Each stone pulsed with the heartbeat of time — the rhythm of centuries Ari had stolen, bargained, and returned.He had watched empires rise from dust and collapse into it again. He had seen love bloom, shatter, and fade. He had saved civilizations only to watch them burn once more.
All of it drifted past him like mist… until him.
You who defy fate itself.
Ari had whispered it once, watching Gilgamesh from afar.I envy how you burn and call it life. I admire your strength… yet I feel nothing at all.
"You've arrived," Ari murmured when he sensed the figure behind him. Footsteps followed — quiet, hesitant, as if one wrong breath might make him vanish.
"The Saint of Hours," the man said. "That's what they call you, isn't it?"
Ari stood in the ruins of a chapel, its ceiling half-eaten by fire. The stained glass behind him — once painted with Solara's radiant face — had melted into a warped prism of red and gold.
He had been speaking to a dying general when the air shifted, heavy like the moment before lightning strikes. The soldiers froze. And then Gilgamesh appeared — golden armor gleaming, eyes sharp as dawn, arrogance threaded with an unfamiliar sadness.
His men called him the Golden King. Ari had known that title once, in another era, another name.
Gilgamesh's first words were neither kind nor cruel."You're the one they call the Saint of Hours."
Ari turned slowly. Firelight kissed his skin like porcelain, shadows playing along his jaw. His expression was calm, almost amused.
"Titles are heavy things, Your Majesty," he murmured. "They tend to slow down time."
And in that ruined chapel, for the first time, someone spoke to Gilgamesh without reverence or fear — a small wound pressed into his pride, warm and unfamiliar.