After the aftermath of his attack, Ithan crouched on the ground, his body exhausted from the strain of pushing his body beyond his limits. His Survival Mystery had gone inactive, smoke emitting out of his body. He couldn't even feel the Zeus Mystery anymore, Stormheart silent. His Prometheus mystery was the only Mystery active, yet even that was enough to send aching pain through him. And yet, he endured it all.
He had a feeling it wasn't over yet. And sure enough, it wasn't. For at that moment, as the dust cleared, a blinding silver light burst from where Anipather once stood.
Then his eyes shifted. The power of his eyes revealed the truth within Anipather's heart. Symbols and vectors poured into his vision — cascading matrices of aether, fragments of equations that once defined the world. Ithan expected to see patterns like he once had with Helen, things like harmonic ratios, flux constants, the grammar of fire and soul.
But there were none. Where Anipather's Mystery had bloomed, there was no syntax.Only a blank theorem written across the sea.
"No... that's impossible," Ithan whispered. His own aether refused to align — his equations broke apart the moment he tried to form them. "There's... nothing to solve."
He stepped closer to the water's edge. The surface rippled — not outward, but inward, folding toward itself, as if space had grown tired of holding meaning.
The remnants of Anipather's aura lingered like thin filaments of silver thought, dissolving into the horizon. Each pulse he sensed carried a paradox — remembrance and erasure coexisting.
Truth equals Forgetfulness. Lethe equals Aletheia.
The realization struck him: this was not corruption or destruction. This was completion.
His Promethean Flame flickered in revolt. For the first time, it found nothing to burn — no fuel, no concept, no opposition. Even his Mystery trembled, unsure how to exist in a world momentarily stripped of all reference.
Ithan's Eyes of Revelation adjusted again, fractalizing into deeper layers — beyond matter, beyond idea, into the scaffolding of cause and perception. He saw the residue of the Lotus — a pattern shaped like a paradox:
λ = ∞/0Truth = NullDesire = Erased
Every variable converged into a single symbol — a circle collapsing inward, devouring its own origin. It wasn't a rune. It wasn't a word. It was the end of language itself. The air rippled around it, refracting light into colorless flame.
"Anipather…" Ithan muttered. "You reached it, didn't you?"
He could no longer feel the man's essence — no trace of the sea-born warrior who claimed to be a hero. What remained was an idea that had forgotten itself.
Ithan knelt and touched the water. The cold spread instantly up his arm, through his chest, into his mind — a sensation not of numbness, but of being unmade. Memories fluttered like dying embers: the forge, the flame, Sophia's laughter, the promise he made beneath the storm. All of it wavered — ready to vanish into the same white void that had devoured Anipather.
He pulled back from the resonance, gasping, flames bursting from his palm as his body rebelled. His Logos Pyros ignited on instinct — white-gold fire carving meaning back into existence. For an instant, his sight cleared. The Lotus faded. The world reassembled its equations.
But in the reflection of the sea, he saw it: A single petal of light drifting toward him — glowing faintly, trembling like a memory struggling to remain.
He reached out, and it dissolved at his touch. No warmth. No residue. Just silence.
"You wanted to be a hero," Ithan murmured. "And in the end, you became truth itself."
The sea answered with nothing — only the faintest echo of a voice, not heard but felt:
"Truth needs no hero."
The waves resumed, soft and dark, washing over his boots. The silence broke. But within Ithan's eye of revelation, a single anomaly remained — a gap in the world's formula, forever unsolved, forever white.
And deep within it, like a wound in reality, Anipather's Aletheia continued to bloom —a Lotus without memory, turning infinitely inward, reflecting the nothing that knows all.
****
Anipather stood there, as his truth unfurled, finishing its completion, Anipather made his move. He manifested his Mystery through his Mysterion art, using a Revelation technique to end the fight once and for all.
"Ἀλήθεια Λωτοφάγου· Ἔρρει ἡ Μνήμη, Καὶ Ῥεῖ ἡ Λήθη."
("Truth of the Lotus-Eater: Memory flows away, and Forgetfulness flows within.")
As he spoke, a pale eclipse formed overhead, a silvery glow manifesting, as if time itself forgot it should be shining. Countless translucent lotus petals fell from the eclipse, dissolving on contact with ground, flesh, or thought. Each petal was capable of erasing what it touched from living memory—names, reasons, histories.
A circular current of glassy water encircles the caster. Ithan felt like those currents could scatter the consciousness of anyone who was trapped within it, like the river Lethe from the myth of the underworld. At the centre stood Anipather, eyes silver-white, body half-translucent.
Ithan felt the temperature drop; all color drained to monochrome silver. Sound vanished; even heartbeats were muted. He experienced a faint taste of lotus and riverwater on his tongue—the taste of forgetting.
As Anipather's Revelation rippled outward, reality itself began to buckle. The world dimmed under the weight of his Aletheia—its truth rewriting the air, dissolving color, sound, and thought into the slow current of forgetfulness.
But Ithan saw through it. His eyes of revelation pierced the silver haze, tracing the fault lines within the lotus bloom, the unstable seams where truth had overreached itself. He understood then—the weakness of Anipather's Aletheia, the price he had paid to reach it. He had become the truth of oblivion. And in doing so, had lost the will to remember why it mattered.
Ithan dropped his weapons. The clang of metal was swallowed instantly by silence.His heart thundered in defiance, blood seething with the last dregs of aether. He drew it inward, toward the spark that refused to yield—the Promethean fire buried in his chest.
Defy the tyrants.
The words of the chained giant echoed again, ancient and relentless.He clenched his fists, heat flaring beneath his skin until his veins glowed white-gold. Then he opened his palms toward the devouring mist.
"Mystery of Prometheus: Revelation Art — 'Αλήθεια Πυρός.'" (Truth of Flame.)
The Forge blazed. White fire spiraled from his body, coiling upward in fractal lines. Geometry ignited the air—rings of light inscribed with shifting sigils, each stroke a rebellion against oblivion itself. The Truth of Illumination roared forth, its law simple and absolute: Where there is light, nothing can be forgotten.
Flame met mist. The petals of forgetfulness ignited, curling into ash as the Lethe currents boiled away. The eclipse above fractured, silver light collapsing beneath the storm of white-gold radiance. Anipather's truth pressed back, cold and inexorable, a tide that sought to erase even the concept of fire. But Ithan's will held firm. The flame did not consume—it endured.
His blood burned brighter, the Promethean flame interwoven with something deeper—his other truth, the Mystery of Survival. He felt it now: they were no longer separate. When he had broken through Bathos, both Mysteries had crossed their thresholds together, their truths folding into one another until they sang as a single, defiant chord.
Flame that endures.Endurance that burns.
The light surged, searing through the Lotus domain. Reality screamed as two mysteries collided—one of oblivion, one of defiance. And in that collision, for the briefest instant, the world remembered itself.
When the two truths collided, the world convulsed. Light and mist clashed midair, neither advancing nor retreating, the sky rippling like glass about to shatter.Flame met forgetfulness—illumination against erasure—and neither could claim dominance.
The Forge quaked. The silver sea overhead fractured into streaks of fire and shadow, and for one suspended instant, everything seemed to remember and forget at once. Buildings, stones, and echoes flickered between existence and absence; one heartbeat, the walls were there, the next, only outlines made of light.
Ithan felt the contradiction tear through him. His flame surged outward, but each burst left a hollow ache, as if pieces of himself were being burned away. Across from him, Anipather trembled, his body half-translucent, his eyes wide with something between awe and terror. The petals of his domain faltered, freezing midfall, unable to decide whether to dissolve or remain.
A crack appeared in the air itself—a thin line of brilliance cutting through the monochrome haze. Through it, Ithan saw fragments of both their truths overlapping: his flame's refusal to yield, and Anipather's longing for stillness.
The paradox rippled outward. The world remembered to forget. It was subtle at first—sound returning, color bleeding back into the edges of things—but the effect spread fast. The lotus petals lost coherence, burning without smoke. The currents of Lethe collapsed inward, drawn back to their source.
Anipather's Aletheia was unraveling. Not destroyed, but undone—it's perfect peace broken by contradiction. His voice was a whisper against the roar of dissolving light.
"This... this isn't how it was supposed to end."
Ithan's fire dimmed to embers around him, heat radiating from his skin in pulses of white-gold.
"It was never peace," he said quietly. "It was only forgetting."
The lotus storm folded in on itself, spiraling back into Anipather's chest. The glow of his Aletheia flickered, caught between eternity and extinction.
And then it broke. The sea of silence shattered into sound, wind rushed back into the world, and the Forge groaned as though awakening from a dream.
Anipather staggered, his outline blurring. The light in his eyes flickered out—not defeated, but released. He fell to one knee, half of his body already fading to glass. His lips moved, a faint breath escaping as his last truth unraveled:
"Peace... is a beautiful lie."
The final petal disintegrated between them. And for the first time since the battle began, Ithan could hear his own heartbeat again.
****
The silence after Anipather's fall lasted only a breath. Then the Aethertech in his chest began to scream. A high, metallic whine split the air—thin at first, then spiraling into a full-throated roar. The grafted core beneath his ribs pulsed erratically, its runes flickering between blue and violet as the stabilizing channels of his Mystery failed to align. The Lotus domain had collapsed, but the energy it once contained had nowhere to go.
"Damn it," Ithan hissed, staggering backward as heat and static built around the body. Lightning crawled over Anipather's fading outline, the aetheric lattice within him tearing apart thread by thread. Fractures of glassy light spiderwebbed across the Forge floor. The air thickened—heavy, warped, vibrating.
Anipather's body convulsed once, his form half-solid, half-light. The graft inside him detonated inward, a silent implosion that drew every particle of breath toward its center.
For a moment, gravity forgot what it was. The Magus below—still maintaining the flight ritual—screamed as his control seals flickered red. The runic rings that suspended the Forge shuddered violently, spinning out of sync. Sparks of unstable aether shot up through the crystal veins like lightning trapped beneath glass.
"Contain it! Rebalance the flux!" the Magus cried. His voice was devoured by the sound of the Forge's structure breaking apart.
But it was already too late. The seven halos that had once kept the Forge aloft began to tilt, rotating against each other, grinding like gears filled with sand. Streams of molten crystal fell from the upper pillars, dripping into the void.
Through the fractured floor, Ithan saw the core chamber below—a whirlpool of light tearing itself open, the Magus flailing in the heart of it, his runes disintegrating under the storm of feedback. Aetheric gravity inverted. The entire Forge lurched. Then came the drop. Ithan barely braced himself before the world tilted, weight vanishing from beneath his feet. The Storm Forge fell.
The sky above split apart as the massive crystal construct plummeted through the storm clouds, shards breaking away and burning like comets. He saw flashes of the landscape below—the sprawling ridges of the Spine of Hyperion, black stone cliffs glowing faintly with veins of dormant ash.
The Magus's final chant echoed up through the collapsing shaft, thin and warbled, like a prayer being drowned mid-syllable."May the gods forgive us—"
The rest never came. Light erupted below — not radiant, but jagged, alive. The air folded in on itself. Aether screamed. The Magus's body split apart in ribbons of energy, his robes tearing to vapor as the ritual chamber imploded. His voice cut off in a crack of thunder that wasn't thunder at all.
Ithan squinted through the storm, the smell of burnt ozone and glass thick in the air. There was nothing left of the man—no blood, no ash, only the faint outline of a shadow where he had once stood.
He turned.
Anipather was still upright—barely. The silver light within him flickered, his skin fracturing along the veins of his graft. Pieces of the Aethertech pulsed through the cracks like dying stars. The artificial core that had once empowered him was now eating him from the inside out. He didn't fight it. Didn't curse. Didn't plead. He just stood there in the light of the dying Forge, eyes locked on Ithan's across the crucible, expression almost peaceful.
"I guess this is it, Ashborn," he said, voice cracked but steady. "Guess even a bastard like me has no right to call himself a hero."
Ithan's jaw clenched. "There's no such thing as a hero."
Anipather's mouth twitched into something like a smile. "Sure. Maybe. And still… for some reason, I still want to be one."
He lifted a trembling hand, pressing it against his chest. Fingers dug deep, past flesh, until metal screamed. Sparks and blood spilled together. He tore through the bone and pulled free the core—a shard of radiant crystal caged in brass and runes, beating like a second heart.
It glowed weakly, struggling to hold its form.
"This power," he rasped, looking at it as though seeing it for the first time, "wasn't meant for me. The Solar Dominion called it salvation. But all I ever used it for was to kill. Kill, and kill, and kill, till I forgot what I even wanted it for." He coughed, blood spattering his arm, but his eyes remained fixed on Ithan. "Feels like you can use it better."
The core slipped from his hand, weightless in the storm's pull. It drifted between them, light pulsing in rhythm with Ithan's own heartbeat. Equation sigils flashed behind Ithan's eyes, lines of shifting geometry writing themselves across his vision. The core's runes unfolded like a solved formula, its energy resonating with something already buried within him.
Then his chest began to glow. The grafted plates beneath his skin—the ones born from the data crystals—reacted violently. His tunic tore as crystal filaments burst through, fine as hair and alive with light. They reached out, coiling toward the drifting core like living wires.
When the core touched him, the filaments struck. They pierced the crystal heart and drew it inward. Aether roared through him—too much, too bright, too alive. His body arched, his veins flaring white-gold as the core fused to the lattice inside his chest. The smell of scorched fabric filled the air.
Through the blinding light, Ithan lifted his arm. His hand closed in an instinctive gesture, and the air itself answered. Stormheart flickered into existence.
The lance materialized in his grasp, its haft humming with divine resonance, the same pitch as the Forge's dying core. Sparks crawled along its blade, lightning forming around his wrist like a gauntlet of living fire.
He turned to the dais where Stormheart had once rested— the very seal that had held the Forge dormant for generations. Without hesitation, Ithan drove the spear down.
The blade pierced the crystal seal, embedding itself deep into the heart of the crucible.Light exploded from the contact point, lines of energy shooting outward through the walls as the living filaments from his chest followed suit, embedding themselves into the Forge's structure.
The entire mountain shuddered, the hum of awakening power vibrating through the stone. And for the first time since its fall, the Storm Forge breathed. The Forge began to vanish. Not in an explosion, but in an unraveling.
Light peeled away from its edges like silk burning in reverse, the crystal lattice folding inward, collapsing through itself piece by piece. Whole sections of the great engine dematerialized, their geometries bending until they simply ceased to exist.
Then came the silence before the fall— and gravity remembered them. The world dropped out from under Ithan's feet. He and Anipather's lifeless body plunged through the collapsing light, swallowed by wind and ash.
The impact came with bone-crushing violence. Ithan slammed into the mountainside, rolling down jagged stone and glassed earth. The sound of snapping ribs filled his ears. Dust and fragments tore at his skin. When he finally stopped, his back hit a wall of rock so hard that the world went white.
For a long time, there was nothing— just the slow, dragging pulse of his heart and the taste of blood in his mouth. He lay sprawled against the slope, every breath a rasp. The night stretched out before him, lit faintly by the reflection of the moons on the shattered peaks of the Spine of Hyperion.
Mountains rose like the vertebrae of some dead god, their slopes glowing with faint veins of dormant ash. Ithan couldn't move. His limbs refused. His Mysteries were silent. Even the flame inside him guttered low, trapped somewhere between pain and numbness.
He didn't know how long he drifted in and out of consciousness. Time had become a blur of shadow and red haze. Then—footsteps. Slow. Heavy. deliberate. Each step crushed the gravel into dust.
Ithan forced his eyes open, vision trembling in and out of focus. A dark shape approached through the moonlit fog, tall and broad-shouldered. The antlers caught the light first—branching, bone-white, alive.
The figure stopped a few paces away, the glow of its eyes pale and cold beneath the shadow of a stag skull helm.
Archon Damarchos.
The warrior's silhouette loomed against the silver night, the air around him thick with the scent of salt and iron and something older—wild, predatory, divine.
Ithan tried to move, to summon fire to his hand, but nothing came. His fingers only twitched. Damarchos tilted his head slightly, the living antlers creaking like old wood.
"You fell far, Ashborn," Damarchos said, his voice a low tide crashing beneath the words—deep, resonant, and ancient. "And yet, somehow… You still burn." He stepped closer, the moonlight catching the curve of his antlers. "Impressive. Truly impressive."
Ithan coughed, pain lancing through his ribs. His voice was little more than a rasp. "You… how are you here…? Helen…"
"You think I would face her alone?" Damarchos scoffed, folding his arms across his massive chest. "For decades, I've warred with that monster. Not once have I defeated her. Not even now, at Aletheia, when my power stands at its highest. Compared to her? I am a shadow."
He knelt slightly, enough for Ithan to see the sea-colored glow pulsing beneath his helm.
"But that doesn't matter," Damarchos said. "I'm not here for her. I'm here for you."
Ithan blinked through the pain. "For… me?"
"Think back. The last time we met—years ago, before the Forge, before the flames—you were still just a boy," Damarchos said. "A boy with fire in his eyes, caged by a village that feared you."
His tone darkened, not cruel, but filled with weight.
"I spared you then. I asked you to come with me, to join the Dionians… to reshape the world."
The stag-helmed warrior rose again, standing tall against the pale sky.
"I'm asking again. The Imperium's order is a lie—one forged on broken backs and borrowed gods. With your Promethean spark… your Titanic blood… we could tear that false order down." Damarchos extended a hand—not in command, but in pact. "So tell me, Ashborn… will you finally join us?"
"Sorry," Ithan rasped, blood drying at the corner of his mouth, "but I've got a contract with the Imperium."
Damarchos tilted his head, the stag helm casting a long shadow across the rocks. "Truly?"
"Truly," Ithan said, managing the ghost of a smirk.
Damarchos's eyes narrowed beneath the helm. "Then die."
He raised his hand—only for a lance of searing pink flames to tear through the air between them, screaming like a comet. Damarchos vanished in a blink, space warping with the sudden twist of his movement. Where he'd stood a moment before now stood her.
Helen of Themyskira emerged from the blaze, one hand gripping the throat of another Damarchos, his armor cracking beneath her grip.
"Helen," the true Archon snarled from a ridge above, reappearing in the folds of moonlight and smoke.
"You should've given up, Damarchos," Helen said coolly, eyes gleaming like twin suns. "Your raiding party's already in retreat. And this clone of yours…"
She lifted the broken figure slightly higher. The man gagged, blood spilling from his mouth as his skin began to shimmer, the illusion dissolving. A moment later, the false Damarchos twisted violently in her grip, revealing a Dionian warrior beneath, his face contorted with fear and regret.
"F-forgive me, Archon…" he choked, "She was… too… strong…"
Helen regarded him, curious. "Shapeshifting. Impressive transmutation—didn't know Dionian magi were capable of such a technique. Especially at Aletheia."
Without another word, she squeezed.
A crack echoed through the valley. The imposter slumped, lifeless.
"Foreigner," Damarchos hissed, fury masked beneath control.
Helen smiled, her expression unreadable, calm as a storm's eye.
Damarchos held her gaze for a long moment—then turned his eyes back to Ithan's collapsed form. "We'll meet again, Ashborn. And my third offer will be my final one."
With that, his body melted into shadow, fragments of antler and cloak scattering like mist. Even Helen's perception could not track him.
Silence fell.
Helen turned, her gaze sweeping over Ithan's mangled form. Then to Anipather's corpse—limp, hollow, and self-wounded. She said nothing. The story had already been told in blood.
She lifted her hand. A soft hum rippled through the air. Gravity shifted—not as weight, but as warmth. Ithan's body lifted, drawn gently toward her, the force cradling him like unseen arms.
"I don't know what Anipather was planning, but it seems like you put a stop to it," she said quietly. "You should rest, and leave the rest to me." She tapped a finger on Ithan's forehead, and then the world darkened once more.