h4Chapter 135: Nightmare/h4

    I found myself back in the throne room of the old werewolf pce.

    Dead.

    Everyone was dead.

    Kieran. Lira. Lucas. Even the young ones I barely remembered.

    All of them twisted into grotesque corpses.

    And standing in the middle of the blood-soaked floor?

    Me.

    Not as I was now—but older. Crueler. Crowned and dripping in ichor. Her eyes were wild. Her mouth stretched into a predator’s grin.

    "I am what you be if you win," she said. "If you kill Caelum. If you keep going."

    "I am the end of your story."

    I drew my de.

    "No," I whispered. "You’re just another obstacle."

    We fought.

    Magic against magic. Power against power.

    She was faster. Stronger.

    But I was more desperate.

    I knew what it meant to lose.

    I rammed my de through her throat and held it there as sheughed, bleeding golden fire.

    "I’ll be waiting," she hissed as she died. "Inside you. Forever."

    Trial Three: The Future That Hungers—passed.

    When I stumbled out of that field of ash, the Realms changed.

    The air bent around me.

    The shadows bowed.

    And then the voice came.

    Low. Old. Not a god—but something worse.

    "I have watched you from the moment you opened your eyes in blood. You were born of war. Of betrayal. Of hunger. You are mine now, me-born."

    "Show yourself," I said.

    The ground split.

    And something emerged.

    It had no shape.

    No face.

    Only hunger.

    Only void.

    It whispered my name in a thousand dying voices.

    And I smiled.

    "Thene and take me."

    I didn’t wait.

    I lunged.

    de out. Magic screaming from my hands. Fire burned the skies above me. Shadows screamed through my veins. I became everything Caelum feared. Everything the gods denied.

    And the void roared.

    It would not go quietly.

    It struck with tendrils of agony, with illusions of my parents’ dying breaths, with the scent of burning forests and the feeling of drowning.

    But I did not stop.

    Not this time.

    I was vengeance.

    I was temptation devoured.

    I was the hunt.

    And I would not rest.

    Until the god who cursed me fell to his knees, and every lie burned behind me like a trail of fire.

    I felt him before I saw him.

    The way the wind turned ck. The way the stars stuttered like they feared him. The way my shadow—my own living power—writhed on the ground, trying to escape.

    He stepped from the rift he’d carved through the divine realm like it owed him blood. Taller now. Broader. His wings had returned, but not of moonlight or fire like before. These were monstrous—stitched from screams and void, the bones glowing with sick gold.

    Caelum.

    But not the one I remembered.

    Not the one who once whispered my name like it was scripture. Not the one who had stabbed me and cursed my soul. This was something older. Something wearing his face, but warped. Divinity devoured by madness. A god reborn through rot.

    "I see you’ve grown," he said, voice low and cold.

    My fingers flexed on the hilt of the de forged in the Cradle’s me. It pulsed with moonfire, but also...something else. Something deeper. Shadow. My other half. My real half. I had once feared that darkness. Now I wore it like armor.

    "You shouldn’t be here," I said quietly.

    He smiled. "Yet here I am."

    Then he charged.

    I met him head-on. There was no time for more words. Not this time. Not after all that had been lost.

    Our des shed with a sound like a star copsing. Shockwaves shredded the trees around us. Divine winds tore through the sky, scattering the clouds like torn silk. I ducked low, sliding beneath his next swing and twisting to carve my de up his side. He caught it—barehanded—bleeding golden ichor that hissed where it hit the ground.

    "You severed half your soul to survive," he hissed, eyes glowing. "Now I am whole. And you—"

    "I am free."

    I exploded upward with a roar, wings of night and me bursting behind me. I didn’t wait for him to speak again. I wouldn’t y his games. Not anymore.

    Strike after strike, I drove him back. Every movement precise, honed through pain. His counters were wless, maddeningly synchronized with mine. He was faster than before. Stronger. But so was I.

    Lightning cracked. The world bent.

    And still, we fought.

    Every blow wended split the sky. Every sh of swords left burning rifts in the divine realm. I lunged high, summoning a storm of crescent moonfire des from the void—and hurled them down like judgment.

    He dissolved into mist, then reformed behind me with a snarl, shing down my back. Pain bloomed red and raw, but I didn’t falter.

    I spun and kicked him in the chest, sending him crashing through an obsidian tree. It exploded in a burst of crystalline dust.

    "You never understood it," I said, panting. "What it means to break."

    His form shimmered again—bodiesyered upon bodies. Human. Beast. God. Nightmare.

    "I understood it," he said, voiceyered with too many echoes. "I became it."

    He mmed his hands into the ground.

    And the realm shattered.

    Cracks spiderwebbed out like a mirror breaking. Everything tilted. The battlefield bent inward, folding like a copsing star. Reality screamed.

    And then we were falling—through memories, throughyers of forgotten gods, through burning skies and ancient wars I had never seen but somehow remembered.

    Wended on a battlefield of bones.

    He rose first.

    "This is the cradle of gods," he said. "Where the first of us fell. Where you will fall too."

    I stood slowly. My body ached, but my power burned brighter than ever. My scars glowed with lunar silver and obsidian ck—divine and cursed, all at once. Not fractured. Complete.

    "Then I’ll bury you where you belong."

    He lunged again, faster this time. de met de, but he didn’t stop there. His magic poured out, ancient and stolen—threads of time, echoes of gods he had consumed. Each strike came with the voice of someone long dead.

    "You were meant to heal, not destroy!"

    "You were the dawn—we made you!"

    "She will fail, like the rest!"

    They screamed through him, a chorus of regret and rage.

    I drowned them in silence.

    My de sang with both light and shadow as I let go of every fear. Every tether to what I had been. I had sacrificed love. I had sacrificed memory. I had sacrificed need.

    Now I was nothing but purpose.

    And that made me unstoppable.