The earth could not bear what it witnessed.
The eleven divine avatars descended like the last judgment each a monument of divinity clad in ruinous glory. Their steps carved molten rivers in the ground; their breath became windstorms that stripped valleys to bone. And at the eye of this unmaking stood Zeirion Althar, the Sovereign who defied fate, surrounded yet unshaken.
Behind him, Aralya sat against a fractured boulder, the glow of her lunar armor flickering as her breath steadied. Her gaze never left him not for fear, but for certainty. She knew this dance was inevitable. She had seen it in dreams, in echoes, in the cracks between time's gaze.
The gods closed in.
Each one bore the weight of a domain. Time, Death, Truth, Dream, Flame, Void, Sky, Order, Decay, Light, and Silence. Once worshipped by entire civilizations, now called back from their sleep by the Covenant a desperate attempt to silence the one force they could not contain: Zeirion.
"You stand alone," said Ios-Reth, god of Bound Futures, draped in chains of time that looped endlessly behind him. "Even you cannot rewrite destiny thrice."
Zeirion answered with silence. His hand rose.
And in it, Eclipsion pulsed black steel etched with veins of crimson flame. Not forged by mortals, but born from the moment Zeirion first rejected the will of the gods. A blade of defiance. A blade of unmaking.
He stepped forward, and the sky wept fire.
With that first motion, the battlefield transformed. What had been soil and stone became dust and ash. The gods launched first.
From the left, Muraleth She Who Weeps In Light unfurled wings of prismatic grief, casting beams of emotion turned purity that could unmake memories. Zeirion ducked and turned, parrying the spectral beams with Eclipsion, each clash echoing like a cathedral collapsing.
From above, Oun Thera crashed down, his body an amalgamation of glyphs and raw concept, his fists imbued with the idea of punishment itself.
Zeirion met him mid air.
Their impact shattered clouds, split trees into atoms, and sent tremors across continents.
But it wasn't enough.
The gods had once been supreme. Together, they were an orchestra of divine calamity.
But Zeirion had become something more than divine. He had become inevitable.
He parried Time's binding chains with the tempo of his own will. He silenced Silence itself with a word spoken in a tongue not heard since the stars were young. He turned Void against itself, bending its endlessness into a cage of sovereign command.
And still, they came.
Blood real, divine, and sovereign soaked the ground. The battle lasted for what felt like hours, maybe days. The sun rose, trembled, and hid again. Mortals from across the Realms looked up and wept without knowing why.
Aralya rose.
Though injured, her presence ignited the winds. She whispered incantations older than the first moonrise, stitching light and memory together.
Then she stepped into the fray.
Two against eleven.
Husband and beloved. Sovereign and queen.
Aralya struck the God of Dreams with a blade made of silver regret. Zeirion shattered the Flamebearer's spear with the edge of his will.
One by one, the gods fell.
And when only Ios Reth remained, his chains broken, his eye dimmed with disbelief, he knelt.
"You are not mortal," he said. "You are not god."
Zeirion walked slowly toward him, lifting Eclipsion.
"I am the answer you refused to hear," he said, and drove the blade down.
When the final god died, a throne formed from the dust and fire they had left behind.
A throne only one could sit upon.
Zeirion turned to Aralya.
"I didn't want this," he said softly.
"I know," she answered, taking his hand.
"But it must be done."
And he sat alone, yet not alone.
The throne accepted him.
The world changed.
And in the silence that followed, the Realms remembered once more what it meant to kneel not to fear, not to divinity but to truth.
The Sovereign of All Worlds ruled again.