The sky pulsed with a color that had no name.
Far beyond Aetherveil and Zephyscall's grave, beyond even the stilled remnants of the First God's collapse, Caelum stood before the rift in the world — a boundary that shimmered like a dream about to be forgotten.
It wasn't just a gate. It was a grave.
Not of bodies. But of stars.
They called it the Gate of the Drowned Star. An ancient tear in the sky where one of the first stars was said to have died—not from time, but from betrayal.
Caelum heard the pulse behind the silence. Not sound, not thought. Memory. The Void was calling.
Not asking. But remembering him.
He closed his eyes. And in the dark behind his lids, the Hollow Bloom opened.
---
White petals drifted upward now, not down.
The realm within the black cube unfolded—not as it had before, a prison of silence and grief, but as a realm awakening. The void was no longer still.
It knew what Caelum had done. It felt what he had lost.
And it answered.
Towers of memory rose like forgotten ruins: each shaped by a sorrow he had buried, each echoing a time he had chosen to endure. Trees with leaves made of fading laughter. Rivers that ran backward, showing the last moments of the dead.
At the center, the Drowned Star.
It wasn't a sun. It was a mind—ancient, buried, broken.
A god, yes. But not one of power.
A god of remembrance.
She spoke like a whisper from a dying fire:
> "You are late, Caelum Rivenhart. The stars have already begun to bleed."
He lowered his head.
> "Then teach me. One last time."
---
Time twisted.
She showed him visions—of before the gods, when the Void had gardeners, not rulers. When life was cultivated, not dominated. When memory was the language of creation, and each soul sang its story into the fabric of time.
But the gods grew jealous of the old ways. They killed the last gardeners. And drowned the star that remembered too much.
> "Your blood remembers what the world was told to forget," the Drowned Star said. "So remember for them. One last bloom."
Caelum stepped forward. And the Void bloomed around him.
The Hollow Bloom reshaped. The air folded like glass. A new sword rose before him—not of steel, nor magic. But of every name he had carried.
It pulsed like a heartbeat: Elienne. His family. Reya. The village. Even the gods he had spared.
He took the blade. And with it, the burden.
The Drowned Star's voice faded:
> "You are not meant to save the world, Caelum. You are meant to remember it, so it does not repeat."
---
As he stepped out of the Void, the sky above Earth began to fracture.
The higher deity had arrived. And it would not be fooled by silence.
Caelum stood upon the gate, alone again. But not hollow.
He whispered:
> "Then I will burn my name into the stars, if that's what it takes to keep their memory safe."
The Void trembled with approval.
And the battle for forgetting, for remembrance, and for endless grief.