Chapter 33: Dirge of the Drowning Stars

Lin Wei floated in the eclipse's void, his body a mosaic of fractured light. The silence here was a living thing—a vacuum that gnawed at his thoughts, leaving only the echo of his heartbeat. Shadows coiled around him, taking shape: the Silent Patriarch, his features blurred at the edges like a half-forgotten memory, and Echo-0, its skeletal grin stitched together by strands of Lin Wei's own voice.

"You've always been here," Echo-0 crooned, its words dripping with borrowed familiarity. "Buried in the Patriarch's shadow. Isn't that right, Little Heir?"

The Patriarch's ghost said nothing. His eyes—Yuelin's eyes—held a sorrow older than the clan itself.

Flashback:

Lin Wei, age seven, huddled in the clan's storm cellar as thunder shook the earth. Yuelin pressed a rusted locket into his hands. "When the world gets too loud," she whispered, "listen to the quiet inside."

He'd opened it later, finding not a portrait but a shard of obsidian—the heart of a fallen star.

The memory dissolved as the void shuddered. Above him, the Harvester homeworld loomed, its liquid starlight bleeding into the mortal realm. Mountains crumbled into ash, rivers flowing backward into skies choked with memorial smoke—realms collapsing into a single, suffocating dirge.

Astralon found him there, their body a patchwork of light and wounds. The once-celestial entity hunched, their Harvester scars now glowing like molten ore. "The system…" they rasped, clutching a shard of the Moonlit Veil. "It was never yours. The Patriarch forged it from a Harvester's heart—to control what he couldn't understand."

Lin Wei's cracks pulsed. "Why tell me now?"

"Because you're repeating his mistake." Astralon's voice broke. "He thought grief could be chained. All he did was feed it."

The void rippled. Echo-0's laughter echoed as Lin Mei's presence surged—a storm of inverted flames tearing through the darkness.

She emerged as a paradox: a silhouette edged in void, her ghostfire devouring the eclipse from within. The Harvesters' dirge faltered as she spoke, her voice a collision of sister and stranger. "You called this a prison," she said, staring at the Patriarch's ghost. "But you built the bars."

The ghost flickered. "To protect you."

"From what? This?" She gestured to the merging realms, villages dissolving into starlight. "You didn't protect. You horded."

Echo-0's skeleton twitched, its borrowed voice sharpening. "And you, Little Ember? Will you hoard your brother? Your humanity?"

Lin Mei's flames stilled. For a heartbeat, she was twelve again—stealing persimmons from the clan orchard, her laughter bright and unburdened. Then the moment shattered.

"I'm done hoarding," she said.

The Eclipse Entity's flames inverted. Light became vacuum; silence became scream. Lin Wei's cracks split wide, temporal instability spilling into the void as she gripped his arm—not to destroy, but to merge.

The system's final alert flickered:

[Directive Override: Eclipse Protocol Engaged.]

[New Entity Forming: Veil of Drowned Stars.]

Astralon lunged, but the void swallowed them. Echo-0's skeleton unraveled, its laughter lingering like poison.

And in the heart of the Harvester homeworld, the Patriarch's ghost smiled.