After the calm that follows a storm, Roze called Voidheart to the throne chamber. The conversation that followed was private — words said in a low voice, offscreen, sealed between two friends who had borne equal shares of ruin and rule. Roze told him everything: the prophecy glimpsed in Theodre's time, the inevitability of Fengxi's return, the weight of a weapon he could not risk leaving exposed. The details of that telling belonged only to them.
Voidheart listened without interruption. When Roze finished, the younger man's face did not twist in surprise so much as settle into an old, familiar resolve. He bowed once, the ghost of their shared past tightening the gesture. Then Voidheart summoned the twelve siblings from the orphanage — twelve faces he had raised, tempered by hardship and loyalty. They came as they had always come: silent, steady, ready.
Roze's orders were simple and absolute. In the days that followed, Voidheart and the twelve — each bound by oath to him and to the memory of what they had suffered — performed the ritual Roze commanded. They created the Dreadbound Circle: a woven ritual that anchored knowledge and secrecy in immortal flesh. Under Roze's blessing, and by the authority now carved into his crown-mark, each member of the Circle was granted unending life — not as a gift of joy, but as a tool of endurance for a task that would span millennia.
Their charge was precise. Gather knowledge of Luxar and of the worlds beyond it. Catalogue languages, magics, histories, techniques, and weapons. Collect truths and bury them in vaults and in minds alike. Most crucially, when the time came for Roze to vanish, the Dreadbound were to remove every trace of him and of the Reverents from history and memory — to erase names, monuments, entire chronicles if necessary. Even the faintest whisper of the Reverents or of Celvarn's crimson rule could draw Fengxi's appetite; a single remembered melody might be enough to call her gaze. The planet could not risk that.
Roze's voice was steady as he explained the final instruction: in time — after ten thousand years — the Circle was to guide the reemergence of memory. Then, carrying the vast knowledge they had hoarded, they would shepherd a new generation of heroes. They would choose teachers, forge mentors, and steer destiny with patient hands until the world was ready to remember itself without inviting annihilation.
Voidheart's hand found Roze's. "My lord," he said quietly, the words plain and raw, "I will miss you. We all will."
Roze smiled, a small, almost boyish twist of his mouth. "I will miss you too," he answered. "I won't drag Vonni into this — he hates conflict. But he will know, and he will support it in his own way. I may be the foolish king who erases himself. That is a foolish crown I will gladly wear."
Voidheart only nodded. "It's for the greater good, my lord."
One by one the twelve names were spoken aloud, in the hush of the inner sanctum, and each stepped forward to take the Dreadbound oath. Voidheart stood with them at the front:
Voidheart.
Infernos.
Oblivion.
Bloodfang.
Ruinclaw.
Shadeborn.
Pestilence.
Duskbane.
Zephiron.
Noctis.
Abyssion.
Gravemourn.
They lowered their heads and bowed before Roze — an unyielding line of immortal witnesses. Their posture, grave and precise, sealed the covenant. Their faces were unreadable, but in their eyes burned the knowledge of a thousand hard nights: they would walk centuries alone to keep a promise.
Fifteen years later, the rumor spread like a slow, impossible drought. Roze and the heart of Celvarn simply vanished. The palace stood one morning and disappeared the next; the banners, the bells, the carved faces of Roze's successors — all of it slipped out of the world, erased as if a history-tongue had been cut. The people of the lands woke with holes in their stories: a throne that had no memory, a kingdom that left no footprint. Entire memory-threads were undone. Men whose grandfathers had sworn oaths to Celvarn stared at the empty fields where a castle should have been and felt only a vague, inexplicable hollowness. Names evaporated from ledgers. Roads that once led the court now led into open country. The Dreadbound had done what their oath demanded: they removed every trace.
The Circle scattered like seeds on the wind. Each member took a direction — hidden libraries, mountain monasteries, subterranean vaults, remote guild halls, far-off trading outposts — and began their work in earnest. They collected, they recorded, and they erased. Where they left traces for the distant future, they left them divided, coded, and layered beneath centuries of mundane life. They built grave-stones that told no story and stored tomes behind false walls and superstitions. Most crucially, each Dreadbound marked a handful of minds — those they trusted with conditional hints and puzzles — so that ten thousand years hence, there would be those who could decode what had been sealed.
Centuries rolled. Around eleven hundred years before the "present" that would one day be Michi's time, Hayabina — once Hikari reborn and folded into the dark oath Roze had witnessed — found purpose. She met King Isiya Uradhara and bowed, accepting him as lord. The meeting was quiet, neat as ritual: a single soul finding its place as fate rearranged the deck of rulers.
And then, at a time carved into the breath before a storm, Roze watched.
Not in the flesh as ruler of Celvarn — he had no throne and no court. He stood as one who had folded himself into the world's quiet underside, watching a boy named Michi sit on a bench. Michi was wounded, perplexed, and unmistakably human: hair in disarray, face marked by fatigue, eyes clouded with questions that had no immediate answers. Roze studied him like a tutor examines a pupil on the cusp of meaning. For a few long moments, the world around them moved like molasses — distant bells, whispering leaves.
Then horror struck: a dome of shimmering energy formed, a sphere that closed silently around the scene. The barrier was ancient and precise. It cut the sky like a bell and sealed the planet's immediate fate. Roze reached for influence, for the threads of power he had woven into the planet, but the barrier was designed to block him. He felt the edge of his will rub against the shield and fail.
A small, cold smile touched his face. He had expected this. He was not naive to fate's cruelty. He looked at Michi — puzzled, wounded, innocent in a way Roze had long since abandoned — and the weight of the ages pressed him like a hand.
"Well," Roze murmured, voice carrying the dry humor of one who has bargained with ruin and won terms. "Very well. I know what will happen next."
He turned his head slightly and addressed the silent air, not expecting an answer but delivering the lesson that had been his life's harshest charter.
"Be smart — or be dead."
The sphere settled its silence around Michi. Roze's last image before the dome sealed his sight was the boy's eyes, puzzlement shifting into resolve. Beyond the barrier, the stars burned their cold, unmoving light. The Dreadbound's work had only just begun. The world would sleep with its scars, the memory of an Apocalypse dissolved like salt in rain — and in that forgetting, future heroes would rise.
The end....