——Moment of Judgment——
The Sanctum no longer stood in judgment.
It was becoming something else—
A theater of broken law.
A cathedral unraveling mid-prayer.
Where once it had held truth, it now only witnessed power.
The air itself had forgotten what it meant to hold breath. Time clung to the stone like old ash, refusing to move forward. Space pulsed inward. Meaning bled from the floor.
Arkeia knelt in silence at the foot of the One.
Her blade lay discarded in the rubble—forgotten. Her hands trembled not from fear, but from the memory of something she could not name, only feel. Something that had already changed her.
Elissa stood just behind her, glass-eyed, paralyzed by awe. She didn't blink.
She didn't need to.
From the fractured shadows, Caelinda hummed a discordant psalm. A tune older than mercy, braided in languages no longer spoken. Her smile curved as if knowing the conclusion of a song not yet sung.
And at the center of it all—
Balfazar.
No longer pretending.
No longer restrained.
He stood in defiance of possibility—blazing emerald runes carved across his flesh, living geometry pulsing in an alien rhythm—like the ending of an age given form.
From his back, wings vast and black as the final breath of sleep stretched wide, fully unfurled. They were not mere adornment, but weapons, shields, and oaths—each shimmered with a silent gravity, poised to fly, to strike, to erase.
The Promised Eye, upon his brow, gazed unblinking—its starless slit casting down a quiet apocalypse of truth.
He loomed with a stature that dwarfed mortal measure, vast yet impossibly grounded, like a monument carved in mockery of human scale. Every breath he drew bent the very edge of reality
Across from him, Mar'aya seethed.
Her halo sputtered. Golden fire wreathed her limbs in divine recoil. Her voice cracked the rafters of the Sanctum's corpse:
"You abomination. You mock judgment? You mock me? The Pillar of Righteous Clarity. I am a foundation—the weight that holds the weave in place!"
From the colonnade's edge, standing atop fractured stone, Aethon let loose a cackle, loud and irreverent.
"Did she say foundation?" he laughed, nearly slipping. "Oh, gods, someone's been sipping their own sermons!"
Balfazar cracked a grin.
Mar'aya turned, fury wild and crackling.
Then—
She vanished.
And the spark of a duel flared.
The clash was instant.
And it was glorious.
A shriek of light tore through the air—Mar'aya, aflame with righteous fury, collided with Balfazar mid-thought. The eastern wing of the Sanctum didn't collapse—it forgot it had ever been whole. Dust rose in reverse. Columns twisted like caught in breath. Ceiling tiles wept light before vanishing into shadow.
Then silence.
Then again.
A blur. A roar. A spiral of burning gold and veiled black, folding through space in a choreography of paradox.
They battled faster than thought.
Mar'aya's wings carved geometry into ruin—slicing arcs of divine justice that bled the very concept of symmetry. Her movements obeyed the logic of gods: sharp, final, righteous. Each strike a verdict. Each step a claim to cosmic inheritance.
But Balfazar was not contesting her inheritance.
He was rewriting the will.
He did not strike—he interrupted. He folded through skipped time—his body stepping out of memory, his shape recalled rather than arrived. Above her. Below her. Behind her. Reality did not react to his presence; it corrected itself around him.
Each time she attacked, the world bent to spare him effort.
His wings flexed, etched in runes that flickered between visibility and erasure—black limbs dragging thought and narrative into silence. Every motion shimmered with realities discarded, his afterimages contradicting each other like overlapping lies.
He moved like a prism of truths unmade—like something seen through fractured veils.
Mar'aya struck through the laws of creation.
Balfazar erased the laws.
"You run," she hissed between radiant swings, her hands aglow with compressed divinity. "You hide."
"No," he said, voice both behind and within her. "I wander. You chase."
She cast a beam wide enough to cleave the mountains—an edict of judgment hurled in desperation. The light struck true—
—or rather, it struck the placeholder of where he had just been.
He hovered upside down behind her, weightless, hair flowing like starlight trapped in reverse current. Gravity seemed reluctant to engage him.
"Do you remember what it feels like to be lost, Mar'aya?"
She spun with fury. In her palm, a lance of judgment formed—divine edict condensed to radiant weaponry. She hurled it with the scream of a dying pantheon.
The air rippled with golden intention.
It passed through the space he no longer acknowledged.
She blinked—and suddenly found herself grounded, panting, wings dragging ash behind her. The sky above her was wrong—stars flickering in geometries forbidden.
The chamber had rotated.
Time had blinked.
Somewhere above her, Balfazar laughed.
He now stood sideways across a fractured column, planted upon a wall that should not hold weight. Not by magic. By redefinition.
"Sermon's over."
He stepped downward, which became forward. And with casual cruelty, he kicked.
She was sent crashing across the Sanctum, her form smashing through a mural of ancient justice, once painted to honor balance. The wall cratered. Gold fire erupted beneath her feet, trying to remember how to burn.
But the flames hesitated.
Not from lack of will.
From lack of command.
She roared, rising—divine fury twisting the air into halos—but Balfazar did not rise to meet her.
He simply watched.
When she lunged again, the floor beneath him stuttered and warped—stones suddenly unsure of their solidity. She fell through a moment too soon.
She recovered.
And when she looked up, he was already behind her, fingers absentmindedly sketching something into the air—a rune never taught, a glyph that described what should not exist.
She screamed and struck again—and this time, her blow landed.
Or so she thought.
Her palm pressed against his chest for a flicker of breath—feeling heat, resistance, victory.
Then it was gone.
He stood three steps behind her again. Hands clasped. Unscathed. Unconcerned.
Her strike had been remembered. Not endured.
"Would you looka at that… you've managed touch the memory of me," he said, calmly.
She turned. One of her wings twitched out of sync. Her pupils dilated.
"Do you still believe this is combat?" he asked, almost tender. "You're not fighting me, Mar'aya."
"You're fighting revision."
He tilted his head. The runes across his chest pulsed—not brighter, but deeper—as if pulling light into them, draining meaning from the world.
And as she raised her arms again, wings stretched and lips curled to release one last divine decree—
Balfazar blinked.
And she forgot what she was doing.
Just for a second. But that second bloomed with consequence.
Her mouth hung open in silent confusion. A single tremble in her fingertips. A pause in her wingbeat. A loss of orientation.
He smiled.
She lunged—rage fractured by disbelief—and as she passed through the chamber, the air thickened like syrup. Her motion slowed. Her light dimmed.
Time staggered beneath her feet.
She felt the weight of futures she hadn't chosen pressing in around her.
He raised a hand. Not to strike.
To pause her.
And the Sanctum obeyed.
Her form froze mid-lunge, suspended across possibilities like a word caught between drafts.
Not by power.
Not by spell.
But by edit.
Balfazar did not stand as a victor. He stood as a correction.
And Mar'aya, for the first time in all her divine knowing, felt the shivering root of an ancient fear:
That the truth was not being revealed to her—
It was being replaced.
Like a puppeteer…
His fingers curled in the shape of something ancient.
Something cruel.
Something the world tried to forget the moment it was remembered.
And the sky answered.
Mar'aya—soaring, incandescent, divine—was plucked from the air like a spoiled fruit torn from the branch. No crash, no explosion, no blast of force. Just an absence of motion. An interruption of agency.
Her limbs jerked open. Her wings locked in place. Her spine bent backward unnaturally, like a statue caught mid-fall and held upright by the will of a sculptor who had not finished.
She trembled. Not from pain.
But from intent.
Suspended by nothing, she hovered like a forgotten thought too ashamed to complete itself. Her divinity flared and faltered—trying to speak, to justify itself. But the air around her had been edited. It no longer listened.
She was not bound by spell.
She was being corrected.
Like an error in the margins of a script that no longer welcomed her handwriting.
Her halo cracked. Her wings spasmed out of sync. Her voice broke—not with rage, but with a crumbling certainty.
"You… You think this makes you greater?! You play with things you don't—can't—understand! Without us, reality dies!"
Balfazar's eyes shimmered—not with fury, but with amusement.
The runes across his chest pulsed in rhythm with a second heart that beat for nothing mortal. His wings flexed behind him, brushing the columns with a silence so absolute it turned stone into memory.
"Greater?" he echoed softly. "No. No no no, Mar'aya…"
He gave the smallest flick of his wrist. Her arms jolted open wider, unnaturally so, as if the joints had forgotten which direction they were built to bend.
"You still think this is a contest."
He stepped forward—slowly. His weight did not disturb the floor. It rearranged itself to allow his passing.
The shadows deepened. Not darkened. A place of colorless depth bloomed behind him with each step, like meaning collapsing in his wake.
The Promised Eye did not blink. It studied.
"I didn't come to claim your rank," he said, his voice low and indulgent, like a parent explaining to a child why bedtime exists. "I'm not here to compete for a pillar."
The light around her began to separate into fragments, as if unsure whether it should reflect, obey, or flee.
He circled her. His wings whispered across the air like pages being turned in a book that hated being read.
"I'm not a challenger—nor a heretic"
He grinned. And something behind the grin seemed to grin wider.
"In truth, I'm not entirely opposed to your purpose," he said, almost idly.
A faint amusement lingered in his tone.
"I'm just not in the story the way you expected."
Her voice trembled, the words slipping out like a confession she didn't mean to make.
"What do you want… what are you?"
He leaned in, close enough for the air to feel weighted. Above him, the Promised Eye narrowed—not in menace, but in diagnosis, as though measuring her very being against a truth she could not yet survive.
An impossible smile stretched across his face, too precise, too deliberate, like a mask that had chosen to wear him.
"Ah… I was beginning to wonder if you'd ever ask."
"I am the Old and the Outer made flesh," he said, joy curling at the edges of every syllable.
"They are me. I am they. And I…"
His voice sank, syrup-smooth and knife-sharp.
"I'm just the part of us that laughs when the play ends."
Mar'aya peered into the Promised Eye—peered through it—and the Sanctum distorted. Columns split into countless mirror-images, bending into angles that refused to meet. The air tasted of copper and ash, and the light inside the hall moved as though it were underwater.
And beyond that distortion, she saw them.
Shapes vast enough to blot out suns. Eyes that were not eyes, watching from folds of darkness that seemed older than matter. Some writhed like storms caught in flesh, others towered in stillness, bound by chains of law older than creation. She felt their thoughts pass over her—cold, tidal, and without mercy.
They did not stand together as allies, nor oppose each other as foes.
They were simply there. Waiting.
All turned toward the same point.
Toward him.
And she saw the truth.
For a moment that seemed to stretch without end, she beheld not the man before her but the vastness within—the cosmic frame his physical shell barely contained. A celestial silhouette loomed, humanoid in outline yet draped in writhing tendrils of illuminated shadow and blighted light, shifting like living script in a language she almost understood before it slipped away.
Two immense violet eyes, deep as collapsed stars, stared from that vastness, and above them burned a single emerald eye, a beacon cutting through every veil of her being. The longer she gazed, the more the form wavered—folding, unfolding—until it became them: all the Old and the Outer, fused into one incomprehensible whole.
Mar'aya screamed.
Not from pain.
But from the epiphany of her own irrelevance before the face of cosmic horror.
Holy light erupted across her limbs and sputtered out. The threads of her halo unspooled mid-air like the unraveling of a crown never truly hers.
"You're nothing but a parody!" she spat, voice quaking. "A nightmare that thinks it can write!"
"Oh, my lady Pillar," Balfazar whispered, as the air around him began to hum with impossible tones—echoes of thoughts that hadn't yet been formed, voices not born of breath, but of idea.
"I'm not writing."
His wings shifted. The floor beneath him shuddered. A single vine of void crept from behind his heel and traced along the seams of the Sanctum.
"I'm editing."
He reached across his chest.
His wings parted—not with fanfare, but with inevitability.
Three emerald truths burning through porcelain flesh, each pulsing in rhythm with a heart that did not beat, but declared.
The air recoiled.
The glyph emerged—not drawn, but remembered. Its shape refused geometry. Its lines bent meaning. It shimmered like regret cast in starlight.
It was not a word.
It was finality.
He did not raise his voice.
He didn't need to.
"End Script…" Balfazar whispered, "Fear."
Reality buckled.
Not with thunder, but with silence.
The kind of silence that comes after the last god prays and no one listens.
Mar'aya gasped.
Her mouth opened as if to scream—but no sound came.
Her body convulsed midair. Her limbs spasmed out of harmony, wings folding and unfolding in erratic, painful rhythms. Her skin shimmered between forms—one divine, one unknown, one forgotten.
The glyph pulsed again—once, then again—and with each throb, something left her. Not her soul. Not her life.
Her certainty.
She blinked rapidly, struggling to hold onto thought. Her breath shattered into fragments.
"Wh–what is this—this feeling—"
Her voice broke down.
And then softened.
Terrified.
"I… I'm afraid…"
She didn't try to scream.
She confessed.
Balfazar stepped beneath her and smiled—not cruelly, not with triumph. But like a teacher watching a lesson finally learned.
"There it is."
Above him, the Promised Eye narrowed—not in hatred, but in resolution.
Bhind him, the Sanctum's broken walls seemed to lean closer.
As if even stone wanted to hear what came next.
Golden blood began to seep from Mar'aya's eyes, her lips, the fractured lines of her divine form. It hovered from her body not as a leak, but as yielding—drawn into Balfazar's outstretched hand with reverent inevitability.
It pulsed softly as it floated—alive with memory, resistance, and surrender. It shimmered like faith being drained from scripture.
He turned—slowly, almost solemnly.
His wings towered behind him like the veil of a temple before desecration. The runes across his chest intensified, as though the glyph he had summoned still echoed beneath his skin. The second heart within him throbbed without rhythm, pulsing with truth not yet born.
He stepped toward Arkeia.
She remained helpless, breath ragged, eyes wide with reverence and ruin. She did not know whether they had moved to the altar or had always been there, waiting.
The ichor shimmered between them.
"My rose," he said gently, the words bending the air like prophecy.
She hesitated—caught between will and something deeper.
Then, as if the thought were not hers to resist, she stepped toward the altar.
Every footfall felt borrowed.
Her lips parted.
The golden ichor touched her tongue, and breath shattered. Her spine arched, ribs straining to contain the invasion. Light and shadow warred in her veins. Her eyes flared white—not with purity, but with contradiction made flesh.
She cried out—
not in agony, but in arrival.
The sound split into two voices—mortal and divine—reverberating through the broken vaults of the Sanctum, lingering as if the walls themselves now knew her name.
Held aloft by unseen will, Mar'aya gave voice—in the rapture of surrender twisted against her will.
It left her like a prayer dragged from the throat, a sound meant for defiance yet breaking into something that bent toward him despite itself.
"End Script…" he grinned in satisfaction,"Bind."
A tether formed—radiant, coiling, impossible. Not a line, but a braid of soul-thread and reversed purpose. It bound them like mirrored whispers of a prayer that no longer sought the heavens.
They pulsed in unison.
Light bent around them. The air recoiled unsure what it was witnessing. The glyph still glowed between Balfazar's fingers, slowly fading as the bond asserted itself.
Elissa dropped to her knees, eyes full of tears she could not explain.
Vharn ceased his song and wept without sound.
Caelinda whispered something in a tongue older than birth and held her stomach.
Mar'aya's form dimmed. Not with death.
But with surrender.
Arkeia's burned brighter.
The tether shimmered once—an unholy heartbeat.
Then sealed.
Not with sound, but with recognition.
—
The stars paused.
The Old stirred in their cages.
The Outer held their breath.
Balance was rewritten.
The Dawnborne Dyad had been born.
One goddess of twilight.
One priestess ascending.
Two voices—now one song.
Both tethered beneath the Eye of the Promised One.
And Balfazar—
He said nothing.
He only watched.
His wings remained open, vast and still.
The Promised Eye blinked once.
And the Sanctum collapsed into silence.