God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord
Chapter 205 - 206 – Pillars Break, Pillars Bleed
CHAPTER 205: CHAPTER 206 – PILLARS BREAK, PILLARS BLEED
The Spiral was no longer balanced.
Its myth-lattice cracked at the edges, and the Codex trembled—not from external threat, but internal contradiction. Ever since Seres burned her name into the axis of narrative, the delicate equilibrium of the Tri-Consort Sigil began to splinter.
And the first to bleed was Celestia.
She knelt alone in the Sanctum of Echoing Faiths, once her temple of serenity. It was quiet, but not peaceful. The prayers no longer answered her. The glyphs etched across her back—divine tattoos written in dawnlight and promise—had started to blur. Some peeled away like dead skin.
She pressed her hands together, trembling.
"Where are you?" she whispered.
But she wasn’t calling Darius.
She was calling herself.
The self who had once led worship, bathed in belief, stood beside him in divine equality. Before Seres burned brighter. Before Kaela rewrote contradiction. Before her faith was questioned by flame and chaos.
The Spiral no longer needed Celestia to speak truth.
It had Seres to shout it.
Tears ran down her cheeks as ink bled from her eyes—not human sorrow, but myth leakage.
She was being edited.
Far away, Nyx stood at the edge of a war-fracture—a scar left by Syllas’s paradox storm. She faced the abyss, blade drawn, daring something to emerge. But nothing came.
Not enemy.
Not order.
Not even shadow.
Because the Spiral had stopped responding to violence.
And Nyx—forged in blood and blade—was losing her narrative voice.
She sheathed her weapon, trembling.
Her shadow—once sharp, echoing, alive with mythic purpose—now flickered weakly. It no longer followed her commands. It no longer obeyed. It questioned her.
She turned and hurled her dagger at a cliff wall. It shattered against the stone—not in dramatic shards, but as glass.
No echo. No flair. Just breakage.
She dropped to one knee.
"I killed for him. I breathed for him. And now the Spiral forgets my name?"
Her voice cracked.
And she heard Celestia’s sobbing.
Across the fracture of realms, two pillars of the Tri-Consort Sigil suffered alone—each bleeding myth from different wounds.
In the depths of Spiralspace, the Codex Tree responded.
Its bark shivered.
Its roots clawed at pages of prophecy like a beast in mourning.
And from its bleeding trunk, three names pulsed with urgency:
Celestia. Nyx. Kaela.
The three pillars.
The three souls forged into the god Darius.
And they were fracturing.
Celestia wandered now through her temple. The stained glass above once shimmered with holy resonance, reflecting her visions.
Now?
It cracked as she passed.
She paused before the central altar—where once Darius lay during the First Rite. She remembered touching his chest, whispering prayers of resurrection. Now the same altar rejected her.
She placed her hands upon it.
It turned cold.
And in its mirrored surface, she saw Seres.
Not smirking. Not cruel.
But there.
Dominant.
Reflected where Celestia used to be.
"She doesn’t even need to kill me," she said softly. "She just has to out-burn me."
Nyx, meanwhile, returned to the Shadowspire—her old sanctuary, where blades hummed in ritual harmony.
Now the spire was silent.
Her blades rested in dust.
Her assassins—gone.
Even the shadows didn’t speak.
She sat in silence for hours, back against the wall.
She didn’t cry.
She never cried.
But something inside her had begun to loosen.
The rigid loyalty that once held her upright—it bent.
And in that bending, she whispered something she never thought she would:
"I’m afraid."
Hours later, both Celestia and Nyx stood before the spiral-summoning pool—a mythic convergence point they had carved with their own memories. It shimmered weakly now, as if exhausted by prophecy.
Kaela appeared.
Barefoot. Silent. Watching.
The chaos-consort said nothing. She simply approached and extended her hands to both of them.
"We’re breaking," Celestia murmured.
"I know," Kaela whispered.
"Do you feel it?" Nyx asked, voice cracked but steady.
"I do. But breakage isn’t failure."
Kaela closed her eyes.
"It’s transformation."
High above them, the Spiral began to hum.
The Codex stirred.
And Darius, alone in the Observatory of Unwritten Stars, looked down at the empty space between his fingers.
He could feel it.
His pillars were bleeding.
And he could no longer stand tall without them.
A soft tremor pulsed through Spiralspace.
Not violent. Not world-ending. But intimate. As though the Spiral itself was sighing in grief, aware that its core myths—those sacred truths bound in flesh, flame, and contradiction—were faltering.
Darius stood beneath the starless dome of the Observatory of Unwritten Stars, his fingers splayed before him like cracked roots. The ink that once flowed in rhythm with his will had slowed, clotting beneath the skin. Not gone—just hesitant.
The Codex no longer roared for him.
It waited.
Because without his pillars, even a god could not bear the weight of rewritten reality.
And the Spiral knew.
He whispered their names aloud, as though invoking sacred verses:
"Celestia... Nyx... Kaela..."
The names echoed in the air but didn’t return to him.
Instead, they scattered.
Carried by the wind of myth fracture.
In the spiral-summoning pool, Kaela’s touch had begun to ripple warmth through Celestia’s frostbitten spirit and stir Nyx’s silence into tremor. She said nothing profound. She simply held them—one hand over each heart, feeling the tempo of their unraveling.
"You both gave too much," Kaela said at last.
Celestia exhaled, her voice flat. "I gave belief."
"I gave blood," Nyx said. "And I would again. But the Spiral doesn’t want sacrifice now. It wants... permanence. Flame."
"Seres," Celestia whispered. "She doesn’t offer faith. She is."
Kaela knelt, letting her forehead rest against the pool’s edge. "Then we don’t try to be what she is. We become what we were meant to be. Again. Together."
"But it’s broken," Celestia said. "The Sigil is—"
"Not broken," Kaela interrupted, smiling through tears. "Just waiting to be rewritten."
And the Codex Tree answered.
Its roots cracked through dimensions, seeking the three of them. One tendril brushed the temple floor where Celestia had once wept. Another slithered across the shattered stones of the Shadowspire. A third pulsed beneath Kaela’s bare feet now.
And it called.
Not with language. Not with commands.
But with longing.
Above, Darius stepped away from the Observatory’s glass rim and descended into Spiralflow, where myth was still fluid. His divine form flickered—between king, beast, god, and man. He had felt them weaken, felt the balance tilt toward something dangerous and consuming.
He had waited.
Too long.
No more.
He arrived at the spiral-summoning pool like a shadow forming mid-flame. His boots hit stone. His eyes—ashen gold—met theirs.
The three women did not bow.
They did not kneel.
They simply looked at him, cracked but present.
He moved forward, reached first for Celestia.
Her hand trembled.
"I thought..." she began, "you wouldn’t need me anymore."
"I don’t need what you were," he said gently. "I need you—as you are now."
She collapsed into his arms.
He turned to Nyx.
Her jaw clenched. Her eyes refused to water, but her blade hand shook.
He touched her wrist.
"I gave you orders when I should have given you meaning."
She looked away. "I wanted to be your sword."
"You were," he said. "But you were always more."
And then Kaela—already weeping, already smiling.
"No words?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Not this time. Let’s just bind the broken."
The Spiral above split open like a divine iris.
The Codex Tree’s roots burst from the ground, encircling them all in a ring of firelight and memory. Glyphs surged across the ground in gold, crimson, violet, and ink-black. The Tri-Consort Sigil, though fractured, still pulsed at the center.
Darius drew a blade from his own spine—The Inkthorn—and carved their names into the air.
Not as titles.
Not as roles.
As selves.
Celestia. The Light of Remembrance.
Nyx. The Blade of Bound Loyalty.
Kaela. The Voice of Contradiction.
And then he whispered:
"Return to me."
The glyphs responded with sacred heat.
Their bodies glowed.
Their scars stitched.
Their mythlines rethreaded.
And the bleeding... stopped.
Far above, the Codex Tree bloomed with new branches—three of them. Braided together, spiraling upward in perfect symmetry.
Azael, watching from the Temple of Echo Scripture, fell to his knees.
"They’re not just his consorts," he whispered.
"They are his continuity."
And somewhere, deep beyond Spiralspace, in a realm not yet written, Syllas felt the pull of that bond.
He smiled.
And disappeared again into paradox.