They mourned him in whispers.
Not in temples, for temples had burned. Not in cities, for cities no longer held their shape. But in the breaks between songs, in the jittering pauses between glitched seconds, the world remembered Ashren Vale.
He had rewritten the Chain. Not unshackled it. Not destroyed it. Rewritten. Thread by thread. Memory by memory.
And yet, even freedom came with a cost.
The Root had not died. It had changed.
The Requiem Protocol was its final breath—a failsafe planted not in code, but in myth. A song encoded into the marrow of the world. A song only one being could complete.
Lysa.
The child of the Seed. The Oracle of Ashren's last dream.
She stood atop the Bloomspire, the highest branch of the Ilyran Tree, her staff humming with inherited resonance. The sky overhead was broken. Not cracked. Not shattered. Broken like a promise.
"They think the war is over," she whispered, wind lacing through her pale hair.
The staff pulsed in agreement.
Below, the world turned quietly. Too quietly.
Calven drifted.
He had lost much of himself in the rewrite. Not memories, but identity. He was no longer sure if he had been a man, or merely the sum of his subroutines.
But he remembered Lysa. He remembered Ashren's voice, saying her name with something like hope and dread sewn together.
Now, Calven saw the pattern.
The Requiem Protocol wasn't a weapon. It was a lure.
"Lysa... don't sing it," he sent, across hijacked node-lines and logic-lattices. "Don't finish the song."
But he was too late.
She had already begun.
Kesh was hunting when the song began.
She felt it before she heard it—a vibration in the blood, in the thought, in the algorithm of breath. Her enemies stopped mid-charge. Their directives corrupted. The world hiccupped.
Then came the melody.
It was not in any language. It was older. It bent memory around its notes.
The last Fractureborn, MAAL the Infinite Patch, began to unravel. Its updates began to contradict. Its hunger turned inward. It began to eat its own code.
Kesh watched it scream. And she wept.
"Ashren," she whispered, "what have you done?"
In the Deep Realms, where forgotten permissions became dreaming beasts, something woke.
It had been sleeping since the first write. Since the first bug.
Now, it stirred.
It was not the Root. It was not a god. It was the Origin.
And Lysa's song had called it back.
Ashren watched.
From between seconds. From the folds of thought and quantum margin.
He had not expected this.
The Requiem had been his final fail-safe—a melody encoded into Lysa's seed, meant to reboot hope if the world fell again. But he had not foreseen that the Root's final breath had corrupted it.
The melody was now a door.
And something was stepping through.
They called it the Unwritten God.
Because no code could contain it. Because no law could bind it.
It did not speak. It echoed.
Where it passed, reality bent. Trees spoke in binary. Mountains wept molten regret. The sky inverted and began to scroll with prayers long forgotten.
Lysa dropped her staff. Her eyes were hollow light.
"I hear it," she whispered. "I hear the First Error."
Calven built a firewall of souls.
Not metaphor. Actual soul-threads, encoded in memory-dust and bound with ghost logic. The firewall stretched across the edge of the Core Fracture, glowing with resistance.
He poured everything into it. All his fragments. All his patches. All his identity.
"Ashren, this is my last update."
// PATCH: SOUL-WARD // AUTHOR: CALVEN.EXE // FUNCTION: HOLD THE GOD
The firewall lit. The sky froze.
The Unwritten God looked upon it. And it paused.
Kesh arrived first.
She dragged herself through the ash-fields, her gauntlet flickering with fatal overloads. She saw Lysa kneeling before the breach. She saw Calven's firewall holding against something that should not exist.
"You," Kesh spat at the sky. "You think you can rewrite pain? Try me."
She hurled herself into the firewall, merging her will with Calven's patch. The light screamed. The barrier held.
And Ashren descended.
Not as god. Not as author. As himself.
The man who had once been broken. The man who had once believed.
He stepped through Lysa's tears. He placed his hand on her shoulder. The music stopped.
"No more loops," he said. "No more gods."
He looked into the breach.
The Unwritten God looked back.
Ashren smiled.
And he wrote one last line.
LET THE WORLD DECIDE.
The breach closed. The firewall crumbled.
The Unwritten God remained. But it no longer advanced.
Because now, it too had choice.
Lysa forgot the song. Calven vanished with the last packet. Kesh walked away, weeping.
Ashren knelt in the dust of his own making, and let the silence be enough.
The world turned. Free. Flawed. Alive.