The blade of starlight cut through the stillness.
Kael's strike should have been final—an end to the chaos the Heralds had birthed. But the moment it touched the Child of Silence, time fractured.
Not backward. Not forward. Outward.
Kael found himself suspended in a place beyond existence—the Bleed, where realities collided and collapsed, where time wept and truth unraveled.
The Child floated before him, untouched, its gaze no longer empty.
It blinked.
And Kael saw.
He saw entire galaxies crushed in silence.
Worlds that never screamed as they died. Beings who begged for sound—any sound—as the Child blinked them into mute extinction. He saw the origin of the Heralds, born from the unspoken wish of a dying universe that no longer wanted to feel.
He staggered.
"You're not silence," Kael whispered, "you're grief."
The Child didn't speak. It couldn't. Its voice had been stolen by the first world it failed to save. Its power wasn't destruction—it was numbness. A longing to erase feeling so nothing could hurt again.
Kael's blade lowered.
"Then let me show you why we fight to feel."
With a breath, Kael opened his mind—no, his soul—to the entity within. Their connection deepened, no longer as host and passenger, but as two fractured pieces becoming whole.
Light burst from Kael's chest—not bright, not blinding, but warm. Human.
He showed the Child memories:
Lyra's laugh as they sat beneath shattered moons.
The bittersweet goodbye to his former world.
The fire of rage, the tears of regret.
The pain of failure, and the stubbornness to rise again.
The Child blinked once more.
And this time… it cried.
A single tear drifted into space.
Where it fell, stars bloomed.
The Bleed cracked.
Reality reasserted itself. The Child dissolved—not in defeat, but in release. Its silence ended.
Back in the skies of Kael's world, the last of the Heralds vanished into dust.
Kael hovered, exhausted. Victorious.
Below, Lyra wept and laughed at once.
Valen dropped to his knees in awe.
And across every surviving realm, a whisper echoed like thunder:
"The Celestial God lives."