Chapter 70: The Zenith of Unmaking

  They took to the sky.

  Korren hung heavily against Aeor's side, an arm slung tight over his shoulder. Extending his Essence to encompass Korren as well was a steady, quiet drain on his reserves, one he couldn't afford on a long journey. It was simpler to let Death lift his own body and to just bear Korren's physical weight.

  To his right, Kayneth mirrored the tactic, flying steadily with Zoey secured against her flank. On his left, Dregor kept pace. Aeor had wondered how the ring would adapt to him, but the answer came when a pair of massive wings of scaled stone emerged, beating against the air with heavy, rhythmic thuds. Velora held the rearguard, yet her movements were jagged and labored while she struggled to keep her place in the formation.

  For a time, they flew beneath a canopy of cold, distant stars, relying on the pale celestial light to cut through the dark.

  But as the minutes bled away, the sky began to change.

  Cerulean flames started to bleed through the black canopy above, slowly and methodically reclaiming the skies. Aeor watched the unnatural fire spread, feeling a cold knot of doubt tighten in his chest. A part of him wondered if flying deeper into this domain was a mistake, but he buried the thought. Second-guessing was useless now. There was no logic left to predict what waited for them.

  Kayneth's labored breathing broke his focus.

  "Can we pause?" she asked, her voice thin.

  Aeor halted mid-air, finally taking her in properly. She looked utterly drained. The wings of flame at her back flickered dangerously as her grip on Zoey started to slip.

  Despite the open question, every eye immediately fell on him.

  He glanced to his left. Dregor wasn't faring any better. The stone-scaled wings beat sluggishly, and his chest heaved, pulling in shallow, ragged gasps that barely seemed to fill his lungs. Zoey, Velora, and Korren were managing, but the same unnatural exhaustion weighed heavily on their features.

  Aeor gave a curt nod, and they descended toward a barren, jagged ridge.

  He eased Korren to the ground, then moved to help Dregor settle against a weathered boulder. As Aeor's hands gripped him, an unnatural, icy chill seeped through Dregor's form. It wasn't the cold of the night air; it felt entirely hollow.

  "Are you alright?" Aeor asked, kneeling beside him.

  They had barely been flying for half an hour. Between the constant drain of their flight and the immense exertion of surviving the reality storm, fatigue was to be expected. But this sheer level of physical collapse, especially in Dregor and Kayneth, was entirely disproportionate. A creeping sense of wrongness settled deep in Aeor's gut.

  "Yes," Dregor muttered, though his voice lacked its usual rumble. "Just need to catch my breath."

  A heavy thud sounded behind them. Kayneth touched down, but the moment her boots hit the dirt, her legs buckled as if the bones had turned to dust. Zoey caught her instantly, struggling to brace her weight, and shot a panicked look at Aeor.

  "She's freezing," Zoey said.

  Aeor's gaze snapped from Kayneth to Dregor. The exact same hollow chill.

  "I'll get wood for a fire," Aeor said, standing up.

  Zoey nodded, already conjuring twin flames in her palms as she huddled between Kayneth and Dregor to share the warmth.

  The ridge itself was lifeless, but Aeor spotted the twisted husk of a dead tree on a fractured mass of floating earth nearby. Wasting no time, he let Death lift his body and took to the sky.

  When he returned, the makeshift camp was dead silent.

  He landed heavily, the dread spiking in his chest. No one was looking at the fire. They all sat in silence, bearing identical, grave expressions, their eyes locked onto their Archive status.

  "Did something happen?" Aeor asked.

  Velora looked up at him, her usually composed voice laced with absolute disbelief. "The Thread..."

  Aeor immediately dropped the gathered wood. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out his parchment and unfolded it to look at the thread.

  Aspect Concordance

  Aspects that oppose the stasis: (6/13)

  Death

  Time

  Light

  Darkness

  Authority

  Depth

  Aspects that support the stasis: (7/13)

  Existence

  Life

  Dream

  Void

  Invariant

  Horizon

  Entropy

  The words had shifted. They had lost Horizon. They had lost Entropy. But before his mind could fully grasp the failing balance, his eyes snagged on the final line.

  Time Until World Collapse: 10 Days

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The revelation knocked the breath from his lungs. It made no sense. When they took flight, they had fifteen days. He tore his gaze from the parchment, looking to the others for some kind of anchor, but found only mirrored horror.

  "We cannot afford to stop," Kayneth rasped, forcing herself upright even as her legs violently trembled.

  Aeor couldn't form the words to reply. The reality around them was unraveling too fast. But what truly shattered the moment was a heavy, sickening thud. Dregor, heaving for air and leaning against the boulder, collapsed against the stone.

  Time fractured. Suddenly everyone was moving, rushing to his side, falling to their knees in a desperate bid to stabilize him. Frantic words bled into the cold air. Pleas were screamed to distant gods. Voices begged Aeor to do something, to use his aspect, to pull him back.

  But Aeor remained frozen, staring down as the life drained from Dregor's eyes.

  Dregor looked back at him. His lips barely moved, pushing out a single, silent breath. A name.

  Aria.

  And then he was gone.

  Someone screamed. Velora, or perhaps Zoey. The sound tore through the night, raw and agonizing. But as the cry peaked, Dregor's body began to unmake itself. His armored form broke apart, crumbling not into ash, but into tiny, glowing motes of cerulean Essence. The dust drifted upward, catching the wind, and began to vanish into the dark.

  And as the final mote faded, the screaming simply stopped.

  The desperate cries, the frantic hands, the suffocating grief, all of it abruptly vanished with the wind. A hollow, terrifying silence fell over the ridge.

  Zoey turned to look at Aeor. Her eyes were rimmed red with fresh tears, yet her expression was perfectly calm. It was a blankness that didn't belong on her face, a total disconnect from the reality that had occurred just a second prior.

  "Kayneth is right," Zoey said smoothly, her voice utterly void of the panic from moments ago. "We cannot stop here, not while..."

  She kept speaking, but the words became static in Aeor's ears. He stared at her. He looked at Velora. He looked at Kayneth. He searched their faces for the devastation, for the horror of the friend they had just lost.

  There was nothing. In their eyes, Dregor had never existed.

  Aeor's mind went entirely blank.

  He realized he had been hiding behind the indifference of Death all along. He had convinced himself he had matured. He believed he could handle whatever the initiation threw at him because he had grown physically stronger. But emotionally, he was entirely fragile.

  All he had done was run away.

  He knew it was not his mother who had healed him after the battle against Vaelkar. He knew the truth too well, yet he had desperately pretended otherwise. He knew exactly what his amulet meant. He knew who he was supposed to embrace.

  And still, he ran. He clung to false hopes. He knew what that letter truly—

  He violently severed the thought before it could fully form.

  Time blurred as they continued to move. Aeor retreated into a void within himself, completely shutting his mind off to the unfolding nightmare. The dissociation was so absolute that he barely registered the moment Kayneth lost the final vestiges of her power. Her flames died, and she plummeted toward the jagged ridges below.

  Aeor could not remember if he had dived after her. He likely did. It sounded like something he would do. But the memory was completely absent, and the effort would have been entirely meaningless. Before she even reached the ground, she had already dissolved into cerulean motes, her Essence drifting away on the suffocating winds.

  Korren and Velora met a far more violent end. The howling storm of existence reappeared, tearing across the sky just before the borders of Sar'Vareth came into view, swallowing them in a blinding tempest of raw power. But even as the roaring winds ripped them away, the destruction felt entirely distant to Aeor. Even if the storm had spared them, it would not have mattered. He had seen the hollow exhaustion in their eyes. He had seen how much of their weight had already been stolen by Existence itself. It was only ever a matter of time.

  He knew he should be crying. He knew he should be tearing the sky apart in rage. But as the world unmade his friends one by one, Aeor remained entirely, terrifyingly numb.

  He, Zoey, and Baron finally reached the edge of Sar'Vareth.

  Aeor had braced for ruins. He had expected shattered foundations and floating debris of a city broken by the crushing weight of the Existence.

  Instead, as they crested the final ridge, the violent winds simply ceased.

  Sar'Vareth was exactly as he had left it. The crescent harbor, the shimmering aqueducts, the pristine statues on the high walls. Not a single stone was out of place. The world outside was being unmade into cerulean dust, yet this city sat frozen in an immaculate, sickening perfection.

  Outside the city limits, reality was finally giving out. The vibrant hues of the world bled away into a lifeless monochrome. The only color left in existence was the apocalyptic cerulean raging above. The world was mere moments from being unmade.

  But the moment they stepped fully into Sar'Vareth, the howling chaos vanished.

  The grand avenues that should have carried the voices of thousands lay completely empty. Yet even in this pristine stillness, a subtle tremor ran through the terraces. The city felt like a ghost barely clinging to a fading anchor, slipping a fraction more with every passing second.

  Zoey pulled out her Archive Status. Her voice was completely hollow as she read the shifting screen. Every aspect but one had fallen to the First Solenar. Time was stripped away again putting the end of the world down to mere hours.

  Aeor did not react. He physically couldn't.

  Zoey didn't yell. She didn't plead with him to do something. She just looked at him, her red-rimmed eyes searching his devastated face, and realized the terrifying truth. She knew she was forgetting something profound. She could feel a gaping, unnatural hole in her own mind, a massive weight that Aeor was now carrying entirely alone. She couldn't even bring herself to ask what was lost. Seeing the absolute Death of his spirit, her own hope quietly extinguished.

  They eventually stopped at a marble bench overlooking the muted waters of the harbor. They sat in silence. It was a quiet, mutual surrender. They had accepted their fate. A woven trial was never meant to be conquered so easily.

  Then, Baron broke the stillness. The Dusktail leapt from Zoey's lap and bolted deeper into the city.

  Aeor moved numbly. He vaguely remembered chasing Baron into the outer ring with Zoey. But what finally gave him pause was when they turned down a narrow lane where a row of abandoned shrines waited. Their stone altars were chipped, the offerings reduced to dust and wind-blown petals.

  The surrounding houses were broken and the cobblestone streets were deeply cracked. It looked like a place deliberately forgotten. It was a place that did not seem to belong to Sar'Vareth at all.

  Aeor thought he remembered everything about this city, but here in this ruined place, he was unsure.

  His mind started to open as the absolute numbness finally began to recede.

  Aeor felt a heavy pressure descend upon him as Baron rushed into a dilapidated temple. His gaze followed the creature, eventually catching on a statue that stood in the central courtyard.

  It was a statue of Vaelkar and the First Solenar.

  Aeor's heart skipped a beat.

  He and Zoey approached the temple with slow, hesitant steps.

  A faint jingle threaded the air as Aeor turned around and saw a girl no older than twelve winters standing by the temple's broken wall, half-hidden in shadow. Her eyes were pale, unfocused, fixed somewhere far past them. On her wrist, a bronze bracelet glinted, beads clicking softly as her fingers turned them one by one.

  Aeor's mind screamed at him. He knew with absolute certainty that he had met her before, yet the memory of why remained out of reach.

  Aeor swallowed, words rough in his throat. "Who are you?"

  The girl turned her face toward him, though her eyes saw nothing. "I merely see what others do not. That is all."

  Aeor's pulse hammered. He glanced at Zoey, who stood wide-eyed, her lips parting but no sound coming.

  "I came because I had to see you," she whispered.

  "Why?" Aeor asked, voice low.

  Her head tilted toward him. The words fell with no heat, only certainty. "Because a storm is coming for you, Scion. If you do not embrace who you are, it will consume you. And this world with it."

  His father's voice echoed in his mind, the same words that had haunted him in the ruins.

  Embrace who you are.

  Aeor said nothing. He could not.

  The girl's voice shifted, lighter now. "I don't want you to die. Either of you."

  She turned and ran, her silhouette thinning into the air until only the fading jingle of her bracelet remained.

  Then, it clicked. The memory that he had forgotten.

  Mayla.

  "Do you remember this place, Zoey? We have—"

  The words died in his throat. As he turned toward her, a cerulean blade was already driven through her chest.

  The numbness returned, harder and colder than before. Aeor watched a single tear run down Zoey's cheek while the green in her eyes began to dim. She lifted a trembling hand, her fingers slowly brushing against Aeor's cheek as the color bled from her skin.

  "I remember, Aeor," she said softly.

  The words hung in the air, the final thread of her voice lingering between them. For a moment, the world seemed to stop its collapse, drawing a heavy, suffocating veil over the ruins. She simply looked at him, her gaze holding a lifetime of things she had never said. Then, the spark behind her eyes vanished.

  Her hand slipped from his cheek, falling uselessly to her side. Her eyes turned a hollow, vacant white. Only after that final breath did her form begin to unmake itself. She broke apart into those same cerulean motes, drifting away into the stagnant air until nothing remained of her but the memory.

  "NOW!" a voice called out. It was familiar, but Aeor did not move. He didn't care. His gaze remained fixed on the empty space where Zoey had just stood.

  The world around him did not merely break, it ceased to be. His surroundings vanished as a crushing, absolute darkness swallowed every remnant of reality.

  And there, in the center of that void, a figure stood.

  He held the simple stature of a man, standing no taller than Aeor himself, yet his presence was a heavy mantle that seemed to weigh upon the very soul. Every remaining thread of the shattered world did not just acknowledge him; it bowed to his will. He was the anchor in the nothingness, a sovereign over the silence.

  His eyes were the only light left in creation. They burned with the primal furnaces of Existence, twin stars of cerulean fire that pierced through the dark and fixed upon Aeor with a terrifying, ancient intensity.

  Those eyes were the last thing Aeor knew before the abyss surged, and he was whisked away into the unmaking.

  If you want to see Mayla having three conversations with Aeor at different points in time, you can revisit her scenes in Chapter 22 and Chapter 48. Using the same lines of dialogue, that moment in the dilapidated temple now also reads as a third conversation with the Aeor in this chapter.

  Chapter 71 releases Monday at 6 PM EST.

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