The Floating Cathedral shook like a dying animal.
*KRNNNNNNNNK—BOOOOOOM*
A sound like star-metal being torn against its own will rippled across the inverted sky.
Feathers of molten scripture drifted through the air, hissing as they burned holes through the marble.
Kael stood at the center.
Bare-foot.
Blood-soaked.
Dripping with Dominus's half-erased face like ink that refused to dry.
The edit wound across Kael's back still glowed—white, blistering, sacred fire trying to overwrite his spine.
It failed.
Everything holy failed now.
Because something unholy had learned how to answer back.
Veyra limped toward him first, half her armor missing, ribs visible where Belladonna's thorns had ripped her open.
You could see her lung shiver when she breathed.
She did not care.
"Kael," she barked, wiping blood out of her eye, "you're burning."
"I'm writing," he thought, but his mouth wouldn't translate the truth cleanly.
Words felt too small.
Reality felt too slow.
Lirien staggered beside her, the pale witch holding her own intestines in with shaking hands, healing delayed because the Saints kept rewriting her flesh faster than she could stitch it.
"You're changing," she murmured, voice trembling like a prayer being strangled.
Changing wasn't the word.
Becoming was.
Dominus collapsed to his knees where Kael had struck him.
Seven halos flickered around his head like dying fireflies.
He tried to speak a commandment.
Tried to rewrite Kael's name again.
His jaw split sideways—
*SPLTRK*
—like parchment torn off its frame.
"No more," Kael thought.
And the Cathedral obeyed.
Aurelius the Golden, covered in his own molten brilliance, blurted, "Impossible—your narrative is unbound—"
Kael raised his hand.
Not to strike.
To edit.
Reality beneath Aurelius's feet folded like wet paper.
The saint's legs dissolved into liquid gold, dripping off his body in screaming sheets.
He clawed the marble, fingers melting.
"Mercy!" he screeched, but the word had no script to cling to.
Kael removed it from the vocabulary of the moment.
Nocturne clutched his silver-threaded eyes, moaning as the futures inside them collapsed.
"You are overwriting fate," he mumbled, voice cracking.
"Do you understand what you—"
Kael did.
He understood perfectly.
Because the Abyss wasn't whispering anymore.
It was waiting.
For him to write something worth following.
Veyra stumbled to his side, grabbed his arm, and demanded, "Kael. Look at me."
Her fingers left bloody crescents in his skin.
Her heartbeat was wild, desperate, terrified for him—not herself.
He looked.
And the world steadied.
For exactly one pulse.
Seraphine pressed her forehead against his chest, smearing blood across his ribs.
"You don't have to do this alone," she pleaded.
Her voice sounded like it had crawled out of a grave and still believed it deserved warmth.
Kael heard both of them.
Felt both of them anchoring him to flesh, to gravity, to breath.
To the version of himself that wasn't a god or a weapon or a correction.
To the version that loved back.
Dominus rose, body rearranging into something monstrous and script-heavy.
His voice boomed through the cathedral, cracking every window:
"THE WORLD HAS ONE AUTHOR."
Kael stepped forward.
His shadow rose behind him like a titan of ink and teeth.
And for the first time since the dawn of scripture, a saint stepped backward.
Dominus felt it—
Real fear.
The kind mortals learned first.
The kind gods never believed they would taste.
Kael's chest ached.
His spine burned.
His blood hummed like a choir trapped in an iron lung.
But his voice, when it came, did not tremble.
He reached into the air and tore a vertical line through existence—
*SKRRRRIP*
—and words appeared, hanging like luminous wounds.
The First Commandment.
Kael didn't speak it.
He wrote it:
"NO STORY MAY CLAIM WHAT CHOOSES TO LOVE."
The Cathedral went silent.
The halos around Dominus cracked.
The script on the Saints' bodies peeled away like dead skin, screaming as it lost its owner.
Reality blistered under the weight of the new rule.
Veyra choked on a laugh, half-mad, half-ecstatic.
"You absolute bastard," she exclaimed.
"You rewrote religion."
Lirien touched the Commandment with trembling fingers and confessed, "You rewrote me."
Kael looked at the words burning in the air.
His words.
His rule.
His truth.
And he realized something terrifying:
He hadn't written the Commandment for himself.
He'd written it for them.
The Cathedral collapsed in a waterfall of inverted stars.
The Saints screamed.
Dominus howled.
The sky bent.
And Kael Voss—
Abyss Walker, narrative defiance made flesh, the thing the world could no longer edit—
smiled.
Because he had written only the first commandment.
He still had six more to go.
And this time,
the story would obey him.