Silence.
A long, heavy silence.
And yet, around the Infiniverse Crucible, the Hymns still rang.
Majestic.
Terrifying.
The towers Noah had birthed, each of them grander than Omniverses, continued to sing. Their voices were endless, filled with complexity and purpose.
But for the first time since the Festival of Existence began...
Noah Osmont did not move.
The aura of an Early Creature still burned gloriously around him- glorious, unrelenting, vast- but his figure sat utterly still.
His golden eyes, now deeper than abyssal wells, stared forward with a calmness that was more dangerous than any fury.
Because in that stillness, there was absence.
Ruination...was gone.
And not in the way she’d been before. Not into ash, not into light, not into the glory of the Wheel’s Breaking.
Gone.
There was no pull on the bond they shared. No connection to trace and pull from!
No hum of her existence!
No trace of her Signature, no vibration of her mythos in the Records of hus weavings.
She had vanished, and the link between them had severed.
"..."
Just like that.
HUUM...
A low, tremulous reverberation echoed from Noah’s body. His weavings, already unquantifiable, began to shimmer. The complexity and purity within him surged like boiling tides, his Towers pulsing in unison as the Hymns grew louder.
Around him, the Infiniverse was silent.
Her radiant face, usually majestic or proud, bore no expression now. Her multicolored crystalline hair flowed behind her in stillness as she floated beside him.
And like him, she was staring at the same place.
The spot where Ruination once stood.
Seconds trickled by.
No glimmer. No ash. No flicker of a broken wheel.
Only... nothing.
Only absence.
And that made it worse.
Noah’s thoughts stirred, slow and heavy.
Deep within, he remembered something.
A whisper of a prophecy from his own mouth, not long ago.
"Beware the day when Death sings in living tongues. On that day, the Foldless Ones shall stir, Those neither bound by Life nor caged by Death.
Their names will not be remembered, for they were never written. Their weavings cannot be unspun. Their will cannot be undone.
In the end, the Thread that was favored shall not be the one that remains. But the Thread that learned to twist itself.
The Gravewake shall open. The Nine Breakings shall echo. And in the silence after the final fall, only a single note shall endure, Not a sound, but a choice."
"..."
He had spoken those words as prophecy.
He had lived many of them already.
But now...
"The Nine Breakings shall echo..."
Noah’s voice came low, like a judgment as he looked around.
And yet...
No echo returned.
No answer.
No Ruination.
Only the maddening, hellish quiet in the wake of her final cry!
—
Far beyond the Nullvein Gravewake Folds.
Across existences and beyond conceptual distance...
The Transcendent Origin Folds.
A place few would ever glimpsed.
A sanctum woven from the earliest strands of Beginning. Here, overlapping folds of white brilliance sprawled like veils across an endless sky.
Fantastical landmasses, floating Omniversal continents- drifted across immense, radiant wheels of existence that shone beneath them, gliding through the firmament like ghostly ships on an unseen sea.
And above them, rivers of white-gold clouds meandered in silence, winding across light years.
Peace.
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