*PAST*

  Blood dripped slowly from his trembling hands, each drop dark and deliberate.

  Astraxian stood unmoving, alabaster skin streaked with red. His face was carved in stillness, yet his eyes were hollow—strained, stretched thin past all reason. The body before him was one he knew far too well.

  The garden had begun to rot. Towering blooms of violet and gold, once pulsing with divine light, now curled inward, petals crumbling like old parchment left to decay. The silver leaves dulled, their whispers fading to silence. The air, once rich with jasmine and something ancient—something uniquely hers—grew stagnant, suffocating. Even the eternal dusk had dimmed, shadows reaching long and hungry, creeping toward him like starved beasts.

  But none of it compared to the ruin inside him.

  She lay there, unraveling into mist, the slow dissolution of divinity itself. Her eyes—once fire and love and wrath—were now glassy, vacant. Staring into the abyss he carried within.

  A breath left him. Ragged. Then it twisted, jagged, breaking into laughter.

  At first, hollow. Air through cracked stone. But it grew, rough and bitter, a sound with no joy, no relief. Only fragments breaking under weight too great to bear.

  He turned, sudden and violent, driving his fist into the wall of her sanctuary. The opalescent stone cracked beneath the blow, fractures spreading like shattered constellations. Pain flared sharp through his hand—real, grounding—but meaningless.

  He exhaled hard, dragging his bloodied palm through his hair, smearing crimson across his temple like war paint.

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  Memories bled through him.

  Laughter beneath violet moons.

  Hands entwined, promises whispered, carved eternal.

  His fingers brushed her fading skin. His voice cracked with a breath too fragile to name.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured. The word tasted wrong. A lie. A prayer. A wound without end.

  The air shifted. A whisper slithered through the dying garden.

  “How many times has it been?”

  He stiffened.

  Lifted his head. Found her standing before him.

  Not memory. Not spirit. Her.

  She glared, wreathed in neither light nor shadow. Eyes burning with something colder than rage.

  Judgment.

  “Tell me, Astraxian,” she said, voice like a blade through silk. “Do you even remember why you do this?”

  His fingers twitched, helpless.

  “I remember.” His voice was hoarse, raw. A rasp dragged from stone.

  “Then say it.”

  His mouth opened.

  Nothing came.

  The earth beneath her cracked wider. The last remnants of the garden fell to ash. Her gaze pressed him flat.

  “Coward.”

  One breath. One flicker.

  Gone.

  The garden lay dead. Empty. Obsidian walls pulsed slow and hollow, like the heartbeat of a dying world.

  Astraxian did not move. His bloodied hand trembled, curling inward. The dried crimson on his skin etched patterns only madness could decipher.

  “Nothing changes.”

  Her voice echoed in the hollow of his mind.

  A breath out.

  He turned. Stepped beyond ruin.

  The path twisted ahead, through bones of what once bloomed. Above, no stars. No sun. Only twilight without end.

  They waited.

  The Wardens. Silent. Bloodied. Hollow.

  Mira spoke first. Her silver hair clung to sweat and blood. Her gaze never touched him.

  “Rowan?”

  Casiel exhaled, dragging a hand down his face. Golden armor dulled with old battle, gleaming faint and tired.

  “Dead.”

  The word fell between them like a blade.

  Mira’s eyes closed.

  “And his target?”

  Softer now.

  “Dead.”

  Astraxian said nothing.

  They had all done it. Again.

  The silence weighed heavy. A stone on the chest.

  Mira broke it, whisper-soft.

  “Go to the chamber. I’ll tend to Rowan.”

  Words laid like funeral cloth.

  Astraxian’s fingers twitched.

  The chamber. Their tomb of broken moments. Their endless waiting.

  His mind frayed at the seams.

  Not again.

  The darkness did not care.

  It swallowed them whole.

  And so, the waiting began.

  Again.