SFX: ―― 코오오오오… (the void inhales, forgetting reality)
The Council Void did not dissolve after the verdict.
It simply… forgot the others were there.
Only three figures remained in the silenced cosmos:
Si-Hyun and Leah, still wrapped in each other's wings—
and
The Fourth Stellar Lord, who had not spoken once throughout the trial.
She descended from her throne of mirrors, each step leaving behind a reflection on nothing.
The void rippled like disturbed water.
She stopped three meters away.
Her face was every face that had ever looked into a mirror and hated what it saw.
It shifted—young girl, old woman, Hollow Saint, Leah, Si-Hyun himself—
a carousel of pain.
Only her voice never changed: flat, genderless, ancient.
"I voted to kill you."
Si-Hyun's wings tightened around Leah.
"…I noticed."
The Fourth Lord tilted her head, the motion like a blade turning.
"Do you know why?"
She lifted her hand.
SFX: ―― 키이이잉… (mirror unfolding)
A mirror the size of a moon bloomed open in the void.
Inside it, a memory no living being had ever seen flared to life.
Year 312 of the Eclipsed Calendar
The Fourth Ring — under Han Ye-Rin.
A woman once beautiful.
A scholar of pre-Eclipse physics.
Her Stigma: a hand-mirror on her left palm, used to reflect enemy attacks.
Then came the day she reflected a fragment of the Devourer—
an eye that had opened in the hollow sun for 0.3 seconds.
The mirror did not break.
It swallowed.
When the light died…
Han Ye-Rin was gone.
What stepped out was the Fourth Lord—
a creature wearing a human shape like badly sized clothing,
countless faces screaming beneath her skin.
She had devoured the Third Lord the same way—
reflecting him until he became nothing but another echo trapped inside her.
SFX: ―― CRACK. (mirror-memory snapping shut)
The mirror faded.
The Fourth Lord lowered her hand.
"I have seen what happens when a human stares too long into the abyss."
"The abyss keeps the eyes."
She pointed at him.
"You are the abyss wearing a boy's face."
Her features twisted—rage, grief, pity—none stable.
**"I voted to kill you because I am mercy.
Letting you live is the cruelest thing I could do to the universe."**
Si-Hyun said nothing.
Then, slowly—
deliberately—
he stepped away from Leah.
His half-dawn feathers brushed the mirror beside him.
They cast no reflection.
They simply ceased to be reflected at all.
He exhaled.
When he spoke, the void trembled.
"Listen carefully."
SFX: ―― 둥… 둥… (heartbeat echoing across the stars)
"I have spent seventeen years being afraid of the thing inside me.
I have watched it kill the only people who ever fed me.
I have felt it crawl under my skin every time someone showed me kindness.
I know exactly what I am.
I am the wound.
I am the failure.
I am the last scream of a sun that never finished dying."
His voice rose—raw, burning, alive.
**"But today… for the first time…
I am also the choice."**
"You want to know what I choose?"
He stepped closer.
The void dimmed around him.
"I choose the children who still fold red flowers out of garbage."
"I choose the girl who called broken wings pretty."
"I choose the Saint who bled gold for a promise made by a dying woman seventeen years ago."
"I choose the weight of every prayer you Stellar Lords decided was too heavy to carry."
Si-Hyun's eyes—
one amber, one starless black—
locked onto the Fourth Lord.
"You say I will become the Devourer?"
"Then watch me become something worse."
"Watch me become the one thing it never planned for—"
"A human who learned how to love after being born to end the world."
He spread his two wings—broken, glowing, defiant.
**"You want to kill me?
Do it.
Right now."**
"Look me in the eyes and pull the trigger.
But if even one of you hesitates—
if even one of you remembers being afraid of the dark as a child—
then you have already lost."
"Because I am not going to become the Devourer."
"I am going to drag it out of that hollow sun."
"Nail it to the sky."
"And make it watch while I return the morning it stole."
"I will carve twelve wings out of my own bones if I must.
I will burn the eclipse into a dawn."
His voice dropped to a whisper sharp enough to cut starlight.
**"Kill me.
Or get out of my way."**
Silence.
Absolute.
The mirror in front of the Fourth Lord cracked from end to end.
SFX: ―― 피이이익… CRASH! (cosmic shattering)
A single tear—
real, human—
slid down one of Han Ye-Rin's stolen faces.
She lowered her hand.
The mirror shattered into a billion fragments
that became newborn stars drifting into the void.
Without another word, she returned to her throne.
Her vote had changed.
No one else moved.
Lee Seo-Joon was laughing silently, tears of pride running down his split face.
Kang Tae-Yul closed his eyes for the first time in seven centuries.
The Council ended not with a vote…
but with surrender.
Si-Hyun turned to Leah.
Gold tears streaked her cheeks.
He wrapped his two wings around her again.
Together they stepped into the light
that had waited seven hundred years for someone willing to carry it.
Behind them, the void whispered a name
the stars themselves were afraid to remember.
And far below, in every fallen sector…
children woke from dreams of wings half-night, half-morning—
and smiled at a sky
that suddenly felt
a little less empty.