The air was still. Thin, like glass that could break if he breathed too hard.
Evodil's boots thudded softly against the floating islands' stone paths, one step to another, each a fragment of the world that refused to die. He didn't know if he was walking to think or to keep from standing still — both were the same these days. A god pacing his own cage.
He stopped beneath a tree with that faint blue bark and purple crown, its glow humming softly against the eternal night. The colors bled into one another — violet grass, navy flowers — an old palette he'd seen a hundred times before. Beautiful once. Now, just a backdrop for his thoughts.
He leaned against the trunk, arms folded, eyes scanning the drop below. The islands drifted in silence, suspended above the black maw of the crater. He remembered falling once — eighty kilometers down. He remembered every version of it.
The bark creaked beneath his back. A low groan. For a moment, his breath hitched, tendrils twitching at his side, ready to dig in before the ground gave way. It didn't. The tree held. Just another false alarm from a paranoid mind that had lived too long.
"Tch," he muttered, pushing off it and straightening his coat. The silence stretched as he moved again, following the faint, white glow of the lamps lining the narrow bridge ahead. The lights pulsed like beacons in fog — always leading to the same place, the same silver gate waiting on the other end.
The main gate of Menystria. As massive and old as ever. He used to think it was beautiful, once. Now it looked like a tomb door, built for something too proud to admit it was already dead.
He stopped before it, rolling his shoulders, letting his hands hang loose at his sides. He didn't need air, not really, but he drew a slow breath anyway. The feeling of it — sliding into a hollow body, passing through a chest that didn't need lungs — still felt real. Comforting, in its own twisted way.
"Fourteen billion years," he whispered, a quiet chuckle following. "Add a hundred sixty-six loops to that and I'm practically ancient."
The sound of his voice vanished against the wind. Only the hum of the lamps answered back, soft and indifferent.
He stepped onto the walked-flat grass, the kind that kept the memory of every footstep. The lamps hanging from the low branches above swayed gently, their pale glow stretching across the cliffside. These were bigger than the ones floating on the islands—solid, wired into the soil instead of magic. They didn't need divinity to stay alight. They just worked.
He moved through the narrow grove, hands tucked into the pockets of his long coat. The light brushed against his face, flickering across the edge of his horns. For a moment, his thoughts softened, drifting somewhere distant.
A campsite here wouldn't be bad. Maybe a bench or two, a table. Something to break the quiet. He could almost picture it: a few lanterns, a book in hand, a few hours of not thinking. Just wind, grass, and the hum of the lamps. A little slice of nothing—peace.
The corner of his mouth twitched. A smirk. Yeah… and if James or Noah ever tried to nap here, I'd toss them straight into the crater. The image lingered for a second—James shouting on the way down, Noah deadpanning even as he fell. He actually chuckled under his breath.
But the sound didn't last. It never did. Reality seeped back in like water through cracks. They still thought he was the same Evodil as before, the same cycle. And if he wasn't aware… they'd be right. He'd be repeating every mistake like clockwork.
Not this time.
The trees thinned ahead, and the light grew harsher, reflecting off metal and moss. The gates of Menystria loomed before him—towering, silver, impossibly still. But something was wrong. The gates weren't closed. They stood slightly ajar, one side yawning open, the hinges humming faintly from the wind.
He stopped just short of the threshold. No guards, no wards, no sound. The snow and dirt at the base hadn't settled yet—it was freshly disturbed.
"...Huh." His voice was a whisper, half amusement, half caution.
Had someone returned? Noah on another one of his trips? James, maybe? Or Jasper—no, that didn't fit. None of them should've been here.
He ran a hand through his hair, exhaling. "Guess that makes me the guard dog for this one," he muttered, then shook his head. "No… sounds too self-important."
He sighed, taking a step toward the open gate anyway. "Let's just call it… curiosity."
He stepped closer, the sound of snow crunching beneath his boots sharp in the stillness. The light pouring through the open gate was blinding against the white expanse outside—an almost holy glare, false and sterile. His blindfold softened it, muting the world into something he could stand. The cloth hid the hollow dark of his eyes, and his hair—long now, black as coal—fell just enough to blur his expression into neutrality.
He paused at the threshold, gaze falling to the ground. From Menystria's side, there was nothing—just the faint dusting of snow that had drifted in from outside. But as he nudged the gate forward with his elbow, the scene changed.
A body.
Lying half-buried beneath the snow, curled as if trying to crawl forward even after death. The flakes that had settled over her skin glimmered faintly under the lamps. Evodil didn't flinch. He only tilted his head, an eyebrow lifting as a thin, humorless laugh slipped through his teeth.
"Well, that's new," he murmured. "Guess the puppet master's losing his grip."
He crouched down beside the corpse, his cloak pooling in the snow, black against white. His gloved fingers brushed the woman's arm—cold, stiff, long since drained of warmth. The purple tint in her skin told enough of a story. Hours gone, maybe longer. A wanderer, perhaps. Someone trying to reach the city when the world still pretended to offer mercy.
The front of her coat was torn, one hand frozen mid-grasp near her stomach. It was swollen beneath the layers—round, tense. Pregnant.
Evodil's grin faded.
He stared for a moment, not out of pity or shock, but in that detached, thoughtful way of his. The kind of silence that meant his mind was turning somewhere darker.
She must've been trying to save the child. Every mother did when the curse grew too close, when the Shades crawled out of their graves. She'd almost made it. Almost.
He exhaled through his nose, the air fogging in the cold. The thought lingered—the realization that this wasn't supposed to happen. Not here. Not in this version of the loop. He'd never seen a body at the gate before. Never this one.
And that meant opportunity.
He let out a quiet, disgusted sound—half sigh, half laugh—and straightened up, brushing the snow off his gloves. "You shouldn't have come here," he muttered to the corpse. "But… maybe you're the closest thing to a favor I'll get from this damned world."
The idea sat heavy in his chest, crawling up through his throat like a sickness. An idea vile enough to make him wince—yet tempting all the same.
Something new. Someone new.
A piece the god hadn't written into the script.
He smirked, a flicker of his old madness curling at the edges of his lips. "Let's see how you handle a rewrite, Azraem."
He dragged the body past the gate, the steel groaning behind him as it sealed shut with that familiar, hateful clang. The sound rolled through the cliffside, echoing down into the void like a bell announcing sin. Evodil stood still for a second, the echo fading into the quiet hum of the lamps around him. He couldn't tell if the air inside Menystria was warmer or colder—it all felt the same to him now, like breathing through cloth in an empty room.
The tendril around the corpse's neck loosened slightly, black and slick against pale, frozen skin. He watched as the dead woman's head tilted limply with the motion, a thin line of blood seeping down from where the skin had begun to split. The sight didn't disgust him—it rarely did. It just made him think.
He sighed, muttering under his breath, "Noah, you bastard, couldn't make a gate that shuts quiet for once, could you?" His tone was dry, habitual, the kind of complaint he made when he didn't want to think too hard about what came next.
The tendril dropped the woman onto the purple grass by the base of one of the massive trees. The bark shimmered faintly in the lamplight—metallic and smooth, reflecting the faint gold lining of his scarf.
He slipped the black cloak from his shoulders, pulling one arm out, then the other. The fabric fell heavy in his grip, smelling faintly of smoke and iron. His scarf stayed wrapped around his neck, the only warmth he bothered to keep. A second tendril rose behind him, taking the cloak gently, folding it once before holding it in the air like a waiting assistant.
The next followed—sharper than the rest, a thin, razor-edged coil that gleamed like glass as it shifted shape. He flexed his fingers, the motion deliberate, almost ritualistic.
His gloves came off one at a time. The scars were still there—layered, tangled, like a lifetime of failed experiments drawn in red and white. His palms bore the marks of old blades; the base of his fingers carried deep burns that never fully closed.
He held his hands up to the dim light, studying them with a faint tilt of his head, before lowering them again. "Hands that built, hands that killed," he muttered, half to himself. "Guess this counts as both."
The third tendril hovered near the woman's body now, the point trembling faintly like an impatient breath. Evodil looked down at her, his expression blank, almost peaceful.
He crouched beside her, the snow and grass crunching softly beneath his boots. His voice came out low, smooth, thoughtful—like he was talking to an audience that wasn't there.
"James had Jasper. Noah had his little miracle." He paused, eyes narrowing. "Why shouldn't I?"
He smiled. It wasn't kind.
"Let's see if I can make something the script didn't ask for."
The tendril dipped, pressing lightly against the woman's stomach, tracing the curve where life used to be. Evodil exhaled slowly through his nose, the faintest flicker of amusement ghosting across his face.
"Sorry, sweetheart," he whispered, voice edged with something between pity and cruelty. "But this world doesn't need another corpse."
He crouched, palms flat against the cold grass beside her. Up close the world narrowed: the slight tremor of her chest where nothing answered, the pale rise of her belly like a promise already broken, the hush of the lamps above. Tendrils curled at his back, the thin one like a held breath, the scalpel-coil glinting in the lamp light with an impatient edge.
He didn't hurry. There was no need for haste. Time was a thing he could afford to slice into at his leisure.
The scalpel slid from the tendril as if obeying a word he hadn't spoken aloud. It hovered over cloth and bone for a fraction of a second—too long, long enough for some part of him that still resembled a man to hesitate—and then it descended.
The cut was precise. Clean. The scalpel whispered through fabric and skin as though it were paper. The first sound was not a scream but a soft wet hush as the blade passed the first layer: coat, shirt, the fragile thread of muscle that had tried to contain a life. Frost breathed against the wound and the smell came up—iron and old heat mixed with the cold of snow. The cloth peeled back like a curtain. Black fingers—his own—touched the pale arc of her abdomen and felt the tautness there, the impossible smallness and firmness of what waited inside.
He felt nothing he could name. Not mercy. Not triumph. Only a professional curiosity, a scientist's fascination with the hardware of living things when severed from the theater of care.
The scalpel moved deeper. The skin parted with a sound like tearing vellum. Fat gave way, pale tissue unfurling. He carved along the midline, each incision measured and deliberate, watching as the wound opened like a book to reveal the hidden pages. Blood—fresh and dark and still warm from where somehow the body kept the last of its heat—pulled between his fingers and the grass. It slicked his glove and ran in thin black streams to the soil, stuttering into the snow where it steamed in the cold.
He reached in.
There was a moment that would have been called sacred in another life: a small, slick resistance, then the give as membranes ruptured. Warmth, deeper now, filled the hollow he'd made. He could have looked away. He did not.
His hand closed around the wet, slippery circumference of a sack, and he drew it out like a mutilated prize. It was slick with blood and amniotic fluid, the surface mottled, and inside something moved, not with a human's conscious flinch but with the small, reflexive beating of a body still nested in the wrong world.
He didn't coax or coddle. He peeled the membranes back with casual, clinical motions, fingers working with the patience of someone unfazed by the grotesque. The world smelled of copper and cold and the faint, metallic tang of life and death meeting.
When the child slipped free, it was small enough to fit within his hand. Skin wrinkled and dark, legs curled under its body. It made a sound—an animal sound, a wet, thin noise like a newly hatched thing—and for a fraction of a breath Evodil's chest tightened, a ghost of something almost like pity passing through him. Then he set it on the grass.
He watched it blink once, as if surprised to find air where there had been only enclosure. Its mouth opened and closed, useless at first, then—after a small, furious convulsion—it drew a lazy, raw gasp. Blood clung to the dark down on its scalp. One tiny fist flexed.
Around them the world continued without comment: the lamps hummed, the snow held its shape, the trees did not bow. He wrapped a second tendril around the infant—not in tenderness but because hands were for other things now—and lifted it as if testing the balance between life and technique. It was warm. Fragile. A single small body in a sky where everything was usually enormous and crushing.
He had the urge then to name it something cruel and theoretical, to give it a place in his experiments and call it justice. Instead, he crouched lower and studied the creature for a long moment, as if reading a blueprint only he could understand. The notion that he had altered the script, that he had planted an uninvited variable into Azraem's tidy progression, pleased something in him much like laughter had earlier.
He worked quickly after that. Sutures of shadow, neat loops the tendrils wove through torn flesh, pulling edges back together with a surgeon's efficiency. The woman's corpse stitched closed like a patchwork thing, the black coagulating at each seam until it matched the rest of her skin's pallor. Her face looked as if she might sleep. The wound's edges sealed with a cold, unnatural neatness. He smoothed the scarf across the new scar and arranged the cloak over the body as if tucking in a guest who'd come too late for the party.
The infant – the thing he had birthed from a frozen, dying world – lay on the grass and made small, indignant noises. Evodil watched without tenderness but not entirely without attention. He had given it a chance. Or he had stolen one. Whatever name fit, it was his now.
He rose, the tendrils recoiling to his back like obedient cats. Snow clung to his boots. Blood dotted his gloves and spattered the hem of his cloak. For a moment he considered killing it—ending the experiment before it began—because killing had always been easier than responsibility. But that thought flickered and died as quickly as it had come.
"Hello, then," he said finally, voice flat and small and oddly careful. "Let's see if you want to keep rewriting my mistakes."
The child kicked once, fierce and meaningless in the face of eternity, and the lamps hummed on.
One of the tendrils rose, gentle but unsteady, wrapping around the infant's small body. The boy was quiet now, breathing shallowly, skin already paling in the cold air. Evodil sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose beneath the blindfold.
"Great," he muttered, looking down at the mess—blood staining the grass, his cloak, the hem of his pants. "Three problems in one night. A stain, a corpse, and now a damn baby."
The words came out tired, not angry. The sort of exhaustion that sat behind his ribs like a dull weight. He glanced once more at the grass before straightening up.
The tendril lifted the child higher. Another coiled beside it, steadier this time, looping around the infant's midsection like a belt. Evodil started walking toward the bridge, the snow crunching under his boots. The night air was still, and the smell followed him—iron, frost, and the faint rot of an act not meant to happen.
Halfway across the bridge, something tugged sharply at his shoulder. His cloak—still held by the tendril that carried his discarded clothes—slapped him across the back of the head. He stumbled forward, caught himself, and hissed under his breath.
He spat to the side, muttering, "If you're gonna hit me, at least make yourself useful. Clean it after we get back, got it?"
The tendril twitched once, then tilted in what could almost pass for a nod.
He snorted. "Didn't think I raised you to be polite."
The rest of the walk fell quiet. The lamps above the bridge buzzed softly, their light flickering against the violet-blue wood beneath his boots. He looked up at the glow and thought—about what little sense this world still made, if any at all.
Oaths. Were they ever real? Did they hold weight beyond mortal imagination? If they did, then why could he remember breaking them so many times without consequence?
Weapon ranks, divine systems, the fake little order Noah loved to measure power by. What good were rules if the hands that broke them were stronger than the gods who made them?
He stopped for a moment, standing in the middle of the bridge as the child stirred faintly in the tendril's hold.
Maybe the world wasn't broken. Maybe it just never had rules to begin with.
Maybe Azraem didn't create laws—just cages.
Evodil smiled faintly beneath the scarf, a dry breath of amusement slipping through. "Fine," he murmured. "Then I'll learn every one of them. Even if it kills me again."
He adjusted the scarf around his neck and kept walking, the bridge creaking beneath his steps, the infant swaying gently in the dark like the start of a secret no one was meant to find.
The manor door groaned open under his hand, the sound dragging through the air like a sigh. He stepped inside without thinking, boots leaving faint purple tracks across the tiled floor. The walk from the Citadel blurred out of his memory entirely—no faces, no footsteps but his own, no sound save the whisper of wind behind him.
Maybe everyone was gone. Or maybe this version of Menystria just didn't need anyone else.
He passed through the entrance hall, his eyes catching on the same damned chairs that had never once aligned properly, each one just slightly crooked as if mocking him. The same collection of half-finished paintings Noah had gifted him still hung at tilted angles, their colors washed pale by the dim lamplight. He didn't bother straightening them anymore.
The table by the archway stood exactly where he remembered it—fruit bowl and all. He stopped, half a step from it, letting out a breath that trembled with a sound between a laugh and a snarl. "A fruit bowl," he muttered. "All this, and it still starts with that stupid thing."
It was absurd—an entire eternity of death and rebirth, and he'd clawed his way to awareness because of a missing candle. A fruit bowl. He would never live that down, not that anyone was left to tell the joke.
He shook his head, the motion faint, resigned. Then he peeled off his gloves—dark leather soaked and stiff with blood—and draped them over the coat hanger. The black cloak followed, its edges dripping faintly onto the floor.
The scarf came last. He hesitated for a breath before unwrapping it. The fabric stuck slightly to his skin, and when it fell, the air hit the scar that wound like a brand around his throat.
Loop 166. The one where Azraem hadn't bothered with elegance—where the blade had cut too far, too shallow, enough to let him live long enough to feel it. The skin there would never quite smooth out again, black lines spidering across pale flesh like cracks in glass.
He ran his fingers across it, slow, almost curious. No pain, not anymore. Just memory.
Behind him, the tendrils shifted. One adjusted the infant in its grip, keeping the tiny bundle close as Evodil stepped past the archway into the kitchen. The child didn't cry—didn't move much at all—but its faint breath still fogged the air.
The smell of iron and ash followed them in, mixing with the faint, stale scent of old tea that Noah used to leave on the counter. Evodil stopped near the sink, glanced once at the black reflection in the window, and exhaled through his nose.
"Welcome home," he said quietly—to the baby, to himself, to the empty house that still remembered everyone who'd died in it.
The dining room was as he left it—silent, cold, untouched by use. The long table stretched through the center of the room, dust softening its dark surface, chairs still lined perfectly but draped in webs that reached from leg to leg, binding them to the wood. He never used it. Not once by himself. When Caroline was alive, maybe. But that thought hit a wall in his mind, faded, and slid away. It didn't matter anymore.
Now there was someone new to take care of. Or something new.
The child wasn't alive. Not really. It breathed only because he made the air around it shiver. It reacted only because his power disturbed even the dead. Fear itself could be forced to move if you pushed it hard enough.
Evodil stepped to the table and sat on the edge, glancing down the line of empty chairs. Eight of them. Always empty. He rested his elbows on his knees and breathed out through his nose, the sound soft, almost bored.
The tendrils behind him shifted. Two uncoiled from his back, hovering low, and set the infant down in the middle of the table. The motion was careful—deliberate—not out of kindness, but precision. The child lay still, its skin faintly gray, small chest rising in uneven intervals.
One tendril lingered above, the end thinning, sharpening, pulling to a point until it gleamed faintly in the dim light. Evodil rolled his sleeves up past his elbows, the gray fabric creasing tight against his forearms. He stared at the boy, then at the blade.
He started to talk, voice quiet, like he was thinking out loud to the air around him. "Let's see… Noah, James, Jasper, Caroline…" He paused, the list cutting off. "No. Not you."
He tilted his head slightly, the faintest smirk flickering at the corner of his mouth as the tendril lifted higher, the tip aimed straight down.
"Welcome home, Ethan."
The tendril came down. The blade struck. The sound was dull, final—wood and bone giving way in the same instant.