The Void stirred.
Caelum stood at the edge of the Hollow Bloom, the ancient realm of stillness and grief that had once swallowed him whole. Its skies bled blue stardust; its fields shimmered with memory petals, blooming with forgotten pain. But this time, it wasn't a place of training. It was a battlefield.
He heard it before he saw it—a rift in the silence, like a memory cracking. From the blackened sky, descended figures draped in celestial armor, cloaked in light and arrogance: the Harbingers of the High Deity Order. They were not the false gods of Earth, but the higher architects of dominion. They came not to rule, but to erase.
Caelum stepped forward, robes whispering with each motion, the charm-bandage still tied over his blind eyes.
"You were warned," one of the harbingers said, voice like shattered crystal. "This realm was never yours."
Caelum's voice came like wind through dying grass: "Neither was Earth."
The first clash shattered the horizon. Light met sorrow. Caelum moved like a broken prayer—beautiful and painful. His magic was no longer bound by incantations but by grief itself. The Hollow Bloom responded in kind—swords of starlight erupted around him, each formed from a memory he'd sworn to protect.
A thousand-year-old memory unfurled. Elienne's smile. His mother's lullaby. His father's final embrace. These fragments rose with him as weapons, shields, wings.
They charged.
The harbingers wielded divine entropy, unmaking reality with every swing. Caelum answered not with equal force, but deeper intent. His strikes didn't just cut—they reminded. When his blade sliced through a god's chest, memories of children laughing, of forests untouched, flooded the creature's mind before its light extinguished.
He didn't want to kill.
But he would not let them erase.
As the battle raged, the Hollow Bloom trembled. The Void itself began to fracture, unable to hold the weight of such cosmic sorrow. Caelum stood amid it all, bleeding from the soul, his hands etched with the essence of too many ghosts.
In a brief moment of stillness, he knelt by a dying harbinger.
"Why…?" the god choked. "You could've been one of us."
Caelum placed a hand over its chest. "That's exactly why I refused."
Above them, the rift widened. A voice not heard since time's first breath whispered.
The One Who Watches had awakened.
Caelum's head turned. That voice—
It was the same that had spoken to him in his childhood. The same that had tried to guide him from the ruins of his village. The same that had gone silent when he entered the Void.
Now, it called him again.
Caelum… are you still walking?
He froze.
An old man's voice. A memory from long ago. A fragmented vision: a bearded figure beside a burning tree. A whisper of advice:
"When the world stops hearing you, speak to the wind. It always carries truth."
He blinked. Not with his eyes—but with his soul.
Another god charged. Caelum turned, eyes closed, and raised his hand. The god's armor withered before it reached him. He gently touched the creature's forehead.
"Go. Remember what you were."
It collapsed, turned into ash that became flowers.
The battlefield began to silence.
Six gods fallen. The remaining three circled him warily. The Hollow Bloom now floated in fractured time.
But then—he felt it.
A surge of power not from within, but from above the Void. The true gods were coming. The Watchers Beyond Light.
And he was not ready.
He turned inward. Not in fear, but in resolve. He knew what had to be done.
Caelum placed his hand on the ground of the Hollow Bloom. The flowers shivered, as though they knew.
"I must go deeper."
He looked to the sky.
"Seal Earth. Hide it. Let no god find it again."
The Void raged.
He screamed—not in pain, but in memory.
A storm of petals and stars engulfed him. The Hollow Bloom folded inward, collapsing time, folding space, sealing Earth from divine sight. One last spell—one last grief—carried into eternity.
And then, Caelum vanished.
Not as a god.
But as the last boy who remembered love.