Chapter Three: The God-Eater's Eye
The gate opened like a mouth.
Beyond it, the Worldweft Chamber waited—an enormous spherical hall built into the earth's crust, where spells were first woven and recorded into the Grand Arcanum's core lattice. Few knew of it. Fewer had seen it. None were meant to stand inside it unranked.
Its walls shimmered with slow-moving magic—ribbons of light that encoded the behavior of the universe: how flames moved, how air obeyed will, how time ticked forward.
Every spell in Elethar passed through this chamber at birth, before being fed into the Codex and distributed to the world's sanctioned mages.
Eyris stepped into it as though he belonged there.
And the lattice twitched.
The spells recognized him.
[User ID: Undefined]Authority Level: Overwrite.You may rewrite spell-law.Warning: Such edits may produce ontological instability.
Eyris blinked.
He felt it: the threads of magic. Not just spells, but the instructions behind them. Like reading the source code of existence.
And for a moment, he understood everything.
Elsewhere – A Thousand Miles North
Far from the Arcanum, buried in a fortress-temple carved into a dead god's spine, a black-eyed woman opened her eyes.
She was not Rank Ten.
She was not Ranked at all.
Her name was Kasira the God-Eater, and she had been dreaming of fire for a thousand years.
He's awakened.
The whisper came not from her lips but from the scar across her stomach, where the last god she devoured still pulsed.
She stood in silence, listening to the winds scream outside her temple.
"Bring me the boy," she told her cult. "Before the Arcanum kills him."
"What boy?" asked her high priest.
Kasira smiled. Her teeth weren't human.
"The spell that walks."
Back in the Worldweft Chamber
Eyris raised his hand and brushed a strand of floating spell-thread. It rippled. The air darkened.
And then:
[Prototype Spell Drafted: Echoform]Effect: You may project a past version of yourself into the present for 30 seconds.Cost: Temporal bleed. Nearby minds may experience alternate memories.
He didn't cast it.
He didn't need to.
It simply became true the moment he willed it.
Behind him, another version of Eyris flickered into existence—his past self, pulled forward like a ghost made of intent.
The two versions stared at one another.
The chamber recognized them both.
"That's new," he said.
The echo grinned.
Suddenly, the spell-threads began to vibrate violently. Color bled from them. The walls cracked, not from force—but from logical contradiction.
The chamber could not process two presents of the same entity.
Red warnings bloomed across the lattice.
[System Threat Detected]Singularity risk imminent.Executing fail-safe: DEPLOY CONTAINMENT ENTITY 01
From the heart of the chamber, a statue unfolded.
Flesh re-grew around bone. Eyes bloomed like roses along its skull. Wings of molten runes unfurled, forming a body made from pure spell law.
It spoke in three voices.
"You are not supposed to be here.""Your existence is a breach.""We are the Compiler."
It drew a blade made from crystallized prophecy—a sword forged from pre-written futures.
And it lunged.
Eyris didn't move.
He let it strike.
The sword plunged into his chest—
—and stopped.
Not in flesh. Not in bone.
In code.
The Compiler recoiled.
Its voice cracked.
"Impossible. You... have no future."
Eyris looked up, eyes glowing like a dying star.
"No," he said. "I consumed it."
His skin pulsed. The spellbook etched into his mind flipped pages by itself, faster than human sight could follow.
Then came the feedback.
The Compiler screamed.
Its form fractured—folding in on itself as its code tried to reconcile what it had pierced.
A living spell.
A null-ranked existence.
A paradox with intent.
And then it collapsed into itself, absorbed in silence, leaving behind nothing but drifting lines of unclaimed magic.
Eyris stood alone in the Worldweft Chamber.
But now, the spell-law was listening.
[System Update Initiated]New Root Authority Installed: Undefined.All new spells will route through Prime.You are now the source.
Far North – Kasira Again
Kasira felt the change.
Her knees buckled.
The dead god in her belly went silent.
"It's begun," she whispered."He didn't break the lattice.""He became it."
And then she laughed.
Not with joy. With hunger.