They walked where no road had ever been.
Ash fell thick as funeral snow, erasing footprints the instant they formed. The inverted city drifted above, lights flickering like dying neurons. Between them and the city flowed the River.
It had no banks.
Only a slow, black current pouring upward into the bruised sky, carrying fragments of things that had once had names.
A child's laughter. KLIK-KLIK…
A mother's last breath. HSSSSHHH…
The sound of a wedding ring hitting concrete.
Every lost memory drifted past in translucent bubbles, glowing faintly before bursting into nothing. POP! POP! POP!
Aria walked beside him, barefoot. Blood still dripped from her wrists. Where each drop touched the ash, tiny white lilies forced their way up, bloomed, and withered in a heartbeat.
Seong-jun's crows circled high above, hesitant to descend.
He stopped at the edge of the impossible current.
Across the River, the Throne waited: a mountain of petrified saints fused into a single screaming colossus. At its peak sat an empty cradle carved from the moon's own bone.
The girl from his classroom was inside.
He could feel her heartbeat—faint, fragile—straining to become the world's last heartbeat.
"How do we cross?" he asked.
Aria knelt, dipping two fingers into the black water. She brought them to her lips. The taste made her eyes water gold.
"By giving the River what it wants," she murmured. "A name you no longer need."
She stood and rolled up the sleeve of her funeral shroud, revealing the pale inside of her forearm.
Words were carved there—thousands—glowing like molten scripture. Names. Dates. Final thoughts. Every soul that had ever bled on her altar had left its signature burning into her skin.
She pressed her palm to the current.
RUMBLE—SHHHHHHH!
The River surged upward, forming a hungry mouth.
Aria began to speak, voice soft as a lullaby, terrible as confession:
"Kim Hye-jin, who loved strawberry poptarts and wanted to be an astronaut.
Park Min-su, who forgave his father on the day he died.
Choi Eun-bi, who never told her sister she was proud…"
With every name, a letter flaked from her arm like burning paper. Pain folded her almost in half, but her voice never wavered.
The River drank.
A bridge of black water rose, solidifying into a narrow path of writhing names. Seong-jun watched her bleed light.
When the bridge finished, half the names on her arm were gone. Empty scars remained, pale as forgiveness.
"Your turn," she whispered, swaying.
He stared at the bridge. Then at his hands. Beneath his skin, shadows moved like trapped birds. He knew what the River would ask.
He stepped forward.
The current licked at his boots, curious.
A single crow broke from the flock, landing on his shoulder. Its eyes belonged to a boy he had carried from a burning orphanage. Light as ash by the end.
Seong-jun reached up, closing his fingers around the crow's throat.
"I'm sorry, Min-jae," he murmured.
He crushed the bird. Black blood ran between his knuckles. SQUELCH!
The River roared in ecstasy.
He opened his hand. Feathers fell. Each feather became a name he had carried for eleven years:
Lee Min-jae, age nine, afraid of the dark.
Jung Soo-ah, who sang him happy birthday while something ate her legs.
Kang Dae-ho, who begged him to kill him before the Nightmare rewrote his soul.
With every name he surrendered, a piece of his shadow tore away, dissolving into the current. Pain precise, surgical, familiar.
When he was done, a strip of darkness was missing from his silhouette, as though someone had taken a bite from his existence.
The bridge widened, stable now, hungry for more.
He looked at Aria. Lips trembling, eyes shining with something too bright for hope.
"Together," she repeated, softer than snowfall.
He took her hand.
They stepped onto the bridge of stolen names.
The River spoke beneath them—a chorus of a billion drowned voices. Some begged. Some cursed. Some simply said his name, over and over, like drowning men clutching driftwood.
Halfway across, the current tried to rise and claim them both.
Seong-jun's remaining crows dove as one living shroud, wrapping them in a second skin of screaming wings. KRRAAA-KKRAAA!
The River recoiled, burned by regret sharpened to edges.
They kept walking.
On the far bank stood a figure made of stained glass and sorrow.
Grigori. The First Saint.
His body a cathedral window depicting every sin humanity would ever commit. Light that should not exist poured through him, fracturing into colors without names.
He opened arms that ended in broken halos.
"My wayward children," he sang, voice layered with choirs and screaming. "Have you come to finish what we began?"
Seong-jun's shadow rippled, barely holding shape.
Aria stepped forward, blood still dripping from empty scars.
"We've come to end it," she answered.
Grigori smiled with a mouth of shattered communion wafers.
"Then come," he invited, gentle as plague. "The cradle hungers.
And the moon is almost finished bleeding."
Behind him, the mountain of fused saints opened a thousand eyes. Every eye wept ash.
Seong-jun tightened his grip on Aria's hand until bones creaked.
Crows screamed a sound that used to be human. SCREEEEEEEE!
Together, they walked toward the Throne, leaving the River of Forgotten Names behind—poorer by everything they had once been.
Ahead, the cradle rocked gently, though no wind blew.
Inside, a teenage girl opened eyes the color of ending—and smiled with too many teeth.