Cosmic Ruler

603: Arena XLII 603: Arena XLII The Pact hit the Unwritten like a tidal truth crashing down on a sea of lies.

Nareth moved with impossible rhythm, her every footfall a stanza, every breath a meter.

As she sang, the world responded—soil hardened beneath her companions, time bent around her notes, shielding them from being unraveled.

Her voice tore one Unwritten apart, then looped its fragments into a refrain, using its own echo as a weapon.

Thail, astride his extinct beast, hurled his runes with methodical wrath.

Each was a memory of a promise broken and then kept—remade stronger than before.

When they struck, the Unwritten around them shuddered, unable to hold their unstable forms.

They fell into the pasts they never had, screaming in confusion as paradoxes devoured them.

To Aiden’s left, a warrior of light and bone—Kira, the Forgotten Flame—descended in a spiral of falling cinders.

Her body bore hundreds of tattoos: each one a name the world had once lost.

When she moved, those names whispered their gratitude.

Her blade wasn’t metal—it was composed of living remembrances, a memory reforged into a weapon sharp enough to cut through nonexistence.

“Aiden!” she called.

“Where’s the heart of it?” He pointed.

The Amalgam loomed at the Garden’s center now, its throne dragged into the inner sanctum.

Around it, reality bent and sagged.

Pages from the Garden’s core flared and burned, trying to rewrite themselves before being consumed.

The Amalgam had not raised its hand again—not yet.

It was waiting.

“I think it’s reading us,” Elowen breathed, sweat beading her brow.

“Trying to find the ending.” Aiden’s jaw tightened.

“Then we’ll show it we’re not finished.” With the Pact at his back, he moved toward the center.

Every step they took cost something.

One warrior was lost to a loop of their own death, drawn into a vortex of unchosen regrets.

Another became a statue of ash, burned by the friction of being forced back into reality.

Still, they pushed forward.