The constellations carved into Kaelion's collarbones had begun to move.
He watched them squirm beneath his skin as he trudged across the ashen plains, each twitch of those celestial markings sending fresh waves of fire along his nerves. The map they formed was clear a twisting path leading to the corpse-city of Vharasth, its obsidian spires just visible on the horizon like broken teeth against the bleeding sky. The black quill at his ribs had fallen disturbingly silent, its usual restless stirring replaced by a watchful stillness that put his teeth on edge.
The city walls rose before him, not ruined as he'd expected but preserved in perfect decay. The gates hung open, their iron bars twisted into the shape of a screaming face frozen mid-howl. As he crossed the threshold, the cobblestones shifted beneath his boots not settling, but actively rearranging themselves to herd him toward the central plaza. His void-touched eye twitched, revealing the terrible truth behind the facades: every building was a prison.
Behind glassless windows, figures stood frozen in amber light not statues, but people caught mid-realization. A man clawed at his throat, fingers bent in final spasms. A child pressed small hands against an invisible barrier. Near the gates, a woman had managed to scratch a single word into her palm before the light took her: RUN.
The plaza opened before him like a wound. At its center yawned a circular pit lined with teeth of black stone, from which echoed a sound like a thousand scribes whispering just beyond comprehension. The Godforge Core in his chest screamed in response, its black lightning arcing down his arms in jagged patterns that burned his sleeves to ash.
"You're late."
The archivist stood beside the pit, her silver stitches now pulsing with sickly light. Half her face had begun to unravel, the skin peeling back to reveal glimpses of what moved beneath something with too many eyes, its teeth spiraling in fractal patterns.
Kaelion's hand went to the Oblivion Sceptre. "What is this place?"
"The birthplace of laws." She gestured to the pit, her fingers elongating as they moved, joints popping. "And your final test."
The first sacrifice demanded his name.
Not just the word, but the neural pathways that recognized it as his own. The archivist's needle-thin fingers plunged into his temples, extracting the memory strand by strand. He felt it go that fundamental knowing of self leaving behind only a hollow certainty that something vital had been taken. His mouth moved, forming syllables that no longer held meaning.
The second sacrifice took his last childhood memory.
A summer afternoon in the Scriptorium's gardens, his sister's laughter ringing like wind chimes as they chased fireflies through the dusk. The extraction was slower this time, the archivist savoring each neural connection as it snapped. When it was gone, Kaelion couldn't remember ever being a child at all. The concept of youth itself felt foreign, a story told about someone else.
The third sacrifice stole his reflection.
When he looked into the polished obsidian at the pit's edge, nothing stared back. Not emptiness, but absence the space where his image should have been now occupied by swirling mist that occasionally resolved into half-formed faces. They mouthed words he couldn't hear.
The pit's whispers grew louder.
"Come home, little scribe."
The descent was not physical. One moment Kaelion stood at the edge, the next his consciousness unraveled downward through layers of existence. Forgotten languages slithered against his mind like eels, their words leaving burns where they touched. Broken laws floated like shrapnel, their jagged edges slicing his essence as he passed. Deeper still, the walls themselves pulsed with fleshy warmth, silver threads sprouting from them like roots.
At the heart of it all floated the Godforge not an object but a process, a perpetual alchemy of molten laws and screaming metal. Its surface shifted between solid and liquid, occasionally forming faces that begged for release before dissolving again. The heat it radiated wasn't temperature but meaning, each pulse threatening to rewrite Kaelion's very essence.
The archivist's true form awaited him there.
Her human shell had fully unraveled, revealing the horror beneath a writhing mass of silver threads and stolen faces, with the hollowed-out corpse of the original archivist at its center. The thing spoke with a hundred voices:
"We were the first attempt. You are the last."
The battle that followed was fought across shifting planes of existence. Kaelion rewrote laws faster than the Godforge could stabilize them, his fingers moving in frantic patterns as he inked new realities into being. The archivist-thing tore chunks from his past, each stolen memory leaving him less whole. At the crucial moment, when the thing had him pinned with threads through his flesh, Kaelion made the ultimate sacrifice he severed his own shadow with a blade of condensed silence.
The shadow fought him, of course. It always did.
When he finally plunged the Oblivion Sceptre into the Godforge's heart, the resulting explosion of energy blinded his void-eye permanently, the divine light searing away the last of its vision. The archivist's remains fused to his left arm, silver threads embedding themselves in his flesh like veins. Somewhere deep below, something vast and ancient stirred from its slumber.
Kaelion stumbled from the ruins as the city collapsed behind him, his body forever changed. Above, the stars rearranged themselves into a new, more dangerous configuration. The constellation they formed resembled a crown missing its jewels a hollow thing waiting to be filled.
As the first drops of silver blood fell from his fingertips to sizzle against the earth, the last thing he heard was his own shadow whispering from where it lay severed on the ground,
"They called you weapon. Now you are the hand that wields you."