The sky didn't scream—it held its breath.
Atop the cliff of obsidian light, Caelum stood before the First God of the northern pantheon. The being had no name—its title lost in the unraveling of myth. Those who dared whisper it went mad, their voices devoured by time itself. It was said to be the first thought born in the void, the first watcher of stars, and the first tyrant to call silence holy.
It stood now like a monument sculpted from galaxy dust and memory. Its eyes were clocks with bleeding suns. Its voice was not sound, but absence.
> "You are unmade."
"You are but ash given arrogance."
The God's voice sank into the stone of the cliff, boiling the horizon. Mountains far below crumbled into sand.
Caelum didn't answer.
He raised a hand—and with it, a memory.
---
A shattered bell.
A quiet chapel.
A dying priest whispering to a boy:
> "You will have to choose, child. Between the burden of knowing and the mercy of forgetting."
---
Caelum blinked once.
And then the world ruptured.
---
The First God moved—more thought than flesh, its form turning into constellations and breathless wind. It struck like a dying star.
But Caelum had spent 1,000 years dancing with silence. He moved between moments, his sword unsheathing not with steel, but lightless memory.
His blade whispered across the void:
"Elienne."
The God froze—not from pain, but confusion. It could feel the weight of the name. A human name. A mortal grief.
> "What… is that?"
Caelum answered softly.
> "The one thing you cannot eat."
---
The fight became unwatchable.
Reality cracked—planets blinked and reformed. Trees aged and decayed within seconds. The Hollow Bloom itself seeped through Caelum's presence, haunting the battlefield with whispers and illusions of flowers that bloomed only in forgotten hearts.
For every strike the First God made, Caelum offered not force—but memory.
The laughter of his sister.
The face of a father bleeding into his arms.
A song his mother used to hum during rain.
And then—
> Elienne's voice:
"Try… to love again…"
---
The God howled in its mindless language, struck by a blade that carved not flesh, but identity. One name—Caelum—stood before it as a wall of remembrance.
Then came the final strike:
A stillness.
A memory of a field. Two hands, fingers interlocked, under a sky that would never return.
---
The First God fell—not dead, for gods do not die.
But it forgot itself.
Its form dispersed across the wind like a story no longer believed.
---
Caelum stood alone again.
Bloodless.
His sword cracked, not from force—but from cost.
> "One left," he murmured, "before the gate must be sealed."
He turned to the rising dawn.
And far away, in a sky that flickered like candlelight, the true enemy stirred.
Not a god.
Not a tyrant.
Something older.
---
The void began to call again.
A pulse through his bones.
A whisper on every petal of the white flowers at his feet.
> "Come home, Caelum. One last bloom".