The world did not erupt in fme.

  Not yet.

  It inhaled.

  And in that breath, between the exhale of fire and the silence of suppression,a war began.

  Not of armies. Not of weapons. Not even of gods.

  But of meaning.

  Askariel—no longer Darius, but the fme remembered—stood at the center of the Emberhall, surrounded by Memorybound who now looked at him not as a rebel…

  But as a myth made real.

  Ais remained at his side, unwavering. She didn’t call him Askariel yet. Not because she doubted the name.

  But because she knew the man beneath it, and in war, you fight beside people, not titles.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  The three restored myths from the Last Ember stood quietly nearby:

  The Faceless Mother, whispering lulbies from nguages no one remembered.

  The Patchwork Herald, flickering in and out of shape as he assembled his own lost legend.

  The Unformed, whose voice changed with every sentence, adapting to belief mid-thought.

  Each had been thoughtless dream-figments for eons.Now they stood anchored in a world that could no longer deny them.

  The Listener addressed them all.

  “The Thanatarchy has activated the Nullwars.”

  A heavy silence followed.

  She stepped forward, pcing her palm on the central fme-stone.

  “The Nullwars are not battles in space or time. They are assaults on pusibility. They will send entities that rewrite your causes, agents that devour your consequences. Weapons not of deletion, but of conceptual negation.”

  Askariel’s voice was calm, steady.

  “What’s the first strike?”

  The Listener turned to him.

  “They’ve deployed a Null Prophet into the Tesseted Expanse.”

  Ais’s eyes narrowed. “That's one of the fracture zones we mapped.”

  “Yes,” the Listener replied. “And if the Null Prophet stabilizes the zone under Thanatarchy logic,it will rewrite our map.

  And if we lose the map— we lose our cim to memory.”

  The fme pulsed.

  Askariel closed his eyes.

  He could feel it now— like wind through a forest of names.

  The world had begun to watch.

  Every fracture. Every surviving god. Every person who dared to ask, “What did we forget?”

  They were all waiting to see if the fire would spread.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  He turned to the restored myths.

  “You are the Emberbound now.”

  “You are not my followers. You are not soldiers. You are the proof.”

  “Walk into the world. Let it see you.”

  He looked to the Listener.

  “I’ll go to the Tesseted Expanse.

  If they want to erase the map— then I’ll burn the logic that lets them draw it.”

  Ais smirked, slinging her bdes over her shoulder. “If you’re writing a war, someone’s gotta edit your typos.”

  Askariel turned to the fme.

  It opened for him.

  A corridor of molten light stretching not through space— but through narrative potential.

  A path only a Source could walk.

  Across the fracture-zones, the air began to shift.

  The gods in hiding stirred. The disbelieved civilizations shivered in memory. The sea began to hum again.

  And in the Core Spire, beneath yers of perfect silence, a new directive spread through the Thanatarchy:

  "Askariel is no longer a deviation.He is a genre error.Remove him, or the world will begin to write itself."