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Location: The Null Core, orbiting the Rotheart Nebula, sealed beyond causal logic
Objective: Break the lock on the vault of stilled Divinities, slay or subdue the sealed Paragons, and recover the Axioms of Unbirth
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The void screamed in motion, without breath. Space folded like a wounded beast around the [Vault of Stilled Divinities] a celestial cube the size of a continent, suspended in chains forged from unspoken laws. No stars shimmered here, only fragments of forgotten oaths drifted in the dark.
Five lights broke through the abyss.
The Lionheart Siblings, each cloaked in their myth-forged essence, descended in formation. Seraphira's halo shimmered in refracted sunfire. Dravion's chains dragged through space with a god-breaking hum. Nyxa glided like silence given shape. Kyther sprinted on broken gravity, laughing. Ashborn, the youngest, hovered low, reality subtly distorting around his very heartbeat.
"This place hates us," Ashborn muttered, his hands flexing as the Genesis Thread laced itself around his arms. "The Vault's locked with laws older than the gods themselves."
Kyther cracked his knuckles, stepping forward. "Then let's break every single law and piss on what's left."
Dravion's eyes flickered like furnaces. "Focus. This vault doesn't just hold divine corpses. It still remembers them. Expect resistance. The kind that thinks."
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- Breaking the laws of locked existence
A sentient ward, the [Cogniphage Guardian,] forged from logic loops and unfulfilled prophecy emerged to bar their path. It hovered like an enormous glass trilithon, etched with paradoxes and dripping reversed time.
Seraphira surged forward first. "You dare recite law to a Dawncutter?"
Her wings fanned wide, beams of enemy light and sound fired at her. She twisted her hands mid-flight and reflected those very attacks, now shaped into crystalline soul-spears. She spun mid-air, launching them in spiraling salvos. The guardian's laws stuttered, catching on her hymn-shard.
Dravion slammed both fists together. "Now!"
Ashborn nodded. "Opening a breach!"
He pulled the [Genesis Thread] taut between his fingers, snapping reality into parallel threads. One showed the Guardian dead, the other wounded. He stitched both into the present. Blood erupted from the construct's unseen core.
"Nice trick," Kyther grinned. "My turn."
Her transformed instantly, his body blurred into a shadow-storm hybrid, leaping onto the wounded Guardian. He bit into it, ripping conceptual laws from its spine. Thunder burst with each bite.
Meanwhile, Nyxa slipped through its mirrored thoughts. She reappeared within her mind.
"Shhh," she whispered. "Let silence end you."
A final stab of [moonsteel paradox], and the Guardian folded inwards, emoted in its mind.
Entering the Vault - The stilled gods awaken
The vault cracked open.
Inside; a dead cosmos, preserved. Within it stood [Six Stilled Divinities], the last echoes of the pantheon erased by Queen Ashley Herself. Now awakened. Now angry.
They were:
• Threxian, the architect of Empires undone
• Malidrax, Heart-Eater of Righteousness
• Va'Luun, Oracle of the End-Script
• Ignoriel, Angel of Scorching Silence
• Bel'Sereth, The Crowned maw
•Orrugal, the Time-Canker beast
Each move without motion, their presence a scream in existence.
"Pick targets," Dravion said, spinning his Cinder Chains. "Stay alive."
---
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- Divine War
Ashborn % Seraphira vs. Ignoriel & Va'Luun
Ignoriel launched silence-rays and logic bombs, Va'Luun distorted destiny threads, unmaking possibilities.
Seraphira sang, her refracted hymns devoured Ignoriel's silence. Each chord weaponized into solid radiance. "My song ends you, fallen angel."
Ashborn circled Va'Luun, Genesis Thread Flaring. "I've rewritten myself before. Let's see how you handle being unscripted."
He fractured space-time, swinging potential futures like blades. Va'Luun twisted probability, but Ashborn countered with diverging futures of himself, blades, arrows, light beams, elemental glyphs, all converging into one devastating strike.
Ashborn shouted, "Reality bends to my pulse!"
Ignoriel shattered. Va'Luun dissolved under an onslaught of divergent selves.
---
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Dravion & Nyxa vs. Malidrax & Bel'Sereth
Dravion charged Malidrax, grappling the titan of righteousness and snapping its neck with a forge-blow to the spine.
"You're no heart-eater," Dravion spat, driving a Cinder Chain through Malidrax's chest, binding its divine pulse to the infernal crucible.
Nyxa danced behind Bel'Sereth weaving through its vortex maw. "Too slow." She said, fraction into five echoes.
Each echo cast a different curse: memory drain, will erasure, lunar poison, dream rot, and spectral scarring.
Bel'Sereth screamed, but it only fed Nyxa's veiled blades.
Kyther vs. Orrugal, the Time-Canker beast
Orrugal was not a beast, but a concept that time must decay. It touched Kyther's bones, making his body age and erode.
Kyther grinned anyway. "That's all?"
He forced his primal essence to regenerate backward. His arm became a beast limb. His foot, a lightning hoof. He roared, the roar of ancient predators from before time's origin.
He tackled Orrugal mid-roar, shifting forms each time: tiger, wolf, storm wyvern, chaos drake.
With a final punch, he drove Orrugal into a rupture in causality.
As the Six Stilled Gods cumbled, their powers collapsed into mythic particles.
Ashborn hovered near the center, holding the [Axiom of Unbirth] a shard of creation logic undone.
Dravion wiped magma-sweat from his brow "Anyone dead?"
Seraphira's wings cracked, and she smirked. "Not yet. But damn, they were... weak?"
Kyther clutched a dislocated shoulder. "I call dibs on the next war god."
Nyxa's veil fluttered. "This place still echoes. We need to leave. Now."
Ashborn stared at the collapsing vault. "The universe will remember this moment."
He turned, quiet for a beat. Then said to himself:
"...and I'll rewrite it better next time."
---
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Location: The Pathless Bridge - a floating silver corridor that leads across dimensions, suspended within Queen Ashley's domain.
Status: Mission Completed. Divinities destroyed. Cosmic Axioms Retrieved.
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The five siblings walked side by side, each crackling with aftershock energies. Yet none fell behind. In the silence that followed the ruin of the gods, only the soft hum of Genesis-Thread echoes accompanied them.
Ashborn cloak, partially torn and smoking, fluttered as if caught between timelines. He gazed upward toward the dreamless void between dimensions, his eyes half-shadowed, half-luminous with Genesis residue. Then he spoke, his voice low, enigmatic, but tinged with unguarded warmth.
"We're pretty strong, huh? I've always wondered... is there anyone out there, in other multiverses you know? Someone like us? Or stronger?"
The others didn't answer immediately. The question lingered like a heartbeat in the dark, rippling through the cosmic silence.
Seraphira, her halo dimmed but still regal, looked to him with a soft breath through her cracked lips, her wings fluttered gently, each feather like a shard of prismatic glass.
"You're thinking like a mortal again, little brother, but..."
She smiled faintly. "I ask myself the same thing. Surely there are others. Perhaps not born, but made. Sharpened by war, grief, or time "
Dravion, dragging a massive black-iron chain coiled over one shoulder, gave a low, almost grating chuckle. His chest still glowed with embedded fragments of divine ore.
"If they exist, I want to forge armor out of them. See if they break easily."
He paused. "But yea... I wonder, too. What else is out there, waiting to test us?"
Nyxa, who drifted rather than walked, glided beside Ashborn. Her voice came not from her lips, but directly into his mind, shaped by starlit whispers.
"Beyond UI'MIR... beyond even the Genesis Veil, there are whispers of things unwritten. Entities that never needed a name. If we exist, then by balance, others must too."
"You feel it too, don't you? The tug... like something watching from behind the fifth mirror."
Kyther, quiet for once, cracked his knuckles and looked out into the void with a rare contemplative air.
"I don't want to fight gods that already exist."
"I wanna fight the ones that'll be born just to fight us."
He grinned ferally. "Like fate gets bored and spits out something nasty just for the hell of it."
Ashborn chuckled softly, nodding.
"I don't know... maybe we'll meet someone. Or something. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But I feel it. Like a song I haven't heard yet, but I know the tune." "And when we do--" he looked up, a flicker of dream-silver in his eye, "--I want to be ready."
The siblings fell silent again. But this time, it wasn't out of fatigue or reverence. It was an expectation.
---
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[The Realm of Echoing Glass - Beyond All Genesis Threads]
Unknown Location.
Unknown Time.
A pair of eyes watches from beyond the Weave. Not eyes of flesh, but cosmic sentience forged in reverse time. A voice, cold as voidsteel, whispered.
"Lionhearts. Thread-bearers. God-slayers."
"How long will you dance before your threads snap?"
And in the darkness, something shifted. Something that had not yet been written...
...but soon would be.
---
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Lionheart Kingdom - Divine Palace of Eclipseroot
Location: Inner Sanctum, beneath the branches of the Eclipseroot Tree
Time: Post-Invasion Reflection
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The five siblings move in quiet unity through the hallowed marble veins of the Lionheart palace, its architecture singing in harmonic frequency with their bloodline. Each column they passed pulsed softly with celestial resonance, light and music braided into structure, an elegance only gods could build. Above them, no true ceiling could be seen, only the mirrored abyss of creation, where constellations flickered in reverence to their passage.
The palace did not echo
It recognized gods.
It absorbed their steps.
---
Ashborn's boots touched the platinum roots of the divine garden floor as they stepped into the Inner Garden, a place no mortals had ever beheld and none outside the family ever would. Above them towered the Eclipseroot Tree, vast and ageless, its bark embedded with threads of dawnlight and duskfire. Each leaf shimmered with cosmic breath and distant auroras; when they fell, they sang truths to those who dared hear them.
Ashborn looked upward for a moment, his young face catching flickers of blue-gold glow from above. Then he exhaled deeply, a grin curling lazily on his lips.
"Mother doesn't seem to be around,"
Ashborn said casually, dropping onto the soft root-woven floor, resting his back against the tree's living trunk.
"Y'all think she's out handling some crisis only she can fix or maybe just catching up with big sister Hestia again... or Xōchiquetzal?"
He smirked at the thought. Both goddesses were part of Queen Ashley's Pantheon alliance Circle, Hestia, the Heart-Keeper of Olympus, and Xōchiquetzal, the flowering soul of Aztec beauty and fertility. Cosmic sisters, not by blood, but by divinity-earned bonds.
Kyther chuckled as he flicked a loose chip of divine bone from his knuckles.
"If she's chillin' with Xōchiquetzal again, then that's good. Last time, the sky rained flower-blades for six days. That was metal."
He leaned back on a jagged root and unsheathed his chaos-spine blade halfway, letting it hum with primal static.
Besides, if it's a mission only she can do, it probably means something's out there stupid enough to poke the myth tree. Let 'em."
Dravion grunted and dropped into a seated position with a heavy thud, steam curling from the joints in his armor.
"She's not idle. She's either forging new realms, silencing traitor gods, or reinforcing the Genesis Locks."
"Either way, the palace hasn't raised a war-hymn. So nothing big yet."
He unwrapped a volcanic glass flask and handed it to Ashborn without ceremony.
"Here. Drink. It's brewed from the core of Varr-Um's last dying forge-star. You'll cough up blood but it's worth it."
Seraphira floated lightly down beside them, her radiant wings folded, one eye still healing from her duel with Aralon.
"Mother has been speaking less lately not to us but I've heard her voice in the Choir's sleep."
"Something is... stirring beneath the mirrored realms. Something old. Something unshaped."
She knelt beside Ashborn, letting a drop of aurora-flecked sap from the tree settle onto her tongue.
"If she is with Hestia or Xōchiquetzal, it's not for leisure. It's for alignment. She's gathering forces."
Nyxa emerged from the shade of the garden, her veil trailing across the starlit grass like whispering silk.
"Mother is dreaming more than she's ruling these days," she said softly.
"And her dreams are bleeding into the Echo Realm."
She tilted her head at Ashborn.
"You're dreaming more too. Do you feel it? The Genesis Threads are a shifting pattern. Unraveling. Reweaving."
Ashborn nodded slowly, sipping from Dravion's flask. He coughed once, violently, his veins momentarily glowing red-gold, and then grinned through a trickle of blood from his lip.
"Feels like fate's getting drunk somewhere, then slapping random chords into our symphony."
"But whatever. If mother's not here then, how about having a drink or smoking? I don't know."
He leaned back fully now, letting the tree's divine hum lull some tension from his shoulders.
"We earned it."
A short silence followed.
Then Kyther grinned widely, pulled a fang from his belt pouch still dripping Abyssal venom from the Beast Thrones war, and bit into it like fruit.
"I like this idea. Best part of killing gods is the break after."
Dravion reached into his forge-bag and summoned a small grill made of condensed flame, setting out astral embers and slapping down something that looked vaguely like meat but smelled like solar storms and regret.
"Dinner's on me. Don't ask what it was. Do ask what it screamed."
Seraphira set her halo to hover like a lantern, casting multicolored rays through the garden. She handed Ashborn a chalice made from Cantor Aralon's false dawn shard.
"Only you get to drink from this one. I told the Choir you'd earned it."
Nyxa curled next to him on the root, folding her knees beneath her. Her voice was a lullaby in shadow.
"Let the cosmos hold its breath tonight. Let the threads pause their spinning."
And so they sat, the five children of Queen Ashley Lionheart, sipping divine forgebrew, resting under the first heartbeat of their mother's myth.
No wars.
No missions.
No gods to slay.
Just siblings.
And silence.
And the long breath before the next eternity.
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Ashborn's body swayed lazily against the root of the divine tree, his gaze half-lidded from the potent haze of Death Stars, the celestial narcotic coiled in drifting smoke around him. A dull red and black glow coiled up his arm like a hungry serpent, his "Future Genesis Thread," unstable and twitching with foreign tension.
He raised it, letting the coiling vision bleed into the open air.
"You know..." Ashborn muttered, his voice slurry yet weighty. "One of my threads has been unstable lately. It's the future thread. Didn't show me much but there was this version of me... fighting some Eldritch thing. I think it was called the Primordial Reality Reaper or some shit like that... I don't fucking know."
He gestured drunkenly, and the thread unfurled, casting a curtain of glowing memory across the air like a live scene playing on the bones of spacetime itself.
"Take a look at how powerful this fucker is,"
Ashborn murmured, lips curled in awe and disbelief. "And I'm not gonna lie, future me holding my own? That's wild."
[Genesis Thread Projection: Future Battle]
Reality: Shattered, floating in the void after a Cataclysm breach of time integrity.
A dimension already long dead, its gods forgotten, its stars collapsed was now a battlefield.
There it stood
The Primordial Reality Reaper.
No name could fully carry its weight. The thing wasn't evil. It was worse: Inevitability clad in divine bone and cosmic nihilism.
It loomed, impossibly tall, a humanoid silhouette cloaked in devoured realms, its body a continent of obsidian flesh, each layer etched in burning crimson glyphs that screamed in silence tongues forgotten even by fate.
Six floating spectral arms drifted behind it in a wheel of annihilation. Each held a mythic weapon of conceptual destruction:
Sword of Extinction - each swing erased history's entire.
Scythe of Failed Timelines - a curved blade humming with cosmic grief.
Spear of Collapse Probability - vibrating with infinite, failed outcomes.
Dagger of Forgotten Gods - dripping with broken prayers.
Chain of Paradox - alive, constricting, howling in impossible logic.
Staff of Silence - nullifying all will and magic in its radius.
Across the battlefield, stood Ashborn, older, weathered, wings split and glowing, half his coat in tatters. His left arm was fused with a braided weapon of Draconic Glyphs and Soulmancy, while his right eye radiated Demonic Wrath and Holy Fire in tandem.
No smile.
No witty remark.
Only steel in his stance.
"Well shit," the younger Ashborn muttered aloud in the garden, watching himself,
"So this is your truth."
---
The Reaper answered with movement.
One swing.
The extinction sword split the void open like wet parchment, three timelines severed, writhing into nothingness.
Future ashborn blurred forward, wings folding as he flashed under the arc, appearing beneath the Reaper's ribcage-
Uppercut!
A crack across the Reaper's obsidian skin.
Minimal damage.
A ripple.
A challenge answered.
The Reaper spun. The Scythe of Failed Timelines carved horizontally, space twisted.
Ashborn vaulted back.
Mid-air Dagger of Forgotten Gods blinked behind him.
Stab.
Blood spilled.
Shoulder pierced.
Ashborn snarled, grabbed the Chain of Paradox, and yanked dragging the Reaper mid-float, slamming it with full momentum into a planetary husk.
Impact.
The realm screamed.
They clashed mid-air, fist to face, bones splitting, entire suns died.
Ashborn slipped between the arms, his footwork impossibly precise, weaving under spear-thrusts, vaulting scythe wings, ducking extinction swipes.
But the Staff of Silence clipped him.
Magic flickered.
Aura dimmed.
The Dagger stabbed again this time, pinning him to space itself.
Ashborn coughed up blood.
He roared.
"Not done."
His hand gripped the dagger.
Ripped it out.
Blood painted void.
He caught the Scythe's next arc between his bare hands. Sparks exploded.
Then... headbutt.
Space collapsed inward.
Both combatants tumbled through collapsed stars, smashing through remnants of reality.
Ashborn kneed the Reaper in the side-
But-
Punched into a black hole by the extinction blade.
In the present, the siblings stared, the scene still unfolding above the garden.
Kyther blinked, eyes wide with admiration.
"I.. have never wanted to fight someone more."
Dravion leaned forward, examining the rhythm of the fight.
"That Reaper's weapons operate on pure conceptual displacement. You're not just fighting a body. You're wrestling with the failure of everything."
He added after a sip of his forgebrew:
"Still, I'm impressed you managed to crack it. Future-you's reflexes have refined Soulmancy flow into physical combat. Not bad."
Nyxa shivered faintly.
"The dagger... it erased the memory of your existence while it stabbed you. I could feel the thread hiccup."
She looked at Ashborn with quiet intensity.
"That thing isn't from this reality. Or any mirror of ours. It's the above pattern."
Seraphira narrowed her eyes at the Reaper.
"Its halo is inverted. That's now a divine being. It's a collapse-born or something formed in the fallout of a dead god's failed resurrection."
"Still... you held your own."
She placed a hand on Ashborn's shoulder.
"Don't face that thing alone again. Ever."
Ashborn exhaled slowly, the thread flickering as the scene faded.
"Yeah..." he said. "I don't think I was alone. I am not sure but I think there were others. But their threads didn't manifest, probably too far from my origin timeline."
He looked at them, smirking again, a little less drunkenly.
"You think there's something worse out there?"
Kyther cracked his knuckles, eyes burning.
"If there is, I wanna punch it in the face and ride it through a supernova."
Dravion chuckled.
"If you can survive that Reaper... then the multiverse still has hope."
Seraphira looked skyward.
"And if something worse is coming... then the Five of Us won't be enough."
Nyxa just whispered.
"The Thread is still shaking."
Ashborn leaned back again, letting the divine canopy drift above him, the tension dissolving slowly, replaced by that quiet, rare thing between gods:
Anticipation.
"Well... if that's the endgame..."
"Then fuck it. Let's train harder."
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----
Ashborn exhaled slowly through his nose, rubbing his temples with his thumb and forefinger as the afterglow of the future Genesis Thread flickered away into nothing. The smoke danced through his limbs, making him feel loose, light, and a little annoyed.
"Ha... the only bad thing"
"It didn't tell me when it was gonna happen. Or anything else. Just that fucking fight..."
He leaned forward, swaying slightly before catching his balance with one hand against the root, eyes drifting toward Kyther, who had just finished cracking his knuckles again for no reason.
Ashborn grinned.
"Yo, kyther..."
He raised his fist toward him, a smirk crawling across his face
"Let's hit each other's fist. No powering up, no standing, no shielding. Just straight-up dumb cosmic fist bumps until one of us backs out. Winner gets the last smoke..."
He paused dramatically.
"... and bragging rights. For eternity."
Kyther's grin ignited immediately, his canines peeking out like a beast who loved for stupidity and brawling in equal measure.
"Heh... fuck yes."
No hesitation. His fist met Ashborn's with a dull, casual-
Boom.
The ground cracked under their seated forms. Shockwaves rippled out, rolling through the sacred garden and disintegrating several nearby starflies that had hovered too close. The Eclipseroot tree, divine and unmoved by godly force, simply groaned like it was tired of this.
Their fists bounced back.
Boom.
Again. Louder. A small supernova bloomed far above in the garden sky, a star couldn't handle the pulse of their third impact.
Boom.
Fourth punch. Their knuckles steamed, bones under skin cracking and realigning from the feedback, but neither moved. Neither blinked.
"Anyways-"
Ashborn said casually, still not breaking eye contact as he delivered the fifth bone-busting knuckle tap.
"What'd y'all think about the fight?"
Dravion didn't even flinch at the shockwave now. He was busy pulling magma-laced ashweed from a cigar-shaped core and lighting it off a spark from his knuckle.
"That thing you fought... it doesn't just erase timelines, Ash."
"It feeds on them. That's why it's so fucking hard to kill, it's always eating something that never happened."
Another BOOM.
Ashborn's left eye twitched slightly from the sixth punch.
Seraphira watched them with half-closed eyes, halo tilting slowly like a setting sun.
"That Reaper's form is asymmetrically divine. Its weapons are thought-born. No craftsmanship. That means it's not a created being, it's a manifest consequence. A living failure. Like... the embodiment of every resurrection that didn't work."
Her lips twitched slightly.
"I hate fighting things like that. You can't predict them."
Nyxa, who sat cross-legged with a veil of shadow flickering gently in her lap, nodded.
"Its dagger nearly slipped through my veil just from watching the vision. It was trying to remove me from memory across parallel versions of now."
She tilted her head and whispered with dry amusement
"That's rude."
BOOM.
Seventh punch.
Cracks now spidered beneath both brothers. The Eclipseroot's roots were still untouched... but they were glowing, warned.
Kyther spoke, finally while rotating his shoulder like he was warming up for a storm.
"I like how Future You fought. Real dirty. Pulled the paradox chain into a grapple loop. That was smart."
"But it wasn't enough."
He turned toward Ashborn, his next punch
Eighth
BOOOM!
Shaking the air,
"You're gonna need more than that, bro. That thing wasn't fighting seriously."
Ashborn chuckled through the pain, skin split across his knuckles now, but his fist was still up, still swinging.
"Yeah. I know."
"But damn... tell me it didn't look cool when I headbutted it so hard space folded."
Kyther burst out laughing as their ninth punch shook the cosmos.
BOOOOM!!!!!!
You psycho. Only you would go full feral like that against a timeline-eating god-bastard."
Dravion raised a brow lazily.
"Don't encourage him."
Seraphira sipped her chalice, now filled with what looked like liquified aurora.
"Too late."
Tenth punch.
BOOOMMM!!!!
Both of them pause. Both fists locked in a standoff.
Kyther's wrist trembled. Just slightly.
"...FUCK."
He slammed his other hand into the dirt and dropped back, laughing hard.
"FINE. You get the last smoke. And bragging rights. Till next time."
Ashborn coughed once, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned wider than ever.
"Eternity just got a little more satisfying."
He pulled out the final roll, lit it against the friction-spark of Dravion's raw knuckles, and took a deep inhale.
"Still... if the Reaper's not even serious in that fight..."
His voice trailed.
"...then maybe we all need to start getting serious."
---
---
---
Hours went by and the garden was still, unreal, too perfect.
A warmth hung in the air like distant laughter from a childhood long buried in time. The Eclipseroot Tree glowed faintly, fading, as petals of light fell slowly like gravity had loosened its grip. The siblings' forms were soft now, edges glowing, details dissolving gently into the air.
Ashborn blinked, his vision blurring again. Not from the smoke.
From grief.
His heart knew it before his mind did... this wasn't real anymore...
"Little brother... It's time to wake up, you know?"
Kyther's voice was... softer. Not boisterous, not chaotic just brotherly. His hand tousled Ashborn's white messy hair with a rough gentleness that only someone who truly knew him could.
Kyther grinned as he leaned in close.
"You've been asleep for too long. Loomlight Sanctuary probably already finished healing your body and mind..."
"...in World Axis-E110."
Ashborn blinked hard, trying to understand. His chest felt heavy, his whole soul aching. The phrase Loomlight Sanctuary rang like a foreign hymn in his ears. His hands trembled.
"What do you mean bro...?"
"Loomlight... Axis-E110...?
"I don't get it."
He looked around at them. His siblings. His family...
Tears slid down his face before he realized he was crying.
He wasn't high anymore.
He was breaking.
Seraphira knelt in front of him, her radiant wings now barely flickering with light. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead gently.
Her voice, always commanding, trembled with affection.
"He's right, baby bro."
"It's time to wake up... Big sister will be waiting for you, darling..."
Ashborn's breath hitched. Her kiss glowed on his skin. His vision swam.
"I'll be waiting for you too..."
Nyxa's whisper curled around his ear like moonlight. She embraced him from behind, her arms protective and impossibly soft, a safe void in the crashing storm of farewell.
"Don't forget us, alright? Even if this was just a dream, it was ours... and I meant every moment."
Dravion stood next. Taller than any god of forged flame, yet his aura pulsed quietly, sorrow restrained.
"It was nice seeing you, Ash."
"Even if it was only a dream..."
He placed a single hand over Ashborn's heart, a final blessing from one warrior to another.
"We all knew this was a dream from the start. But we just... wanted it to be a happy one for you."
The wind blew.
Not from the garden.
But from reality pulling him back.
The Loomlight Sanctuary was waking him up.
The Eclipseroot Tree faded first, then the colors, then the echoes of laughter. Kyther, Seraphira, Nyxa, Dravion. All began fading like embers in the wind, smiling as they vanished from this dream-forged memory.
Ashborn reached for them, his hand stretching through falling petals and warmth.
"Don't go--"
And in that final instant before the dream collapsed-
"We're always with you... our little brother... our seventh star..."
Their voices, one last time united...
---
---
---
Location: Aztec Realm - The Garden of Shattered Suns
Queen Ashley Lionheart sat on her divine throne, swirling wine in her glass made from timefrost. But she paused.
Her back straightened.
Her breath caught.
And she knew.
One by one, her six Genesis Fragments pulsed, a shudder of sorrow, a silent weep of farewell.
"No..."
Her hand gripped her throne's arm lightly.
"My boy... he's finally waking up... but not here... not in my realm..."
Tears streamed down Ashley's immortal face. She wasn't a Queen right now. She wasn't a Goddess.
She was a mother.
Helpless.
Her power limitless, cosmic, and divine could not pierce the veil around Axis-E110. Something, some unknowable force, was shielding Ashborn's location.
Hestia, keeper of Olympus' sacred heart, placed a warm hand on Ashley's trembling fingers.
"He's alive, Ashley. That's enough... for now."
Xōchiquetzal, serene and eternally youthful, leaned her head against Ashley's shoulder and whispered
"Let him become the fire that finds his way home. Even flowers return in spring."
Ashley whispered brokenly
"But what if he forgets me? What if he wakes up... and doesn't remember... us?"
Hestia's voice was like the first fire of a new home.
"Then we'll remind him. No matter how long it takes. That's what family does."
----
----
----
In a white chamber of silence and starlight, Ashborn Lionheart finally opened his eyes.
His heart still hurt.
His fingers curled slowly.
And tears. Real ones streaked down his face as he whispered into the quiet
"...Kyther... Nyxa... Seraphira... Dravion..."
He clutched his chest, where a warmth still lingered from Dravion's touch.
"Mother..."
And slowly, Ashborn sat up. His vision cleared. His systems reinitialized. The Genesis Thread pulsed weakly, but alive.
"...Guess I've got a lot of shit to catch up on..."
---
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To be continued....