Light did not die with the creator.
It lost its anchor.
In the absence where the throne had been, radiance drifted in torn sheets, like banners ripped from an army that no longer knew its commander. The air did not behave as air. It shivered between density and emptiness, as if physics itself had been a habit sustained by authority.
The Rulers hovered in a broken crescent over the void.
Their wings were scorched at the edges. Their spears, once clean lines of law, flickered and reformed with uneven rhythm. Some of them bled light. Others bled nothing at all, as if they had already begun to hollow out from the cost of what they had done.
Below, the battlefield continued to move, but it had lost the shape it wore for eons. Monarchs surged in impulses rather than strategy. Dragons roared without a central cadence. Frost storms spiraled outward, then collapsed into disorganized flurries. Plague mist rose and fell as if seeking permission that no longer existed.
The war did not end cleanly.
It unthreaded.
A senior Ruler drifted forward, holding the Null Relic in both hands. The artifact's alien core pulsed faintly, not hungry, not satisfied, simply present, a foreign law that had pierced a god.
Around him, other Rulers kept distance without being told. Not from fear of each other, but from the instinctive caution of beings who had just learned that creation could be killed.
Silence settled among them. Not peace. A pause between shocks.
One of the younger Rulers spoke first, voice tight with disbelief.
"It is done."
No one answered immediately.
The words felt too small. Too mortal.
Another Ruler, older in demeanor if not in age, stared at the absence and said, "We have cut the chain."
His spear's tip trembled, and the tremor betrayed him. For eons, the chain had been something they hated, but also something they had leaned on. Even imprisonment could become a framework.
A third Ruler's wings beat once, reflexive, as if trying to correct for missing gravity.
"And now the chain is gone," she said. "So tell me, where does law rest now?"
They all felt it. The missing pillar. The war's premise had been a machine, and the creator had been its axle. With the axle destroyed, the machine did not stop immediately. It began to tear itself apart.
The first Ruler to speak again tightened his grip on the Null Relic.
"There was no other path."
His tone carried conviction like a shield. The same tone they had used to justify eons of sacrifice.
Yet even conviction had to look at consequences.
A ripple passed through the void beneath them.
Not an attack.
A correction.
World Tree roots, luminous black and branching in impossible geometry, surfaced briefly along the edges of the battlefield's understructure, then withdrew. The mechanism that had once borne heavenly soldiers and balanced power had shifted. It was no longer balancing.
It was pruning.
One of the Rulers looked down, watching the roots retreat.
"The World Tree responds," he said, quiet. "Not as it did before."
The senior Ruler with the artifact nodded once, grim.
"Balance was enforced by the throne," he said. "Without it, the tree must choose what survives."
A fourth Ruler, whose armor still carried a deep gash from the earlier stalemate, spoke with restrained anger.
"And the Shadow Monarch?"
At that name, the air among them tightened.
They had killed Ashborn once.
They had nearly killed him twice.
They had planned to remove him as an obstacle, and instead he had become the fulcrum that held the old cycle in place. He had returned with death in his hands and made the war endure longer than any side could stomach.
Now he was gone.
Not dead.
Gone.
The younger Ruler's voice cracked.
"He vanished when the throne fell."
"Not vanished," another corrected. "Extracted."
A murmur ran through the crescent formation, wings stuttering, spears angling unconsciously toward the void as if their bodies still sought an enemy.
The senior Ruler's jaw tightened.
"The creator planted contingencies," he said. "We all knew it. We chose to act anyway."
The one who had asked about Ashborn clenched his fist.
"Then the creator's last cruelty is this," he said. "To take him from the board before judgment could be rendered."
No one contradicted it.
Because they all felt the truth beneath the words.
Ashborn had been a wound in their order.
A loyalist.
A traitor.
A victim.
A king.
He had held the stalemate together with love that did not make sense and loyalty that refused to die. Now that love had been severed from the war, leaving a vacuum none of them had planned for.
Another tremor moved through the planes. Gates flickered and tore wider.
KRRAAACK.
Below, Antares threw back his head and roared, not at the Rulers, but at the sky itself, furious at a universe that had changed the rules without asking permission.
The senior Ruler tightened his wings and lifted the Null Relic slightly, as if weighing the artifact's continuing presence.
"We ended the old cycle," he said.
His voice was not triumphant. It was a verdict pronounced by someone who understood what verdicts cost.
"But we did not create peace."
The younger Ruler swallowed.
"What have we created, then?"
The senior Ruler looked at the absence where the throne had been, and in that gaze there was something like dread dressed as resolve.
"A beginning," he said. "A new cycle."
He turned slightly, addressing the crescent, and his words hardened into command.
"Contain the collapse. Secure the World Tree channels. Record every deviation in law. The Monarchs will test the edges of this new reality. We must learn its shape before they do."
Spears lifted in response. Wings beat with renewed discipline. The Rulers' formation tightened, not because the world was stable, but because stability now had to be imposed by hands that had never truly held it.
As they moved, one Ruler lingered a fraction behind, staring into the space where Ashborn had vanished. His voice was almost too quiet to be heard.
"Ashborn," he said, not as accusation, but as something closer to mourning. "Wherever you have been taken… if you still remember what you were meant to be…"
He did not finish.
He did not know what hope meant anymore.
The crescent turned into motion, and the first steps of the new era began, not with celebration, but with emergency.
The chain was cut.
The stalemate was broken.
And the universe, finally free of its creator, started to rewrite itself with trembling hands.