The stars had always been liars.
Kaelion learned this truth when the Hollow Crown constellation led him not to salvation, but to a tower of congealed anguish. It stood alone in the wastes, a twisted spike of black glass that reflected no light, only the absence of it. The sky here hung too low, pressing down like the damp palm of a dying god, its sickly silver hue leaching the color from his already-faded robes.
His collarbones ached where the constellation tattoos shifted beneath his skin. The silver threads embedded in his left arm trembled like plucked harp strings as he approached. Behind him, his severed shadow dragged its inky fingers across the ground, leaving trails that whispered warnings in a language of scorched parchment and breaking bones.
"Don't. Look. Up."
The tower wasn't built - it had been birthed.
Kaelion saw this in the way its surfaces rippled like muscle beneath skin, in the rhythmic pulse that traveled its length like a slow, monstrous heartbeat. The black glass resolved into something more terrible the closer he came: countless screaming faces frozen mid-utterance, their mouths stretched around words that had shattered upon release. Some were human. Most were not.
The entrance was a vertical slit that wept thick, black tears. When he pressed his silver-threaded palm against it, the tower shuddered, and the wound parted with a sound like ten thousand books being torn in half simultaneously.
The air inside was a living thing.
It pressed against Kaelion's skin with greedy fingers, leaving behind the stench of burnt hair and overripe fruit. His blinded void-eye began weeping thick, black tears that sizzled where they struck the floor. The Godforge Core in his chest pulsed erratically, its rhythm matching the distant, throbbing hum of the crown suspended somewhere in the tower's impossible heights.
His boots sank slightly into the floor with each step, as if the tower remembered being flesh. The walls here were worse than outside - the trapped faces were clearer, their expressions more varied. Some showed terror. Others, ecstasy. A few, disturbingly, looked at peace.
"You took your time."
The voice came from ahead, from the darkness that clung like cobwebs between floating motes of dead light. Kaelion's grip tightened on the Oblivion Sceptre as a figure emerged - wearing his face, but none of his scars. This version of him stood tall and unbroken, his eyes clear, his skin unmarred by silver threads or weeping tattoos. Pristine white robes draped his frame, the Arcanthus crest stitched in silver thread over his heart.
"I wondered which of us would arrive first," the double said, smiling with all his teeth. "Though I suppose you're not really me anymore, are you? Not since you let her inside." He gestured to Kaelion's corrupted arm, where the archivist's silver threads pulsed beneath the skin.
The tower groaned around them, its walls contracting like a great lung expelling poisoned air. Above, through layers of impossible geometry, the Hollow Crown began to rotate, its jagged points carving wounds in reality that bled shimmering darkness.
Kaelion's double tilted his head, studying the crown's movement with academic interest. "Do you know why they call it that?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Because it's empty. Always has been. Always will be. The Pantheon feared what might fill it."
The silver threads in Kaelion's arm spasmed violently, twisting into words that burned,
"HE IS THE PATH NOT TAKEN"
His shadow, which had remained at the threshold, now slid forward, its formless hands shaping words against the weeping walls,
"HE REMEMBERS WHAT YOU LOST"
The double smiled wider, his eyes reflecting the crown's slow spin. "Shall we see which version survives?"
The tower held its breath as the two figures - the broken and the whole - faced each other in the belly of a place older than gods. Somewhere above, the Hollow Crown waited, its emptiness aching to be filled.
Kaelion's next words would determine which of them walked away, and which became just another scream frozen in glass.