The world held its breath.
For the first ti since the fall, there was no sound—no wind, no pulse, no echo. Just silence so thick it felt alive.
Zara stirred weakly in Damien’s arms. Her glow had dimd to a pale shimr, the rhythm of her pulse uneven. The newborn light floated near her shoulder, flickering like a candle caught in unseen tides. Beneath their feet, the ground was cracked but still—sealed, yet trembling faintly as though sothing vast and waiting breathed below.
“Did we win?” Zara whispered.
Damien didn’t answer. His crimson aura had nearly faded, his strength pulled thin by the battle. He gazed toward the horizon where the silver light once burned, now nothing but a scar of gray dust across the sky.
You didn’t win, the newborn pulse said softly. You delayed.
Those words chilled them both.
Before Zara could respond, the silence shifted—vibrating faintly like a plucked string. The air rippled, distorting the shapes around them. A mory bled through the atmosphere—a vision of a city before the fall. Human towers gleaming under blue skies. Laughter. Music. Then screams. The sa gray light swallowing it all.
“It’s showing us the first age,” Damien realized. “The mont Oblivion began.”
The vision warped. From the city’s ashes, a figure walked—the sa faceless being, but smaller, uncertain, almost human. Its hand reached out, touching a dying tree, and in that instant, both were erased.
Oblivion was born when creation first feared loss, the newborn pulse whispered. It is the echo of regret given form.
Zara clenched her fists, anger flaring through her fatigue. “Then it’s not just destruction—it’s sorrow that forgot how to heal.”
The pulse humd sadly. Yes... and it grows stronger each ti sothing dies without rembrance.
The ground pulsed again—once, twice—slow, deep, and cold. Cracks of gray light spread outward like veins through the soil.
“It’s feeding,” Damien said. “Every lost mory. Every fallen soul.”
Zara rose, trembling but resolute. Her wings sparked faintly to life, though the light stuttered. “Then we stop it by rembering everything it’s taken.”
The newborn pulse glowed brighter, drifting toward the spreading cracks. But to rember ans to feel it all again—the pain, the loss, the fear.
Zara nodded. “Then so be it.”
She placed her hand on the light. Instantly, visions flooded her mind—the death of worlds, the cries of creatures erased, the loneliness of ti itself. Her body convulsed, tears streaming as every forgotten mont carved through her heart.
Damien caught her, adding his own crimson pulse to hers, sharing the burden. Together, their energies fused into a radiant storm that spread across the valley—filling every shadow with mory.
The cracks recoiled, the gray glow dimming. For a heartbeat, the world rembered itself again.
But then, from the sealed fissure below, ca a whisper—faint, but unmistakable:
To rember ... is to beco .
The light around them shattered.
Zara’s scream echoed through the void as the fourth pulse flared awake—no longer asleep, no longer patient.
It had chosen its vessel.
User Comments
0 comments from readers