the stars bent toward her fingers like threads waiting for a needle.
"The cosmos will decide," she said. "Let the Rite shape its own battlefield."
A flick of her wrist, and the sky fractured—not violently, but with purpose. Fourteen lines of starlight twisted and snapped, reweaving themselves into a shifting map of collision courses. Constellations roared to life, each starline pulsing with a rhythm like a war drum dipped in memory.
Qaritas whispered, "Why is there only one pair on each star?"
Ayla didn't look at him when she answered. Her voice was clean steel.
"Because it's a free-for-all."
He blinked. "What does that mean?"
"It means," she said, turning toward him, eyes burning, "every other pair will be trying to stop you. No mercy. No order. No rules. Just the truth, your bond, and speed."
She stepped closer. Not soft. Not cruel. Just final.
"The fastest pair wins."
Someone—Elios, maybe—laughed low. "And the slowest? They remember why mercy is extinct."
They don't race to win. They race to remember.
Qaritas catalogued them without meaning to—gestures, postures, silences. It didn't give him power, but it gave him shape. If he couldn't belong, at least he could understand.
Ayla stepped forward, her cloak whispering across the marble. The stars tilted—as if remembering her name. Her eyes didn't blaze. They warned.
And time did not stop—but it listened.
Komus turned to Qaritas, voice softer now. "You ready?"
Qaritas didn't answer. The Rite wasn't about readiness. He understood that now.
What happens if I fail?
The thought came unbidden.
His stomach twisted. Not from fear of pain. From the ache of almost mattering—and losing it before it ever felt real.
The stars didn't wait for the willing.
He didn't know what he was becoming. But for the first time, he wanted to find out.
They waited for the chosen.
________________________________________
A hush fell.
From across the courtyard, Jrin with Daviyi at his side, raised a hand. His face was unreadable. Not cruel. Not kind. Only ancient.
Qaritas looked at Ayla. She looked at him. The fear was still there. But for once, it didn't matter more than the wanting.
He could crumble under the weight of her belief—or climb it like a ladder. He chose the latter, if only because she hadn't blinked.
Qaritas looked down. His hand clenched around the edge of his coat. The threads were frayed—somehow. Like they remembered more wear than he did.
He almost asked Ayla to wait. To explain again.
But Becoming doesn't wait.
So instead—he let go of the coat. Let his hand fall to his side. Open. Empty.
A small surrender.
But that's where Becoming starts.
In the choices no one sees.
Qaritas's breath caught. Every instinct screamed he wasn't. But then he met her eyes—and saw no question there, only belief.
But he was tired of waiting for someone else to give him permission to matter.
"I'm ready," he said. The words came out like someone else's voice had borrowed his mouth.
He didn't feel ready. But maybe that was the point—maybe "ready" was just a well-fitted lie you wore while the universe tried to kill you with a smile.
And if Ayla believed in him, maybe he could fake it until the stars bought the lie.
Her smile didn't hold pity.
Just that slight lift of the corner—like it had been stitched there by long wars and longer silences.
The kind of smile that had survived more than it celebrated.
Her hand hovered for a second—just a flicker too long—near the scar on her belt.
Then she said, "Then run with me."
His knees locked. A tremor spidered down his spine. But her gaze didn't flinch, so neither did he.
The stars began to hum. Not music. More like breath over a blade, or the sound of silk torn underwater. Invitation.