Before Qaritas could react—before breath could find his lungs again—each star ignited.
A sound like space folding in on itself cracked through the sky.
Niraí raised both hands, and with a flick of her fingers, a gate opened.
No—a wound. A tunnel of cosmic pressure and spiraling color, a corridor made of unspent gravity and light older than sound.
Fourteen stars surged through.
They dove into the portal like arrows loosed by gods with something to prove.
Qaritas barely had time to move before their own star twisted forward, dragging him and Ayla into its momentum. Shades of purple, cobalt, and rose gold swallowed them whole.
The transition wasn't flight. It was shear—as if their bodies had been ripped from the laws that once governed them and rewritten mid-fall.
Then—
The other side.
Space erupted around them.
Not empty.
Alive.
Galaxites—nebula-forged serpents with crystalline spines—coiled across gravitational rifts. Planets drifted like thoughts abandoned mid-sentence. Comets screamed by, trailing tales of unfinished prayers. Black holes blinked open and shut like ancient eyes trying to forget what they had seen.
They were inside a living map of the 2000th universe.
"This is ours," Ayla said. "The 2000th universe to be born from the collapse of the last. And maybe the last one we get to shape.
Qaritas gaped. "We made this?"
"No," Ayla said, eyes glowing gold-red. "But we're made for it."
Then—
The fight began.
Above and below, Ascendants unleashed themselves.
Not restrained. Not testing.
Unleashed.
Qaritas tried to make sense of the battlefield. He couldn't. His instincts screamed strategy—but his soul only heard memory. Somewhere in this chaos, the truth of what he was becoming waited to break through.
Komus bent space around him like a ribbon spun from gravity's breath, tearing through a starshard field to collide with two Ascendants Qaritas didn't recognize broke from a violet orbit.
He hadn't seen them in the Library—but the space around them bowed in ways that made even the void seem courteous, as if emptiness itself offered deference.
The male ascendant stood like a silence that had learned how to weigh itself. His skin shimmered with the hue of deep space—black-blue and starless, as if light itself refused to settle there. Around his head, fragments of shattered stars and obsidian stone orbited slowly, caught in a field of gravity only he commanded. His eyes were deeper than shadow—irises shaped like spiraling galaxies, pupils devouring light without apology, and sclera dotted with faint stars like a night sky trapped behind bone. Even the air seemed to bend around him, as though the universe had agreed—quietly, inevitably—that everything should fall toward him.
Beside him stood a woman—if the word still applied. Her skin shimmered with shifting voidlight, not black, but the echo of color beyond mortal sight.
Not black but the echo of color that exists beyond human sight—a veil of ultraviolet and fading indigo, like the afterimage left when a dying star whispers its last frequency.
Her hair moved as if underwater, not bound by gravity but drifting in a rhythm dictated by no known force—long, fluid strands of smoke-threaded silver, lit intermittently by glints of invisible energy.
But it was her eyes that held the terror of expansion.
Their sclerae were pure white, so stark they seemed etched in frost, while her irises pulsed with negative color—a chromatic paradox, like someone had painted antimatter into sight. When she blinked, reality twitched.
She didn't carry darkness. She unstitched the geometry of existence.The space around her shimmered unnaturally, stretched like glass under pressure. Lines bent wrong. Shadows drifted where light should have pooled. The eye slid off her form if stared at too long, as if the universe hadn't finished deciding where she belonged.
The air thinned.
Somewhere overhead, Najen's laughter spiraled between explosions of light.
"This is it," he called, a grin in his voice. "The fire between stars."
And for a moment, the phrase hung there—too loud for silence, too quiet for peace. Just enough to remind the universe what it was watching.
Not from lack of oxygen—but from decision.
Something was arriving.
The stars shivered. Not in fear—in preparation.
A roar cracked through the foldspace above them, like a scream split across timelines.
Then a star—one not summoned—punched through the void.
Blue, purple, and black. Threaded with errant sigils and dimension-locked glyphs. Its light bent wrong, fractalized across dimensions no eye was meant to see. Each flare of motion spiraled in on itself—like space rewriting its own directions just to obey it.
Qaritas felt his vision blur.
The star didn't fall into view—it rewrote the sky.
A voice ripped through the cosmos like a command never meant to be heard in just one realm.
"Zyoku. Erivyane. Move."
Two Ascendants near the center of the field attacking Komus and Niraí star—with Gravity and Dark Energy incarnate—peeled away from their vectors without hesitation.
Because the voice hadn't asked.
It had declared.
Niraí gasped. Then—she shouted.
"Brother!"
Qaritas watched as the battlefield bent—
The battlefield didn't crack. It shifted—as if space had just remembered a different path—as if the laws themselves recognized the arrival.
Was this what power looked like—when it no longer asked to be understood?
Komus stiffened. Slowly—too slowly—he turned toward the voice.
A figure stood at the helm of the rogue star.
Tall. Sharp-eyed. Ageless in the way only things that govern dimensional theory could be.
His eyes were impossible.
Not eyes, but portals—open, unguarded, spiraling inward forever. A mirrored cosmos folded in their depths, and yet there was no reflection.
Only recursion.
Nysaeon. The Ascendant of Dimensions, Niraí's older brother Qaritas assumed .
He didn't descend—he replaced descent. Reality folded to let him through.
Komus went white.
Even the void Komus carried bent—not away from fear, but toward recognition.
Qaritas could see it on Komus's face—not fear.
Resentment.
A beat later, a flash streaked past them—blindingly fast.
Someone else launched from Nysaeon's rogue star, landing not far from Komus and Niraí's path.
A perfect landing on their star.
Unapologetic.
And entirely intentional.
A figure stood—casually dusting off cosmic debris from her shoulder. Crisp armor gleamed like polished judgment. Her presence radiated precision.
Orhaiah. The Ascendant of Law.
"Apologies," she said, without sounding remotely sorry. "Nysaeon's in one of his moods. I figured I'd ride this one out with you two."
Her voice curled into a smile. "Or beat him myself, whichever comes first."
Niraí opened her mouth, then closed it again.
Komus said nothing.
Qaritas couldn't tell if he was about to implode or ascend.
Orhaiah winked at him.
"Don't worry, Voidling. He only yells like that at people he still hopes can win."
Who caught the impact with a grin and a gravitational pulse that crushed a nearby moon.
Niraí spun a halo of cosmic gates, portals flickering in and out as her enemies tried to land hits and found themselves punching echoes.
Irteia sang a dream into being—a veil of illusion that spun like starlight dust around Elios as he drifted by, barely awake, drawing power from proximity to sleep itself.
Najen, laughing, rode the back of a collapsed neutron nova like it was a war-horse, shouting, "You call this velocity? I've died in faster!"
Rlaucus didn't shout.
He moved through the Abyss.
Everywhere he went, reality tensed, unsure whether to bend or evaporate.
Qaritas tried to track them all—failed.
The cosmos spun.
He didn't know what part of him the star had remembered.
But as it burned beneath his feet and Ayla sprinted forward into war,
Qaritas followed.
He ran, stars cracking beneath his boots—until a flare of motion to his left caught his eye.
An Ascendant veered from their path, a blade of thought and time aimed at Ayla's unguarded flank. Reflex screamed at Qaritas to shield her.
But she didn't falter. She didn't even glance back.
He breathed once, trusted—and turned away.
His blade caught a different enemy mid-strike.
This wasn't about protection.
It was about pace.
"This is a race, not a rescue."
Not as a god.
But as someone who refused to forget.