The sky bled where Seong-jun had nailed the Lord of Serpents to it.
Black fire crawled along the wound in reality, hissing like frost on glass—
SFX: tssss—krrrK—
spreading, splitting, undoing.
The pinned deity writhed, golden blood spiraling upward, molten and weightless.
Every drop that touched the frozen city melted straight through porcelain, memory, and the idea of what once had been.
Seong-jun hovered before him—wings of living shadow beating slow, deliberate, predatory.
The sword impaling the Serpent pulsed with a heartbeat not his own.
The Lord of Serpents laughed—wet, broken, delighted.
It sounded like drowning in honey.
"You still don't understand," he gurgled, golden blood bubbling between too many teeth.
"This isn't the ending… this is the cradle's lullaby."
His trembling hand lifted—
pointed past Seong-jun
toward the heart of the frozen city.
The ground split open with a sound like a century trying to breathe for the first time.
A cradle rose.
Not the lunar-bone relic from the mountain.
This one was vast.
Continental. Cosmic. Wrong.
Woven from the spines of dead galaxies.
Blanketed in the Veil itself—torn, bleeding starlight.
Its mobile spun slowly overhead:
Hundreds of thousands of frozen human faces,
mouths open, singing silently,
forever.
And inside the cradle—
Nothing.
A perfect, absolute emptiness.
The kind that hurt to look at.
The true Third Cradle.
The one that had never been meant to open.
Until now.
Aria descended between them, wings trembling, white feathers burning at the edges.
Her eyes—once gentle, once terrible—
widened in pure horror.
"No…" she whispered.
"I burned it. I burned the cathedral. I killed God."
The Lord of Serpents grinned around the sword in his chest.
"You killed a lie wearing His face," he rasped.
"The cradle was never in the cathedral.
The cathedral… was inside the cradle.
Everything was."
Golden fire spilled from his mouth as he coughed.
**"You didn't end the cycle, little martyr…
you woke it up."**
The cradle rocked once.
SFX: KOOOOOO—MNNNNG—
The frozen city screamed with a single porcelain voice.
Every statue—every mother, child, lover—split along perfect seams.
From those cracks poured black infant hands, reaching, grasping, starving.
They pulled the world toward the cradle.
Piece by piece.
Seong-jun ripped his sword free.
He spun toward Aria—
but she was already falling, wings folding, white fire guttering like a candle in vacuum.
He caught her before the ground did.
Her body was cold.
Too cold.
Like holding a statue that had learned to bleed.
Her lips brushed his collarbone.
"I thought… if I froze everything… no one would ever have to hurt again…"
Seong-jun's arms tightened.
"I know," he murmured into her ash-colored hair.
**"But cages aren't mercy, Aria.
They're just slow graves."**
Above them, the cradle opened wider.
The Lord of Serpents—half his body unraveling into smoke and snakes—dragged himself upright on nothing.
His voice dripped rot and sweetness.
"One last thing, Thief."
He snapped his fingers.
SFX: tik—CHIME—
The frozen faces in the cradle's mobile turned toward Seong-jun.
Every single one wore the face of someone he had failed:
His mother.
His sister.
The girl from the first Nightmare.
The boy who asked if poems could save people.
They opened their mouths—
and spoke with his own voice.
"You can't save her either."
Seong-jun's wings faltered.
The cradle lunged.
Tendrils of bone and starlight lashed out, coiling around his wrists, ankles—
his throat.
They pulled.
Hard.
His shadow tore—
half clinging to him,
half dragged screaming toward the emptiness.
Aria slipped from his arms.
She did not resist.
Her eyes were endless exhaustion.
"Let me go," she whispered.
"This is what I was born for."
Seong-jun's crimson eyes bled black.
"No."
The word hit the world like a verdict.
He let the cradle take him.
Willingly.
The tendrils yanked him into the emptiness.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
Silence.
Then—
A single crow screamed.
SFX: KRAAAAAAAAA—
Inside the cradle, where nothing had ever been born, something detonated.
Black fire.
White fire.
Regret braided with mercy.
A scream that should not exist.
The cradle shattered outward in a ring of annihilating light.
Seong-jun rose from the pieces.
Not man-shaped anymore.
Wings vast enough to cradle galaxies.
Eyes like collapsing stars.
A crown of broken halos burning above white hair that flowed like living night.
In one hand he held the Lord of Serpents by the throat—
the deity reduced to a flickering candle of lies.
In the other
he held Aria against his chest,
white wings wrapped tight around her like a promise.
His voice was the sound of every grave opening at once:
"I told you."
"No more cradles."
He crushed the Lord of Serpents into golden dust.
It blew away on a wind the world had forgotten.
He looked down at Aria.
She was crying.
Warm tears.
Human tears.
He pressed his forehead to hers.
"Come home," he whispered.
The frozen city rose—
not into the cradle,
but upward, into a sky suddenly remembering how to be blue.
People blinked.
Breathed.
Lived.
Aria stared at the world she had once tried to kill with kindness.
Then at the monster who had torn reality apart to return it.
She reached up, trembling—
touched the place where his mask had once been.
"I… don't know how," she confessed.
Seong-jun smiled.
Small.
Human.
Enough.
"Then we'll learn together."
He spread his wings—
shadow and light braided into something new—
and carried her into the first morning in a hundred years that was allowed to hurt,
to bleed,
to choose.
Behind them, the broken cradle sank into the earth, finally at rest.
Ahead of them:
Terrifying.
Possible.
Alive.