"-Singer of the universe. Chill in the melody. Songstress writer-"
"-Awaken. Awaken. Awaken-"
"-Canen's vessel. Saraswati's rider. Grip the winds-"
A gentle hum threaded through the marrow of my thoughts—like refined madness dipped in silk and static, unraveling my consciousness with a lullaby I both recognized and feared. Each note was deliberate, alien, beautiful—a scalpel singing through the veil of who I thought I was.
"Who... what is this?"
I opened my eyes into a world glazed in frozen resonance. The ground was coated in yellow ice, luminous and wrong, each fracture glowing like threads in a shattered instrument. Beneath my feet, the cold pulsed in concentric waves, distorting the air itself into trembling vibrations.
A world of paused music.
A world held on the breath between one note and the next.
"-Heed us. Come to us. Help us-"
"-Kralscell of Songs. Archon of Passions. Fervor Queen-"
"-The Severance seeks to take us. We must sing the Song of Genesis-"
I looked up. The sky was open—a canvas peeled back to reveal divine exposure. Yellow clouds rippled outward as if recoiling from the thing suspended above: a lemon crystal, so brilliant it bled into the air around it, vibrating like a struck chord. Its presence wasn't silent. It sang. A full choir of forgotten instruments and mourning voices layered in divine, discordant harmony.
It stirred something inside me. Something old. Something too familiar. Something apocalyptic.
"The Severance... takes?" I whispered, the words catching in my throat like a lyric I hadn't sung in centuries.
And then the sky convulsed. Tore open. He emerged—drenched in silver-orange radiance, clad in abyss-forged armour that shimmered with myth and defiance. A man who moved like a requiem in motion, streaking across the firmament with a hand outstretched toward the topaz.
"You can't have it!" I screamed—words erupting unbidden from a hunger deeper than memory. It wasn't simply rage. It was possession. Desperation. Recognition.
The [Cadenza Note Empyrean] wasn't just power. It was mine. A muse born from my breath, the echo of who I could be. And he dared reach for it.
Lightning forked through my spine as something ancient ruptured loose. Memories not wholly mine poured in—fractured hymns from a time when my name was Faltha the Fervour Queen, and my voice had brought cities to their knees. I remembered the betrayer—[Traveler on a Journey], draped in lies, the one who defiled the symphony during the Sealing Wars over thirty millennia ago.
My voice rose in time with my aether. A wrathful aria.
[Skill: Fervour Queen's Symphony—Intro!]
The sound exploded from within. Not screamed—sung. A vibration so total it unmade the room around me. Stone ruptured. Steel disintegrated. Time itself seemed to recoil from the note. The entire building unspooled like sheet music hurled into a storm.
And standing there, amid dust and swirling debris, was the Witch.
Green hair like woven poison. A transparent umbrella twirling above her shoulder like a conductor's wand. Her expression was amusement given form—a smile languid, lazy, laced with something ancient and unforgivable.
"Ah, you're awake," Sathuna said, as though we were old friends in a parlour. "And still dramatic. How nostalgic."
"You drugged me," I snarled, voice jagged from the release of too much silence.
She laughed—soft, unhurried, cruel. "You say that like I slipped something into your drink. It was a ritual, dear. Quite delicate, too. I was admiring the performance."
She gestured with her umbrella, and I followed her gaze.
The city lay broken beneath us—sprawled out like a shattered piano. Silver-orange feathers rained gently from the warped yellow sky, each one pulsing with beauty and blight. A quiet stillness fell over the ruins, but it was not peace.
The aether was thin. Ragged. Like breath stolen from a dying song.
And above it all, the chase continued.
A yellow star falling.
A silver-orange meteor pursuing.
"It's lovely, isn't it?" Sathuna whispered, letting a feather drift into her untouched cup of tea. The feather hummed a dying key before vanishing in steam. Her poise grated like dissonance against every string of my soul. "I'd prefer," she continued, almost sweetly, "if Idaten-II remained mostly intact. Might I convince you, Kralscell of Songs, to relinquish the [Cadenza Note Empyrean] to the ? We only wish to... repurpose it. For a dying world."
My aether rippled. The music in my blood began to climb.
"No." The word rang like a struck bell—clear, resonant, undeniable. "That Empyrean is mine. My muse. My mirror. You will not silence it. Not again."
[Skill: Bass Zeal—amplification!]
The rooftop cracked. The resonance from my voice alone knocked her wooden constructs off-balance—the witch staggered and crumbled before being torn apart by the squalls, tumbling like rotted wood down the edge of the building.
A flash of light opened into a doorway and stepping out of it a new puppet the [Witch Queen] could use spoke before the portal vanished. "Unfortunate," she sighed, swirling her tea lazily. "I can't fight a Kralscell. Not as I am. My magic is... modest."
A lie so transparent I could taste its poison. Sathuna didn't fight with blades or spells. She fought with entropy. With inevitability. This was the one verified everyone across the
"You always struck me as charming," she mused. "So, tell me, Faltha—what price would it take to buy the heavens' finest musician?"
"My soul has no price you can name, Witch."
Her smile sharpened like a broken violin string. "How blunt. I thought the Kralscells of Songs were more... pliable."
"Not for you. Not for a parasite who sells survival and calls it salvation."
The air changed. Heavier. Colder. Her demeanour suddenly becoming more dangerous as the hair at the back of my neck stood on end. "You've worn that name nearly eight-thousand-years," she said softly. "Six-thousand-and-thirty-seven upending's. Six-thousand-and-thirty-seven worlds destroyed by your hands. All of them stained by the winds of your passions."
My fingers trembled. I heard them. All of them. Screams threaded in crescendos. Cities collapsing under the weight of my song. Children turned to ash in harmonics I couldn't undo.
"Enough," I whispered.
"Is your fury really for me?" Sathuna asked. "Or for the one who sang those endings?"
Then the voices returned.
Closer now. Sharp. Urgent. Ridding me of the witch's distracting questions.
"-Fervour Queen! Aid us!-"
"-The Taker comes! The final melody fades!-"
-"KRALSCELL! KRALSCELL! KRALSCELL!-"
My heart fractured. My bones shuddered. Aether flooded me again, harder, faster—no longer a song, but a tidal wave.
"You were stalling," I growled, realization cracking like thunder. "You—stalled me."
Sathuna grinned. "Of course," she said. "What else could I do against a god of frequencies?"
And that was the last note I allowed her.
The storm inside me erupted. Wings of sculpted frost and fury exploded from my back, refracting the light of the falling Empyrean like a shattered stained glass window. My scream was silent. My movement instant.
The rooftop splintered beneath the beat of my wings as I launched skyward, wind and ruin tearing behind me.
I rose through the silver-orange storm, the city a vanishing mosaic below, the sky a symphony waiting to be reclaimed.
I was Faltha.
The Archon of Passion
The Fervour Queen.
The Kralscell of Songs.
And I had a melody left to finish.
***
Barreling through the upper atmosphere—thick with scorched clouds and drifting feathers—I dove straight for the falling star. Layers of friction-rippled air screamed past as I breached each tier of Idaten's sky, zeroing in on the tumbling divine object with singular focus. The Empyrean was just ahead.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer—Telekinesis!]
Black, skeletal hands erupted from my aura and snatched at the gem mid-fall—clawing toward it as Thorn flapped just beneath, wings cracking silver flame like jet engines. His feathers blurred into the winds as he pushed himself harder, trying to stabilize the descent.
But even with both of us, the \[cadenza note empyrean] kept plummeting, shrieking through the heated veil of the upper sky.
"Pisspot!!!" Thorn screamed over the roar of wind, his voice desperate.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — take!]
"I know!" I shouted back, tightening the grip of my will. My psychic force pulled me in like a harpoon line, slamming me closer to the Empyrean. I drove my gauntlet fingers into the gem's surface, beginning to leech its energy straight through the armour.
Its radiant mind lashed back.
"—Severer! Taker! Glitching—!"
"—Unbound reason! Pitch-less song!—"
"—Blank sheet! Mad melody! Abandoned mind!—"
The whispers were chaotic—like twisted musical notes scrawled in blood across the staff lines of my mind. It was trying to fracture my thoughts, to distort and defile. But it would take more than that.
[Skill: Horizon Chain — Sanity Anchor!]
"Keep trying me, Cadenza!" I spat, slamming my helmet into the gem's surface. "You were never a god. Just a pretty toy for fools like Faltha!"
Then Thorn's voice cut in again—panicked. "Oh shoot—we forgot about the kid!!"
I glanced where his eyes were locked. Ben—helpless—was falling far behind us, tumbling alongside a molten piece of the shattered satellite. The shard was already transforming mid-fall, feathers birthing from it via my [conceptualisation].
"...That's bad news," I muttered.
"Panic properly, you emotionless psychopath!" Thorn shrieked.
"You take him. I'll keep this thing from hitting ground and planting a world tree!"
"Less work for me!" the raven barked, wasting no time. He peeled away from the Empyrean's trail, wings blazing silver as he dive-bombed toward Ben's body, catching the teen mid-air with his tail-feathers. They vanished into the storm of falling dream-feathers below.
A grin crept beneath my helmet. "Unhelpful parasite," I murmured.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — Full Release!]
I unleashed everything. Black, demonic mouths erupted from my aura, biting into the gem's radiance, tearing through its divine architecture with pure hunger. The [cadenza note empyrean] recoiled, visibly disturbed by the raw barbarity of the act.
"You were mine once. You really thought I'd treat you gently?!" I said full of madness as the golden glow within my eyes got brighter.
Its yellow glow flickered. I felt it—panic creeping into its twisted symphony. The whispers changed.
"—Foolish of all fools!—"
"—Deafest of plights and joys!—"
"—Free the passion! Unleash the song!—"
The empyrean and I broke through the heat barrier—clouds tore apart around us, wind howled like demons, and below, the Justice Tower of Idaten came into view, growing closer at terrifying speed. The ground screamed up at us.
But I didn't let go. I drained it—every drop of yellow light like white-hot lava coursing through my veins. My three hearts trembled with every pulse. The foreign aether clashed violently with my own.
A million heart attacks. Every second. Still, I held on. "Just... a little... more!" I groaned.
[Aspect: Singing Dream's Call — weaponization!]
[Stigma: Equal Correlation — sequence 8.5]
From the city below, a thin yellow dot streaked upward—radiating malice. The stigma surged through me. Part of my strength vanished in an instant. And then before I could react. A crystal rapier, shaped like a violin bow, pierced straight through my throat.
The wind around me shattered into silence from its whistling squalls. My and the empyrean's fall was arrested in a cyclone of force. Suspended mid-air with crystal blade in my throat, I choked, limbs locked. The blade held me aloft like a pinned corpse.
He rose while holding me like a stringless puppet as i choked on my own blood. The Kralscell of Songs. Faltha.
"This isn't yours, Traveler," he hissed, snatching the Empyrean from my gauntlets while keeping me skewered.
Blood gushed into my helmet. I tried to move—tried to will my aether—but it was chaos inside me. The Empyrean's energy fought my own. I couldn't feel my limbs. Couldn't control anything.
"Fall."
He dragged the rapier through my neck with a brutal flourish. Tossed me aside like garbage. I saw him—just for a second—watching. He waited. And only when my body smashed through the roof of the Justice Tower, leaving a trail of blood and broken armour around my mangled corpse, did he finally look away.
"Finally..! My muse!"
Faltha's voice rang with feverish ecstasy as he embraced the [Cadenza Note Empyrean], letting it consume him as eagerly as he consumed it. The fusion began immediately.
His form crystallized—encased in a gleaming cocoon of golden sound and divine light. Then, in a violent shatter of melody and glass, he emerged anew.
Reborn.
Reforged.
Remade.
Faltha stood tall as the Sovereign of Sound and Wind, a remnant no longer of the Kralscell who had once wielded mere songs. His new body was a symphony given form—clad in radiant yellow crystal, each segment of his armour shaped into an instrument while nine yellow rings of energy cycled around him for a brief moment before vanishing like a mirage.
Piano keys ran the length of his arms like gauntlets of melody. Violin strings laced his forearms and shoulders, humming with tension. A trumpet jutted from his back like a crown of brass and glory. A recorder fused to his chest plate, while drums echoed with each movement from his hips.
And from his back unfurled crystalline angel wings—wide, magnificent, each feather inscribed with intricate musical calligraphy. An orchestra of divinity folded into a single terrifying being.
"Hahaha! So this is what it means to be an artist!" he howled, intoxicated on his own transcendence.
He was unaware of the destruction he wrought. Every flick of a finger sent vibrations through the atmosphere that cracked the sky. Buildings collapsed below as shockwaves of sound obliterated concrete and steel. With every subtle breath, people died—heads bursting from inaudible chords laced in divine frequency. It was in that brief experience of his complete might that everyone below the sixth ring sequence in the city died.
And still, Faltha noticed none of the bloody fireworks.
"I can imagine... so much art," he whispered, eyes wide with vision. "So many songs. Electric. Jazz. Rock. I could compose a piece for every genre right now! The universe must hear this divine orchestra!"
He raised his arms like a conductor preparing his first grand symphony.
"It's so..."
'Intoxicating, right?'
The voice slithered into his mind like a needle through velvet. Jarring. Wrong. Not part of the music.
He blinked. Looking around for its source but unable to trace it like it came from nowhere. It wasn't the empyrean. It wasn't aether. It was something else—something emptier than silence.
[Stigma: Equal Correlation — Sequence Release!]
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — Take The Self!]
The Justice Tower below him detonated as he flew above it.
The upper half of the structure was erased in an instant by an abyssal blast—an expulsion of pure will. Black lightning, like anti-thunder, scrawled across the sky, drowning out Faltha's yellow radiance with unholy night while he defended himself from it deflecting the thunder with yellow winds of energy.
[Skill: Horizon Chain — Binding!]
From the tower's broken heart, a storm of black chains surged upward. They pierced the thunder, burst through the golden soundscape, and wrapped around Faltha's divine body before he could process what was happening.
The chains cinched shut with a soundless scream, binding his wings, arms, and voice. He could neither move nor play—silenced and stunned, drawn down into the ruined tower like a marionette on broken strings.
And waiting at the bottom—a cracked gauntlet met his face with a thunderclap. The punch echoing like vengeance.
Faltha's head snapped back, dazed. The chains coiled tighter, weaving around him like a cocoon. One slit remained—just enough for his eyes to see through, wide with disbelief and panic.
Before him, I stood. Hand clutching my healing throat. "Urgh..." Gritting my teeth I ripped a jagged sliver of yellow crystal from my neck, blood splashing across my armour.
The hole through my bloodied throat hissed with amber-silver energy as the wound sealed shut—no scar, no mark, nothing left but defiance. The broken armour of my neck reconstructed over it as though the injury had never happened before I removed my hand feeling it finally close and I could breathe properly again.
"No wonder you were so confident I was dead," I rasped. "That little aether weapon of yours could kill any regular immortal. Akin to a Finality Matrix in its own right. "
Through the cracked visor of my helmet, my eyes gleamed—silver aglow with a golden fire at their core. A manic grin curled across my face as I locked eyes with Faltha.
He shuddered. Disbelief that even I could still survive his power that was enough to flatten this city with a thought.
"But I think you—and the empyrean—forgot..." A low hum began to rise from within me. The air warped. Reality shivered. "...just how immortal the Kralscell of Sentience is."
[Skill: Sephiwrath — first gate of Yesod!]
My body split with divine resonance.
Silver light flared through the right side of my form, golden brilliance streaked down the left. Veins lit like molten rivers, twin currents of aether flooding through me. My heartbeat accelerated. My blood felt like star fire.
Each breath sharpened into a blade.
Each muscle tensed with sacred force.
The entire tower cracking beneath my feet.
I stepped toward him—deathless, divine, deranged while cracking my gauntlets knuckles. "Let's see you stab me through the neck again then, shall we?!!" Roaring in celebration I tossed a gauntlet forward as its clock hands aligned at the eleventh hour.