It rained inside the temple.
Not water. Not blood. Something... older. The droplets shimmered with colors not seen since the first days of creation—fragments of memory, pieces of forgotten time. Each drop that struck Varis's skin showed him a thousand lifetimes in an instant. A soldier. A murderer. A god. A child. All of them—him.
"I'm seeing... other versions of myself," he muttered, staring down at his hands. "Some of them didn't survive this place."
"You're not supposed to," Ilyen said. "That's the test. You face the weight of who you were, who you could be, and who you'll never become."
"And if I fail?"
"Then the world ends. Again."
The center of the temple had changed. The monolith had cracked open into a spiral staircase made of shifting glass, each step showing a different future. Some of them burned. Others glowed like salvation. One showed Varis holding the blade of silence—the god-killer. Another showed him kneeling before a throne of salt, his eyes hollow, his mind gone.
"I have to choose," he whispered.
"No," Ilyen said, walking beside him. "You have to walk through all of them."
The staircase didn't ascend. It descended—into the core of what reality had tried to forget.
With every step, Varis saw moments from his past twisted into riddles. His mother's lullabies became warnings. His brother's death became prophecy. And the day he first heard the name of the fallen sky... it was no accident. It was summoned to him. Like a lost child returning to its true parent.
The deeper they went, the more gravity bent. Time lost its rhythm. Ilyen staggered, coughing up starlight, whispering prayers in dead tongues.
Then they reached the bottom.
There was no floor—just an endless reflection of the sky above. But this sky was wrong. It pulsed, cracked, bled light. And in its center, chained by silence and story, was the creature that once was a name.
A being of language. Of belief. Of memory.
It turned its head—slowly, like a world shifting.
Its voice, when it came, was not a sound, but a rewriting:
"I remember you, Varis."
Varis fell to one knee, his breath stolen. Ilyen reached out to pull him back—but it was too late.
The entity touched his mind.
And suddenly, Varis understood why the world had ended once.
And why it would again.