The Song of Unbecoming

The light did not fade—it changed.

What poured from the box was not illumination but memory, raw and unfiltered. Centuries collapsed into moments. I saw the giant-kings not as tyrants but as mourners, their stone faces streaked with godblood as they hammered the Seal into existence. I saw the first Starweavers—Malakai and Elara's ancestors—weeping as they surrendered their fluid, boundless forms to become shackled by flesh and bone. Most of all, I saw the truth Verin had tried to voice: the Old Ones were not invaders. They were echoes. Ghosts of a time before choice meant consequence, before love meant loss.

The box held no artifact, no weapon. Only a single seed—obsidian-black, veined with silver—and a note in Malakai's hand: "For the garden we'll never plant."

But it was the seed's song that undid me.

It hummed with the vibration of a universe being tuned. A sound so pure it dissolved the boundaries between past and present, between Sera and not-Sera. The walls of the Celestial Chamber melted into a kaleidoscope of might-have-beens: Elara as a laughing child, Malakai as an old man tending roses, Verin content in some quiet library. All possibilities, all roads not taken, branching from the seed's resonance.

And then I heard her—the Keeper of Broken Things, her voice woven through the harmonics. "Every ending is a chord, child. To silence the song, you must become the rest."

The seed pulsed, and I understood.

Malakai hadn't sent me here to save the world. He'd sent me to mourn it.

Below, in the burning city:

Malakai knelt in the ruins of the Inverse Spires, the Key of Unmaking jutting from his chest like a rib torn loose. Silver tendrils spread from the wound, stitching his body to the cobblestones, the air, the dying light of the moons. Each breath drew the city deeper into him—the screams, the starlight, the whispers of the Old Ones threading through his veins.

Elara found him there.

Or what remained of Elara.

His brother moved through the chaos like a psalm turned inside out. His form flickered between possibilities: a man, a storm, a many-angled truth that clawed at the edges of Malakai's sanity. When he spoke, his voice was the groan of tectonic plates, the sigh of stars going cold.

"You've grown small, little brother."

Malakai laughed, blood flecking his lips. "And you've forgotten what it means to hunger."

The words were a gambit. A fragment of a childhood memory—Elara, starving during their initiation fast, stealing figs from the Temple orchards. For a heartbeat, the thing wearing Elara' face stilled.

Malakai struck.

The Key flared, its light a scalpel. He cut not through flesh, but through time—splitting the seconds between them, peeling back layers of corrosion to reveal the boy who'd once carried him home after he'd broken his leg in the Chronovaults.

"You promised," Malakai whispered, the words a spell. "You promised you'd never leave me behind."

Elara's scream was human.

In the Celestial Chamber:

The seed dissolved in my palm, its song merging with my heartbeat. I knew what came next. The Keeper's warning coiled in my mind—"The price changes the one who pays it"—but the seed's memories offered no comfort, only certainty.

I stepped into the light.

My body unknit. Fingers became stardust, thoughts became symphonies, and Sera—the girl who'd once traded jokes with Malakai over stolen wine—became a vessel for something older. The Chamber's crystal walls sang with me as I reached into the world's wounds and began to weave.

But the Old Ones knew my name.

They poured through the cracks I tried to seal, their voices a honeyed poison. "Why cling to a story that hurts you? Let go. Let the world be wild again."

I almost did.

Then I felt it—a thread of silver, stubborn and bright, anchoring me to the ruins below. Malakai's thread. His final act: binding his fading consciousness to mine, a lifeline woven from shared memories. The day we'd raced storm clouds across the Sky Meadows. The night we'd whispered fears into the dark, certain the other was asleep.

"Finish it," his voice murmured through the light. "But don't look back."