The mountain of saints wept upward.
Ash-tears spiraled slowly, joining the inverted city's rain of rust and memory. Every drop that touched Seong-jun's skin hissed, SSSSSSHHHH…, searching for a heart that still knew how to hurt.
He climbed.
Aria climbed beside him, barefoot on the fused spines of dead saints. Each footfall left a golden print that lingered only a heartbeat before the mountain devoured it. CRUNCH… SWOOSH…
Halfway up, the air thickened into something that had once been prayer and was now only screaming.
Grigori walked with them—though he never seemed to move. One moment, a stained-glass silhouette at the edge of vision. The next, directly ahead, arms spread like a crucified constellation.
"Look," he sang, voice soft enough to flay souls. "Look at what you made of them."
The mountain shifted. Faces pushed out from the stone, thousands, mouths sewn shut with their own halos. The First Descent. Saints who had believed they could close the cycle by becoming its final seal.
Their eyes followed Seong-jun and Aria with synchronized hunger. One face belonged to a woman whose cheek he had once kissed in another life. Lips moved behind the stitches.
Run.
He kept climbing.
At the summit waited the cradle.
Larger than any logic allowed, carved from a single piece of lunar bone, pale and veined with black rivers. Moon-moths the size of children beat against invisible bars, dusting the air with silver rot.
Inside lay the girl from his classroom.
Jung Ha-yoon.
Seventeen. Straight-A student. Secretly wrote poetry about dying stars.
Now her skin was porcelain cracked with gold. Veins of living scripture crawled beneath, rewriting themselves faster than the eye could follow. Her uniform burned away, replaced by a funeral dress woven from the night itself.
She opened her eyes. They were not eyes anymore. They were doorways.
Through them poured the sound of every world that had ever ended.
"Teacher," she whispered. Each syllable birthed a thousand dying suns. "You're late again."
Seong-jun stopped at the cradle's edge.
The crows refused to follow. They hovered in a trembling ring, wings dripping shadows that refused to touch the bone.
Aria stepped past him. Her remaining names glowed white-hot on her arm, ready to burn out entirely.
"Don't," he muttered.
She ignored him. Reached into the cradle. Touched Ha-yoon's cheek with fingers that bled light.
Ha-yoon's doorway-eyes focused on her.
"Sister," she crooned, voice layered with the gentle timbre of something ancient pretending to be kind. "You left me alone for so long. The cradle was cold."
Aria's hand trembled. "I'm here now," she murmured. "Let me carry you home."
Ha-yoon smiled. All the teeth were wrong.
"Home is hungry," she answered.
The cradle lurched. Chains of frozen starlight erupted from its base, wrapping Aria's wrists, ankles, throat. They pulled her forward until her knees cracked against lunar bone. CRACK… CRASH…
Golden blood sprayed across Ha-yoon's face. Where it landed, the cracks in her porcelain skin sealed.
Grigori appeared behind the cradle, hands on its rim like a proud father.
"Watch," he announced, voice ringing with cathedral bells and distant artillery. "Watch the birth of the Final Night."
Seong-jun moved. His shadow exploded outward, becoming a storm of black wings and screaming memories. Every crow dove at once, beaks aimed at the chains, at Grigori, at the cradle itself.
They shattered against empty air.
Grigori hadn't moved. He had simply ceased to exist where the crows struck.
The chains tightened. Aria's spine bowed backward until something inside her made a sound like breaking angels.
She did not scream.
She sang.
A lullaby older than language. Notes made of her own blood and every name she still carried.
The mountain shuddered. Fused saints opened their sewn mouths for the first time in ninety-nine years—and screamed with her.
The cradle cracked. From the fissure poured liquid moonlight, thick as mercury. It rose, forming a perfect sphere above Ha-yoon's body.
Inside the sphere floated a black sun. Its surface writhed with faces—billions, every human who would ever live and die in the coming endless night.
Grigori spread his arms. Stained-glass wings unfurled until they blotted out the sky.
"Now," he exalted. "Let the old world end in mercy."
Seong-jun looked at Aria. Her eyes met his across the widening abyss. In them he saw the same gentle, terrible love that had raised her inside God's corpse.
She was going to let it happen.
She was going to become the door—and close it from the inside. Forever.
He took one step forward. Then another.
The crows tried to stop him. They flung themselves into his path, pecking at his eyes, his throat, his heart. Anything to keep him from reaching her.
He walked through them. Each bird that touched him burst into black feathers and memories no longer his to carry.
By the time he reached the cradle, his shadow was almost gone. Only a thin silhouette remained, ragged and bleeding darkness.
He placed both hands on lunar bone. Looked down at Ha-yoon, at the black sun forming above her, at Aria bleeding golden fire into the chains—and spoke the first gentle thing he had said in eleven years.
"Hey, kid."
Ha-yoon's doorway-eyes focused on him.
"Remember the poem you showed me?" His voice raw. "The one about stars that chose to fall so someone else could wish on them?"
The black sun pulsed. Ha-yoon's cracked lips parted.
Seong-jun leaned closer.
"I'm cashing in that wish."
He reached into what little shadow he had left. Pulled out the very last crow. Its eyes were his own. He crushed it in his fist. Black blood poured between his fingers, falling into the cradle like a baptism of regret.
The black sun screamed. Chains around Aria shattered into a rain of frozen stars.
Grigori's stained-glass face fractured with the first expression of genuine surprise in a century.
Seong-jun looked at Aria one final time. Smiled the way dead men smile when they finally remember how.
Then he climbed into the cradle. Wrapped his arms around the girl who had once asked if poems could save people. Let the last piece of his shadow pour into the crack in her chest.
The black sun rushed down to meet him. Light and darkness married in a scream that tore the mountain in half.
When the ash settled, the cradle was empty. Only a single black feather remained, drifting slowly toward the weeping ground.
Aria caught it. Held it against her heart. And for the first time since she was born inside God's corpse, she cried real tears. Not gold. Not fire. Just water.
Far above, the inverted city flickered once. And began to fall.