The Seed That Devours Names

The battlefield lay silent—but not with peace.

The silence writhed, a thing alive, too dense to be empty. Time moved sluggishly, curling around Orion like wary serpents around fire. The Null-Touched were gone—not slain, but unwritten, their echo burned away by something that had no language.

Orion stood at the epicenter, where reality folded inward in deference. His silhouette shimmered with tendrils of thought and root, crowned by an unseen rhythm that beat beneath causality. The Sovereign Seed did not breathe.

He remembered breathing.

That, too, felt distant now.

Lyra descended from the lattice above, her sigils still glowing with residual heat. She looked at him—not as a comrade, not even as a lover. She looked as one might gaze at an ancient riddle spoken aloud for the first time in millennia.

"Orion?" Her voice cracked on the second syllable.

His head tilted, not in answer but in listening. To her. To everything.

"You are afraid," he said. But it wasn't an accusation. It was a fact, drawn from the air around her, plucked like a thread.

She stepped back, involuntarily.

Kael approached from the edge, his blade still shimmering with half-erased names. He, too, stared—not at Orion, but through him. At the rupture that remained behind him. The Weft was still pulsing. Green. White. Alien.

"You're not just a Seed anymore," Kael murmured. "You're a root."

"No," Orion said. His voice was layered now. Feral. Grieving. Exultant. Cold.

"I am what comes after roots."

And the Weft answered.

From the soil of untime, a bloom rose—a tower of petals, each one etched with the language of dying stars. It wasn't a plant. It wasn't even alive. It was a question, posed to the multiverse itself, and every reality struggled to answer.

A scream echoed from the horizon.

Not human. Not Null-Touched.

Something else had arrived.

Lyra turned to the sound—and saw the sky ripple. Figures stepped through—a council of impossible design. Robes made of melted timelines. Faces blurred, as though painted from someone else's memory. They spoke not in sound, but in subtraction, reducing the meaning of the world as they came.

"The Astral Council," Kael said. "They weren't supposed to exist anymore."

"They never did," Orion answered. "But I brought them back, because they were hunting me."

Lyra looked sharply at him. "You… summoned them?"

"No," he said, stepping forward, his gaze now unreadable. "I summoned someone they fear more."

From behind him, something crawled out of the Weft.

Not a creature.

Not a god.

Just a name, wrapped in claws.

Lyra saw it, and screamed—not out of terror, but because her memory recoiled. It was something the multiverse had cut away long ago. Something that had no right to be remembered, but was now invited.

The Sovereign Seed turned to it.

And bowed.

"I grant you one hunt," Orion whispered. "Feed on those who once named themselves stewards."

The name lunged—and the sky bled logic.

Kael reached for his blade, but Lyra stopped him. "No. Let it happen. He… he's pruning."

"Pruning what?" Kael whispered.

Lyra's voice was hollow.

"The future."

Orion turned back toward them, and for a moment, he was himself again—eyes tired, shoulders slouched, mouth twitching with regret.

"I told you," he said softly. "I won't defend what was. I won't rebuild what broke. But I will grow what has never been."

And then he vanished—into root, into memory, into something waiting beyond even chaos.

The Astral Council screamed as the name consumed them.

And the Seed, now without a world, began to plant in others.