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 "RUN" into her palm before the light took her.
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 archivist's human shell burst apart like overripe fruit, flesh peeling away in wet ribbons to reveal the writhing horror beneath, a pulsating mass of silver threads that slithered like veins through the air, each strand connected to a stolen face frozen in silent screams. At its core hung the hollowed-out corpse of the original archivist, mouth sewn shut with chains of glowing scripture. The abomination spoke with a hundred stolen voices, their words layering over each other in dissonant harmony.
Kaelion moved before the final syllable faded. His fingers carved Edict through the thick air,
"All motion becomes script."
The words wrapped around the archivist-thing like a noose of burning light, freezing its silver threads mid-lash. For one shuddering breath, victory seemed within reach.
Then the thing blinked.
Its sewn-shut eyelids tore open vertically, revealing twin voids that swallowed Kaelion's edict whole. The silver threads convulsed, rearranging themselves into Counter-Edict Alpha,
"The scribe's hand shall tremble."
White-hot agony shot up Kaelion's arm as the bones in his right hand cracked and reformed against his will, fingers spasming wildly. The Oblivion Sceptre slipped from his grasp leaving only for his shadow to catch it, the darkness stretching unnaturally to slap the weapon back into his left palm.
The archivist-thing struck at his past. Needle-fingers plunged into his temples, extracting memories like scrolls from a shelf. His first kill unraveled from his muscles, leaving him suddenly clumsy as decades of combat instincts evaporated. The taste of his mother's ink-stew vanished from his tongue, and with it went the Old Tongue, half his spells now locked behind a language barrier he could no longer recall. Worst of all, his sister's final words tore free in a strand of glowing neurons, leaving his right eye blind and weeping black tears.
Kaelion retaliated by sinking his teeth into his own wrist. Blood splashed across the Hollow Codex's pages, which drank greedily before vomiting forth Hollow Edict "What is taken must be given." The archivist-thing shrieked as the stolen memories reversed course, slamming back into Kaelion's skull along with three of hers,
the First Stitching, when mortal flesh met something older in a chamber reeking of burning hair,
the Taste of Divine Fear as the Pantheon realized their creation had learned to lie,
and her True Name, a seven-syllable horror that cracked two of Kaelion's teeth as it forced itself into his mind.
The living forge stirred beneath them, molten laws surging up like a tidal wave. Liquid commandments wrapped around Kaelion's legs, rewriting his bone structure to make kneeling mandatory. He fought the compulsion until his femur snapped with a wet crack, then scrawled Edict 7 in his own blood – "Pain is a language I refuse to speak." The bones healed wrong, leaving him permanently crouched.
The archivist's stitches bloomed into silver vines that rooted her to the forge as it began digesting her. With a final act of defiance, she tore out her own throat-stitches and unleashed a wordless scream that shattered every bone in Kaelion's left hand, turned the air into shards of frozen silence, and cracked the Oblivion Sceptre diagonally across its black crystal.
With his last functional finger, Kaelion wrote on his own shadow with the sceptre's jagged edge,
"You are the memory of darkness."
The shadow detached with a sound like tearing parchment, sliding behind the archivist to pry open her ribcage with formless hands. It extracted the mummified heart within, still clutching a rusted quill, and whispered her True Name into the forge as Kaelion lunged with the broken sceptre.
The explosion of divine energy blinded his void-eye permanently, but the sacrifice granted new sight. He now perceived the "undertext" of reality, the pale scribbles where gods had edited existence. The archivist's remains fused to his left arm, silver threads embedding themselves in his flesh like veins that twitched when he dreamed.
As Kaelion stumbled from the collapsing ruins, his severed shadow remained behind, watching from the pit with a newly formed mouth. Its final whisper chased him into the wastes: "They called you weapon. Now you are the hand that wields you." Above, the stars rearranged themselves into a Hollow Crown, its missing jewels waiting to be claimed.