Rain fell upward.
SFX: shuuuu—shhhhk! (gravity reversing, droplets slicing past like ink needles)
It began the moment the last elder's heart stopped beating; every drop reversed direction, rising from the blood-soaked stones like black needles returning to an invisible wound in the sky.
The courtyard of the Shadow Keep had become a broken hourglass, and time itself was bleeding out.
Ryen knelt at the center of it all.
Ten thousand imperial corpses lay in perfect concentric rings around him, armor split open like tin flowers.
The famed Radiant Legion. The Dawnbreakers. The Sunblessed.
Names that once made kingdoms kneel.
Now? Just cooling meat under a sky that had forgotten how to stay dark.
Ryen's shadow stretched too far across the flagstones—thin as paper, black as betrayal.
It was smiling.
It had teeth now.
The elder's body slumped forward.
White hair—once proud—hung in wet crimson clumps across a face Ryen had known since he could walk.
Elder Shien.
The man who taught him mercy was a blade turned inward.
"You…"
A wet, dying rasp.
"You completed the Abyssal Scripture. You… monster."
Ryen didn't answer.
He was listening to the quiet.
There is a silence that comes after genocide.
It is not empty.
It is full of small, polite noises:
the drip of blood finding new paths between stones,
the soft pop of cooling steel,
the last exhale of a boy realizing no one is coming to save him.
"I know," Ryen said at last.
His voice was flat—
SFX: krrrk… (ice settling on a frozen lake)
—cold and unforgiving.
"That's why I finished it."
His shadow moved without permission.
SFX: shlorp—ksssssh! (ink crawling, constricting)
It slithered up the elder's corpse, wrapping around his throat.
Elder Shien's eyes widened—not with fear, but recognition.
The shadow opened a mouth that belonged to nothing living and drank the final breath straight from his lungs.
SFX: prrrtchh! (parchment tearing, soul unspooling)
Then it retreated, satisfied, curling back beneath Ryen's feet.
A hot, barbed sting carved itself across the inside of Ryen's skull.
A new name.
A new technique.
The final verse of the Scripture—written in a language that predated light.
And in trade, a memory burned away.
He reached for his mother's face—
her smile when he brought her frost-roses from the northern ridge—
Gone.
Not faded.
Excised.
The space where it had been was smooth and cold, like a tongue finding the gap left by a pulled tooth.
Ryen closed his eyes.
When he opened them, they were the color of fresh voids.
He stood.
The rain continued to rise.
Each reversed drop carried a speck of stolen light—tiny, dying embers of the souls he had reaped—spiraling upward into the wound in the sky, feeding something huge and patient on the other side.
Ryen looked at the sword in his right hand.
There was no sword.
Only shadow, shaped like one.
Umbra, the living weapon.
It shifted restlessly, hungry for a form it hadn't tasted yet.
He let it dissolve.
Far away—too far for mortal ears—
a blind girl in white lowered her blood-slick hand from the throat of an imperial cardinal.
She tilted her head, milk-glass eyes gazing into everything and nothing.
"He's awake," Saintess Lirien whispered to the corpse.
"The night has found its first mouth."
Even farther, beyond the Ashen Sea, a one-eyed prince in crimson stood on the prow of a burning warship and laughed until the void inside his chest bled starlight.
And high above the ruined continent of Auralis, the First Sun—the oldest of the seven artificial suns—flickered.
Just once.
As if something on the other side had blinked.
Ryen felt it in his bones.
The countdown had begun.
He took one step toward the broken gate.
Then another.
Behind him, the corpses began to rot at impossible speed—
SFX: krrrshh—whuuuump! (flesh sloughing, bones collapsing)—
until white bone became black ash.
The shadow was cleaning up.
It was polite like that.
By the time he reached the threshold, nothing remained of the Shadow Clan except wind and the smell of iron.
Ryen paused beneath the archway.
The clan crest—a broken circle swallowing its own edge—had been carved above the gate a thousand years ago.
Now it wept molten gold, as if even stone mourned.
He raised two fingers and touched the melting emblem.
"I'm sorry," he said to no one.
The words tasted like someone else's.
Then he walked out into the storm that fell upward.
The Long Night had a face now.
And it wore his.