The lattice screamed.
Not from pain. From awareness.
As Lyra inscribed burning sigils into the strands above, the multiverse itself seemed to flinch. Entire realms—once static echoes—shifted with new breath. Boundaries twisted into shields, and threads once fraying curled into living glyphs.
Yet still, the Null-Touched advanced.
They moved like thoughtless inevitability—anti-patterns in motion. Their limbs bent in forgotten geometries. Their arrival cracked the symmetry of space.
Kael stood before them at the edge of the breach, blade drawn, eyes blank with focused rage. He was the wall they had never encountered, and never would understand.
"You hunger for what has no name," he muttered, stepping forward. "But I am what eats the unnamed."
And then he moved.
Kael did not strike with steel but with absence. His blade erased—not just bodies, but intentions. Each slash did not kill; it reversed. Enemies blinked into a time before they meant to exist. Screams devoured themselves mid-birth.
And yet… they kept coming.
Beneath them, in the Weft, Orion walked without sound.
The Weft was not a place, but a concept—a hidden layer beneath all stories. It pulsed now with green and white, shaped by the Sprout he carried. Vines grew from his spine. Light twisted around his form, and his shadow stretched the wrong way.
He was becoming something… else.
And even the Null-Touched felt it.
From their breach, they paused. Some retreated. Others howled—not in fear, but recognition.
They had consumed billions of timelines. But this one, this thread, was rejecting them. Not passively. With venom.
Orion whispered into the root-veins of the Weft. "You fed on the quiet of the dead."
He raised his hand.
A hundred stars bloomed from his fingertips.
"But I carry what grows in silence."
Above, the Sprout unleashed a pulse.
It was not light.
It was origin.
And every Null-Touched touched by it remembered for a moment what it was like to be part of something—before their shapes shattered, unable to contain the memory.
Orion rose from the Weft, cloaked in blooming thorns and fractal shadows. His eyes were stars collapsing inward. His voice, when it came, was layered in multitudes.
"I will not defend what was."
The battlefield trembled.
"I will not rebuild what broke."
The Null-Touched faltered.
"I will grow what has never been."
And in that moment, he was no longer Orion.
He was the Sovereign Seed.
And even Lyra—flame-wrapped and glowing—stepped back.
Because whatever he had become, it no longer answered to names.