A few trembling hands rose. Mostly Soterians. A Verdant girl. One Starborn boy with serpent tattoos that shone faintly.
"Who here believes life is meaningless?"
Slowly, one of the Silent Choir initiates raised her hand. Then another from the Iron Sentinels. One or two from the Dreamwalker rows, faces blank as unfinished dreams.
Kayne nodded.
"Good. Both kinds of you."
He drew a circle in the air, shadow condensing into a ring of teeth and runes.
"This is a Bloodline Pact Sigil," he said. "Normally, I'd use it to enslave, corrupt, or weaponize you. Today, I'm feeling experimental."
Lyra glared. "This is not comforting."
Kayne ignored her.
"You wrote your answers," he told the children. "Now bleed on them."
Gasps.
He slammed his palm onto the floor. Shadows shot out like roots, sliding under every desk, every test sheet.
"You said you wanted a purpose?" Kayne growled. "You said you wanted no purpose? Either way, you spoke from your core. The cosmos heard. Let's see if it listens when you do."
Reluctantly, the initiates obeyed.
A prick of a finger.
A smear on ink.
Blood touched words and ignited.
The scripts on every sheet flared, rising into the air as glowing glyphs. Some shone gold, some black, some a confused brown like dried earth.
Kayne inhaled.
The glyphs spun toward him and struck his chest, embedding themselves into his Void-touched bloodline.
He staggered, snarling, as a thousand fragile convictions stabbed into his heart.
"You're insane," Lyra whispered.
"I'm busy," Kayne snapped back. "Be quiet."
He closed his eyes.
Inside him, Beast Core, Flesh, and Bloodline roared. Fenrir's hunger howled. Cain's void laughed. Lycanna's lunar instincts tried to parse all the borrowed meanings, all the half-baked purposes, all the adolescent declarations of value.
Kayne's veins burned with answers that did not belong to him.
Life is sacred because it hurts.
Life is pointless; only power matters.
Life is a test.
Life is a story.
Life is debt.
Life is soil for gods.
Life is a chance to tell the universe "no."
Life is… life is…
He screamed, and the scream turned into a wolf's howl that shook the dome.
Outside, the primal–Aetherian turtle-beast shuddered mid-lunge, as if remembering some long-forgotten puppyhood. Its beam staggered; Kael seized the opportunity and drove a fist of compressed sky into its core.
"NOW!" Kayne roared.
Lyra understood.
"Crown I!" she shouted. "Send your gathered Qi to Kayne's circle—no filters, no refinement! Crown II, route your Vessel cores through Soterian resonance—shape, don't censor!"
The children obeyed on instinct older than law.
Raw Mortal Qi streamed into Kayne's shadow circle—chaotic, impure, as contradictory as the hearts that generated it. Some of it carried Verdant renewal, some Flameguard courage, some Silent Choir doubt, some Bloodforged rage.
Kayne opened all his channels.
Beast Core principle: consume.
Flesh cultivation: endure.
Bloodline: adapt.
The energies hit him like a tidal wave of undecided meaning.
He choked, almost drowned in it.
Then he laughed—a broken, luminous sound.
"Fine," Kayne said. "If you won't choose one meaning…"
His eyes turned black, then silver, then something in between.
"…then I'll hunt for you."
He raised his hands.
"Moonhunter Rite — Pack of the Unanswered."
---
V. The Pack of the Unanswered
Shadows erupted from Kayne's feet, pouring through the bulwark without breaking it. They took shape as wolves—some skeletal, some made of light, some woven from starlight serpents or Bloomwing petals or molten steel. Each wolf bore the face or mark of an initiate whose blood-glyph Kayne had devoured.
They weren't just spirits; they were concepts given fur and fang.
Life as Defiance leapt alongside Life as Duty, their howls harmonizing.
Life as Curiosity darted back and forth, nipping at the heels of Life as Vengeance until it remembered to question its target.
Life as Meaningless Noise manifested as a silent, colorless hound that nevertheless stood shoulder to shoulder with the others, refusing to fall behind.
The pack surged upward, phasing through Lyra's barrier, then through open air, climbing the spiral of battle toward the monstrous turtle.
Kael saw them coming and widened his grin.
"About time he brought pets," he muttered.
The wolves hit the beast from all angles, ripping not at flesh but at law. Each bite tore away a fragment of the abomination's incoherent identity.
"You are not all things," snarled Life as Story, jaws clamped around a clockwork hinge. "You are a scene."
"You are not inevitable," growled Life as Duty, dragging a spike of rusted metal free. "You are a choice someone made."
"You are not godhood," whispered the colorless hound, sinking teeth into a pulsing core of machine-flesh. "You are a failed experiment."
The beast howled as pieces of its stolen meaning were stripped away.
Kael raised both hands.
"Terra Lux—Concordant Verdict."
Radiance poured from him, not as a beam, but as a spiral descending through the beast's now-bare essence. The light assessed what remained.
Beast.
Machine.
Alien instinct.
Corrupted purpose.
"No," Kael said softly. "You're better than that."
For an instant, everyone—Lyra, the children, the goddesses, Kayne, even the watching Feather of Hela-Azrael—felt the Skyfather's compassion wrap around the monstrosity like a father's hand around a broken toy.
Then Kael closed his fist.