Chapter 1618: Story 1618: The Devouring Light
The world was breaking—not in sound, but in silence.
When the last star died, the heavens turned smooth and blank, a mirror without reflection. The crimson fissure in the sky had widened into a wound, and from it bled not light, but memory—fragments of all things that ever were. Faces flickered in the air like torn photographs: kings, beasts, children, gods—all screaming in reverse, pulled backward into nothing.
Zara stood at the edge of the unraveling earth, her voice a whisper against the collapsing world. “Damien... stop. Please.”
But Damien stood unmoving, his body haloed by that shifting darkness, the hollow fire that crowned his form eating through the edges of his soul. His shadow stretched in all directions, splitting like roots through glass.
“I can’t stop it,” he said, though his lips barely moved. “It’s not power—it’s hunger. The more I resist, the more it feeds.”
The Keeper staggered closer, his robes in tatters, the runes on his staff fading one by one. “Then let go of it!” he cried. “Cast it back before it consumes the weave of creation itself!”
Damien turned his gaze toward him. His eyes were no longer eyes—they were storms, galaxies bleeding light. “There’s nothing to cast back. There is no ‘it.’ There’s only me.”
The Keeper froze, realization dawning. “You’ve merged with it...”
Zara took a trembling step forward. “Then I’ll pull you out. Whatever it takes.”
He shook his head slowly. “If you touch me now, Zara, you’ll fall through me. I’m not made of what I was.”
Behind him, the sky rippled. From the fissure descended tendrils of light—not divine, but corrosive, their brightness devouring everything they touched. Mountains folded like paper. Rivers boiled into ash. The horizon folded inward, the world closing upon itself like an eye being forced shut.
The Keeper dropped to his knees, chanting in a dying language. Each syllable broke apart before leaving his lips. “Even the words are fading...” he muttered. “Language itself cannot survive this unraveling.”
Zara’s tears cut clean lines through the ash on her face. “Then we make new words.”
She ran toward Damien, ignoring his warning. The ground dissolved under her feet, her body flickering between being and not-being. Still, she reached him—hands trembling, eyes burning with defiance.
The moment her fingers brushed his face, the abyss screamed.
A blinding surge of light erupted, swallowing the world in silence. The shadows recoiled, shrieking without sound, their forms unraveling into motes of black snow. For an instant, Damien’s face was clear again—his own, human, tear-streaked.
“Zara...” he whispered, the word fracturing as he said it. “You were the only light it couldn’t eat.”
Then the world imploded.
The sky shattered into a thousand mirrors, each reflecting a different ruin. The Keeper was gone. The wyrm’s graveyard was gone. Only Damien and Zara remained—falling through the hollow of everything.
And beneath the endless descent, a whisper waited, soft and cold as a dying breath:
“The light must feed too.”