The arena was dying.

Darkness peeled away from the stone like old skin, dissolving into vapor that fled the light. Chains that once bound the air itself unraveled link by link, slithering into cracks like broken oaths crawling home. The frost across the floor melted in slow, silver rivulets, pooling where fallen Titans once bled. Even the fires, once wild and roaring, sputtered and fizzled out, reduced to embers that trembled at her presence.

She walked through it all, untouched.

Her black military uniform moved like ink in water, not so much swaying as gliding—sharp in cut, flawless in weight. White thread traced the single closed eye embroidered across her chest, glinting faintly in the ruin-light. Her hair was a curtain of shadow, long and windless, spilling behind her in strands that didn't sway, but followed.

And her right arm… It didn't belong to any living being.

A monstrous claw of blackened bone and jagged metal, too large, too heavy, too hungry. The surface shone with subtle heat, faint red veins glowing in pulses like breathing embers. It clicked softly with each shift, like ancient armor remembering the rhythm of war.

"Hush now, hush…the stars still shake."

She sang the words like a lullaby whispered to a sleeping child. Each syllable fell heavy, despite the softness of her voice. Her voice was beautiful, melodic… and wrong.

She stepped over a ruined boulder, her boot pressing lightly into the blackened stone. Where her heel touched, the surface cracked, silent fractures spidering out like something remembering it was supposed to break. Her claw scraped the edge, not for balance, but out of habit. The sound was gentle. The damage was not.

"The world still dreams though wide awake…"

She walked without urgency, circling the arena's core with the calm of someone returning to a place she had built. Her eyes, obsidian pools with no visible end, never blinked, never twitched. They stayed fixed on one thing alone.

A mount of clay.

It sat at the center, absurdly intact. The ground around it had been torn apart by fire, ice, shadow, and screams, but the clay was pristine. Unshaped, unmarked, untouched. As if reality itself had refused to harm it. Or feared to.

She stopped before it.

The claw at her side flexed once, its fingers curling inward with a creak like groaning timber. Then stillness again. Her expression unreadable, her gaze heavy.

She lowered herself with quiet grace. Her coat folded around her like ink pooling at the edge of a battlefield. Her knees didn't thud against the stone, but they did settle with the practiced elegance of someone who had once knelt only to gods she would later kill.

Her left hand reached out.

"Its gods are dust…"

She touched the clay.

"…its kings are lies…"

Her fingers didn't prod or poke. They each knew what to do, as if they'd done this before, long ago, in a world that forgot. With fluid, deliberate movements, she began to mold the mound, pressing her thumb gently into its center, pulling the form upward with slow pressure, massaging shoulders from nothing, coaxing a spine from raw earth.

"Yet still they pray beneath my skies."

Her touch was firm but reverent, as though sculpting wasn't creation but revelation, uncovering what had always been there, buried beneath the surface. She smoothed clay across a forming chest, dragged two fingers down where ribs would be, pressing hard enough to leave impressions that might become breath.

She moved slowly to the figure's jaw, tracing its curvature with her thumb, then tilting its head ever so slightly, commanding posture into it. Her hair slipped over her shoulder as she leaned in.

"The sky once knelt when I drew breath," "My kiss was peace…"

She shaped a mouth.

"…my gaze was death."

And then, without warning, she pressed her monstrous claw to the figure's chest.

It sank in with no resistance. The claw slid forward with a slow, grinding pressure, not breaking the form, but anchoring to it. Her black talons flared slightly, red veins igniting like cracks in volcanic stone. Steam hissed from where living fire met sleeping clay.

"And when the last god rose in pride…"

Her grip tightened.

"…I split her heart…"

Just a single time, a pulse escaped the clay doll.

"…and watched her die."

She removed her claw from the figure's chest with slow precision, the blackened talons withdrawing like spears from a corpse. The moment her touch left it, the twitch ceased, and all movement stopped. Whatever flicker of life had stirred beneath the clay went still, as if her presence had been the only thing giving it permission to exist.

She tilted her head slightly, studying the figure in silence. It was more human now. Its edges had softened. The arms hung gently at its sides, the curve of a face had begun to emerge. It resembled someone. Someone familiar. But not yet awake.

Her left hand slipped beneath its shoulders, the claw curled under its legs and with delicate care, she lifted the clay form into her arms. Not like a corpse nor like a weapon, but like she held it like something unfinished.

She rose to her feet slowly, letting the hem of her coat fall in silence behind her. Dust slid off her sleeves as she straightened. Her eyes remained fixed on the figure as if reading something beneath the surface, something only she remembered.

"I taught the sun to kneel and weep…"

She took her first step as she looked at the sun barely coming from behind the clouds above the arena.

"To warm the graves, not those who sleep."

Each footfall was quiet. Measured. The whole building watched her move, and the world did not breathe.

"I kissed the void, it kissed me back,"

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Her silhouette blurred as space folded with no sound. One moment she was on the ruined floor, and the next she was above it—on the ring of crumbled seats.

"And etched my name on heaven's back."

She stood tall now, framed by the ruined stone and the dying light, the clay body cradled gently in her arms.

The broken stone seat loomed before her, once grand, now split and crooked, scarred by the weight of a battle that just ended. The back had cracked down the center, one jagged arm half missing, as if it too had tried to stand and failed. Dust clung to its surface like old sin. It was no longer a seat of command, but a grave. She knelt again, but not with the same grace as before. This time, it was slower. Her claw scraped the cracked floor as she lowered herself, and the sound echoed like steel dragging across the ribs of the earth.

Gently, she set the clay figure down before the ruined throne. It rested there in silence, half-formed but unmistakably human now. The bare chest rose slightly with ambient breath, like the memory of life lingering inside a statue. Its head tilted back, empty eyes unfocused, lips unformed.

She reached up and brushed a lock of her own hair behind her ear, a streak of clay still smudged across her cheek. Then her clawed hand moved as she lifted it and placed it softly on the clay figure's shoulder. A gesture that could have been mistaken for something almost maternal.

"Now…" she whispered, breath warm against the stone, "…the world is full of little kings,"

She stood up.

"With paper swords…"

She turned away from the figure.

"…and rusted rings."

She took a few slow steps forward, each bootfall ringing dully through the hollow chamber. She raised her claw and brushed her fingers along the broken archway beside her, dragging deep gouges across the surface like tally marks in a prison wall.

"But I recall their fathers cries,"

She paused, letting her palm rest on the cracked stone.

"When I carved justice from their lies."

Her shoulders rose with a breath—not weary, but measured. She exhaled through her nose, her eyes flicking down to the dust at her feet.

"Their kings all begged to wear my crown…"

She turned her head slightly, just enough to glance back at the clay figure beside the shattered throne.

"…and made their Hopes to hold me down."

She smiled, just enough to show her teeth as a memory smiled with her, and without warning, she vanished.

One moment she stood beside the broken throne, and the next, she was gone, the air where she had been falling back into silence like it had never dared to hold her in the first place.

She stood once more at the heart of the arena, as if the world itself had pulled her there, back to the center of what was broken. Her boots met the stone with a soft, precise click that echoed unnaturally loud across the ruin. The air stirred with her presence, heavy not with power but with memory, as though the arena itself remembered her and trembled under the weight of that remembrance.

Her clawed hand lifted slowly, like the beginning of a blessing or the final stroke of an executioner's blade. Above her palm, a single point of light began to flicker, faint and blue, then warmer, shifting from sapphire to gold to white. It grew. It pulsed. It spun slowly in the cradle of her palm, her other hand rising to shape it, smooth it, steady it.

The Sol gathered quickly, hungrily, responding to her as though it had always belonged in her grasp. The orb swelled in size, condensing pure radiance into something that felt neither holy nor unnatural… Just true.

She looked up to the heavens, lips slightly parted, and with a fluid, effortless motion, she threw it.

The Sol tore through the sky like a comet, rising in a smooth arc above the ruin. It didn't scream or crack or roar, but it did hum. And then it shattered. No explosion. No flame. Just light.

From the center of that silent detonation, petals began to fall.

Thousands upon thousands of pure white petals, each one glowing faintly. They drifted downward with impossible grace, slow and weightless, blanketing the air like snow in a world that had long forgotten how to feel cold. They didn't flicker or burn. They glowed with a warmth too ancient to describe.

Beneath them, she moved. She did not walk. She did not march.

She danced.

And not with joy. Not with sorrow. But with the deliberate, flowing grace of a force that had shaped the world and was now reminding it of that fact. Her coat swept wide behind her like wings made of ink, each step so exact it seemed preordained. Her clawed hand cut slow arcs through the air, slicing lines in the fall of petals, not disturbing them, but directing them. And around her, the pedals obeyed, forming a spiral that turned the ruin into a blooming storm of light.

Her voice returned, softer now, yet clearer than before.

"The First wastes her time in the deep…"

She dipped low, one arm sweeping across the arena floor, scattering petals across the stone like the remnants of ancient gods.

"The Second hides beneath his keep…"

A spin, elegant and sharp, her hair and coat trailing behind her in slow motion, the black streaking through the glowing white fall like ink bleeding through silk.

"The Third, that ghost, still spins his thread— Pretending not to count me dead."

As she rose, her claw lifted into the air again, not in fury, but in invocation. The petals around her surged upward in response, caught in an unseen wind only she could command. They curled and scattered around her form, circling her like constellations around a darkened sun.

"The Fourth still bleeds behind her veil, The Fifth has built her crystal jail."

She twirled slowly again, slower this time, less a dance and more a statement. Each motion was deliberate, regal, and terrible in its beauty. The petals touched her shoulders, her hands, her hair, and burned away gently as they did, consumed not by her body, but by what she was.

"The Sixth still drowns in golden pride, While Seven smiles, smiles so bright."

That smile curved across her lips again. Her claw flicked through the air in a lazy circle, and a burst of petals followed the gesture, spiraling outward in an elegant wave that glowed against the light.

"The Eighth dreams war but wakes too late, The Ninth forgets the cost of fate."

She came to a halt at the center once more, directly beneath the falling crown of Sol. Her arms fell to her sides. Her head tilted back, black eyes reflecting the cascade of burning white.

"And Ten, that wretch, born last and least…"

Her gaze lowered, her smile faded and her voice dipped into something colder.

"…Still grovels like a chained-up beast."

The petals touched the floor around her now, some of them vanishing on contact, others sinking gently into the cracks of the stone as if planting themselves.

She stood motionless in the center of that slow, divine snowfall, head high, arms relaxed, the claw now quiet again at her side.

Then, last petal of Sol drifted to the ground. It settled gently at her feet and dissolved into light, its glow fading into the cracks of the arena floor.

She stood alone in that silence, bathed in the memory of a show she had summoned only for herself. Her clawed hand hung loosely by her side, its glow fading now, content for the moment. And yet, her smile was on her once again. It wasn't cruel now, nor was it mocking or venomous. It was honest. The kind of smile someone wears when seeing a long-lost painting restored. Or a song heard again for the first time. There was pride in it. And joy. And something deeper than either… There was recognition.

Her gaze rose to the crumbled seats above. There, seated like a king without a court, was Kaiser.

Still unconscious. Still unmoving. Chains wrapped around his wrists and ankles, slithering with faint light, as if unsure whether they held him in or held everything else out. His head tilted downward, chin resting against his chest, breath slow and shallow, neither dead nor fully alive. The light of the arena had dimmed around him, yet in the stillness, he seemed to absorb what little remained.

She looked up at him like one might look at a monument built in their honor, and her smile deepened even further

She took a slow step toward him… Then another.

The arena, vast and cold, seemed to close in around them, walls bending inward with the gravity of the moment. And then, with a voice soft and full of warmth that had no place in the wreckage around her, she spoke. Each word held like a precious thread pulled from the fabric of prophecy.

"But he…"

Her claw twitched slightly.

"…He'll roar like war, and men will cheer,"

Her voice grew stronger, not louder, but richer, laced with satisfaction and awe. Her eyes gleamed, not with power, but with affection. Pure, unfiltered pride.

"Not knowing I'm the voice they hear."

She stopped now, standing at the base of the shattered steps beneath him. One hand reached forward, not to touch, not yet... Just to gesture. As if framing the shape of what was to come.

"They'll see his blade and call it fate…"

She laughed then. Softly. Not as a tyrant, not as a god, but like a mother hearing her child's first breath. It was beautiful. Terrifying. Unnatural in its gentleness.

"…But I'm the hand that forged its weight."

Her gaze softened even more, almost impossibly, as she tilted her head slightly, looking up at him through the haze of dust and broken sunlight.

"They'll call him Hope. They'll call him King."

She lowered herself to be on his eye level.

"They'll call him God."

Her hand moved.

"But in the end…"

She placed her claws in front of his face

"…they'll call him me."

And then… She snapped her metallic claws.

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