Kael's POV
"Apocalypse?" I stared at my aunt. "You can't be serious."
Nyx pointed at the cracking sky. "Does that look like I'm joking?"
Through the shattered reality, massive shapes were emerging. I saw a hand the size of a mountain reaching through one crack. From another, hundreds of eyes on writhing tentacles pushed through, all of them focused on Lyria.
"This is bad," I muttered.
"Bad?" Lyria's voice cracked. "BAD? I just broke the universe! This is—this is—"
She swayed on her feet. I caught her before she collapsed, and she felt so light in my arms. Too light. Using her power twice in one day had drained her completely.
"Easy," I said softly. "You didn't know."
"Didn't know? DIDN'T KNOW?" Her eyes were wild with panic. "How many monsters did I release? How many people are going to die because of me?"
"None, if we're fast." Nyx walked to the window and studied the breaking sky with a calm I definitely didn't feel. "Most of the sealed beings are still weak from their imprisonment. We have maybe an hour before they fully materialize. Two if we're lucky."
"An hour to do what?" I demanded.
"To reseal them, obviously." Nyx turned back to us. "Lyria broke the seals with her song of truth. So she needs to seal them again with a song of binding."
Lyria shook her head frantically. "I can't. My voice is—I used everything. I can barely whisper."
"Then you'd better rest fast." Nyx snapped her fingers, and a silver throne of ice materialized behind Lyria. "Sit. I'll give you some of my power to help you recover. But Kael—" She looked at me with those ancient frozen eyes. "—you need to buy us time."
My stomach dropped. "Buy time how?"
"The first creatures to break through will come here, drawn to Lyria's power. You need to keep them away from her while she rests." Nyx's expression softened slightly. "I know you're injured. I know you nearly died. But you're the God of Silence, nephew. If anyone can hold back chaos with nothing but willpower, it's you."
She was right. I'd spent five thousand years mastering silence, learning to make emptiness into a weapon. But I'd also spent those five thousand years feeling nothing, and now...
Now I felt everything. Fear. Pain. And something else when I looked at Lyria—something that made my dead heart beat again.
"How long do I need to hold them?" I asked.
"Thirty minutes. Maybe less if—"
The palace shook. A sound like reality screaming echoed across all realms. Through the window, I saw the first creature fully emerge—a massive serpent made of shadows and teeth, easily a hundred feet long. It twisted through the air, its many mouths all screaming Lyria's name.
"SONGSTRESS! GODDESS WHO FREED US! WE COME TO SERVE!"
"They want to serve her?" I looked at Nyx in confusion.
"Of course. She freed them. In their eyes, she's their liberator, their queen." Nyx smiled grimly. "Unfortunately, their gratitude usually involves eating anyone who gets between them and their new master. So I'd suggest you start running."
The serpent dove toward the palace, its mouths open wide.
I pushed Lyria toward Nyx. "Keep her safe."
"Kael, wait—" Lyria grabbed my hand. "You can't fight that thing alone! You're barely healed!"
"I know." I squeezed her hand once, then let go. "But I'm not letting anything hurt you. Not even grateful monsters."
I ran toward the broken window and jumped.
The fall should have killed me. We were hundreds of feet up. But I was the God of Silence—gravity was just another sound I could command. I slowed my descent until I landed softly on the ground below.
The serpent noticed me immediately. All its heads turned, and dozens of eyes focused on me with hungry intelligence.
"YOU ARE NOT THE SONGSTRESS," it hissed. "YOU ARE NOTHING. MOVE ASIDE."
"Can't do that," I said calmly, even though my heart was hammering. I raised my hands and called on my power. Darkness poured from my palms, spreading across the ground like ink in water. "This is my realm. And in my realm, I make the rules."
"THEN DIE WITH YOUR RULES!"
The serpent struck. I dodged left, barely avoiding its snapping jaws. Its teeth carved furrows in the ground where I'd been standing.
I countered with a blade of pure silence—a weapon that cut through sound, light, and matter itself. The blade sliced through one of the serpent's heads. The head dissolved into smoke, screaming.
But the serpent had a dozen more heads, and they all attacked at once.
I danced between the strikes, my body moving on instinct. Even injured, even exhausted, I'd been fighting for five thousand years. My muscle memory knew what to do even when my mind didn't.
But I was slowing down. Each dodge took more effort. Each breath burned in my damaged chest. The wound Selene had given me hadn't fully healed—Lyria's power had saved my life but not restored my strength.
A head got through my defense and bit down on my shoulder. I screamed as its teeth sank in, poison flooding my veins.
"KAEL!" I heard Lyria's distant shout from the palace above.
No. She needed to focus on recovering. I couldn't distract her.
I grabbed the serpent's head with both hands and poured silence into it. The head went rigid, then crumbled to ash. But the poison was spreading through my body, making my vision blur.
"YOU ARE WEAK," the serpent hissed. "THE SILENT GOD IS BROKEN. STEP ASIDE AND WE WILL MAKE YOUR DEATH QUICK."
"Not happening," I gasped.
More cracks appeared in the sky. More shapes emerged. A giant made of flame. A swarm of insects with human faces. A creature that was all mouth and no body. They all headed toward the palace.
Toward Lyria.
I couldn't fight them all. There were too many, and I was too weak.
But I didn't need to fight them. I just needed to slow them down.
I closed my eyes and reached deep inside myself, to the core of what I was. The God of Silence. The ruler of emptiness. The master of the space between sounds.
And I sang.
It was the first time I'd sung in five thousand years. My voice was rough and broken, nothing like Lyria's beautiful song. But it didn't need to be beautiful. It just needed to be true.
I sang a song of silence. Of emptiness. Of the peaceful void where nothing existed and nothing could hurt.
The darkness around me responded. It spread outward in waves, consuming everything it touched. Not destroying—silencing. Making things stop, pause, freeze in the moment between one heartbeat and the next.
The serpent froze mid-strike. The giant stopped moving. The swarm hung suspended in the air.
I held the song, pouring everything I had left into it. My vision darkened at the edges. Blood ran from my nose, my ears. Holding this many creatures in stasis was killing me.
But I held on. For Lyria. For the mortal realm. For everyone who would die if these monsters broke free.
"Just... a little... longer..." I gasped between verses.
Then I felt it—warmth against my back. A hand on my shoulder. And a voice joining mine, harmonizing with my rough song.
Lyria.
Her voice was still weak, still damaged, but it wove through mine like golden thread through black cloth. Where my song made things stop, hers made them sleep. Where mine held them frozen, hers convinced them to rest.
Together, our voices created something neither of us could do alone.
The monsters began to fade. Not destroyed, but sent back to sleep, back to their prisons. The cracks in reality started closing.
"You're supposed to be resting," I managed to say between verses.
"I tried," she sang back, and I heard the smile in her voice. "But you sounded terrible alone."
Despite everything—the pain, the exhaustion, the world ending—I laughed.
We sang together until the last crack sealed. Until the last monster faded. Until the sky returned to its normal black and silver.
Then we both collapsed.
I lay on my back, staring up at the stars, unable to move. Lyria fell beside me, her hand accidentally touching mine.
"Did we do it?" she whispered. "Are they gone?"
"For now," I breathed. "But Lyria... your song didn't reseal them. It just sent them back to sleep."
"What's the difference?"
"Seals are permanent. Sleep isn't." I turned my head to look at her. "They'll wake up again. Maybe in a day, maybe in a week. And when they do—"
"They'll come back," she finished, horror dawning in her eyes. "Oh gods. What have I done?"
Before I could answer, the ground beneath us began to shake. Not from monsters this time—from something else.
A golden portal ripped open in the air above us. Through it, I saw the Celestial Court—the throne room where the Supreme Council sat in judgment.
And standing in that portal was a figure I'd hoped never to see again.
The Supreme Deity. The first god. The oldest, most powerful being in all of creation.
He looked down at us with eyes that had witnessed the birth of stars.
"Lyria. Kael." His voice made the ground tremble. "You have broken the Sacred Seals. You have threatened all of creation. By ancient law, you are both sentenced to immediate execution."
He raised his hand, and divine fire gathered in his palm—fire that could erase a god from existence permanently.
"Any last words?" he asked.
Lyria grabbed my hand and squeezed tight.
I squeezed back.
We faced our death together.
But before the Supreme Deity could strike, something impossible happened.
The stars went out.
Every single star in the sky vanished at once, plunging the world into absolute darkness.
And from that darkness, a voice spoke—ancient, terrible, and amused:
"Well, well. The children are finally playing with fire. How... nostalgic."
I knew that voice. Every god knew that voice. It was the voice from the very beginning, from before the beginning.
The Supreme Deity's hand shook. His fire flickered and died.
"No," he whispered. "You're supposed to be dead. We killed you. We—"
"Killed me?" The voice laughed, and reality shuddered. "Oh, my dear children. You can't kill what was never truly alive. You can only delay the inevitable."
The darkness took shape—a figure made of absence itself. Not black, but the complete lack of anything. Emptiness given form.
"I am Void," the figure said. "The Nothing that existed before Something. The Silence before the First Word. And these two—" It pointed at me and Lyria with a finger that shouldn't exist. "—are under my protection now."
The Supreme Deity backed away, actually backed away in fear. "But why? They're just—"
"Just what? Just the only beings in ten thousand years interesting enough to accidentally free every sealed monster in creation?" Void laughed again. "Oh, I like them. I like them very much. So here's what's going to happen."
The darkness spread, consuming everything. When it faded, we were somewhere else—nowhere else. A place between places.
Void looked down at us with non-eyes.
"Welcome to the True Void, little gods. Let me tell you about the real reason the monsters were sealed. And why," it smiled with a mouth it didn't have, "you're going to wish you'd let the Supreme Deity kill you."