Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 586

Chapter 586: Arena XXV

The sky above was wrong.

Not dark, not void—just blank. Like the world had forgotten how to dream, and the heavens had forgotten how to reflect those dreams.

Aiden stood alone at the edge of what remained. The ground beneath him cracked like old parchment, flaking away from a world that used to remember itself. The Book of What Was still pulsed in his hands, faint with residual warmth, as though exhausted from everything it had rewritten.

He closed it gently. Its cover—stitched from the essence of stories—was fraying.

Even the Book was forgetting.

Behind him, the Blank Sky Pact stirred. Myne, ever silent, leaned against the ruins of a cathedral whose gods had been overwritten long ago. Her silver eyes flickered with something unreadable.

“We lost fifty today,” she said without looking at him.

Aiden nodded. He already knew.

The Unremembering had reached deeper into the folds of reality. Even universal-tier beings—those who once could collapse galaxies with a whisper—were now susceptible. They vanished not with screams or light or battle.

They just… faded.

One moment, they stood beside you.

The next, they were never there.

Only those bound to Aiden—tied to the Book and the pact—seemed to retain some resistance. But even that, he knew, was temporary.

The One Without a Page had begun to act.

It did not come with armies. It needed none.

It unraveled belief.

And now, the skies themselves had become inkless—no longer a canvas for stories or stars, but a sterile void that rejected both memory and meaning.

“We need to move,” said Nexus, his voice distorted, like he spoke from behind a hundred veils. “The Rift at Vauron is thinning. If it tears fully—”

Aiden raised a hand. The Pact went quiet.

“I saw it,” he said. “In the gaps between pages. It’s not just a Rift. It’s a mouth.”

Nexus stiffened.

Myne stepped forward. “The One Without a Page?”

“No,” Aiden said. His voice dropped. “Something older. Something it ran from.”

The Pact, warriors carved from forgotten timelines and lost potential, exchanged glances. Many of them had no mouths, no names, no bodies. But they listened.

“Then what do we do?” asked a voice like a swarm of quills. It belonged to the Archivist, who once catalogued dying multiverses before his library collapsed into nonbeing.

Aiden opened the Book of What Was.

There were no words on the next page.

Just a single symbol, crude and trembling—drawn in his own hand.

A seed.

A seed of a story.

“It’s not about what we do,” Aiden said. “It’s about what we remember.”

He placed his hand on the seed-symbol.

The sky pulsed.

For a heartbeat—just one—the blankness above cracked with a whisper of color. A thread of unwritten dawn.

Then it was gone.

But the Pact had seen it.

And for the first time in many days, the silence wasn’t hollow. It was waiting.

They marched across dead constellations.

Realities that had once housed life now floated as fossilized thoughts, drifting through a sea of conceptual ash. The Pact moved carefully, weaving between collapsing notions and fragmenting dimensions. Every step took will. Every breath demanded identity.

At the edge of everything, they found the Rift.

It pulsed like a scar cut across the hide of the world.

Aiden approached it, the Book clutched to his chest. Myne walked beside him.

“It’s bleeding,” she said.

He nodded. “And beneath the wound… it dreams.”

The Rift opened not into another world, but into a time before time. A realm so raw, so untouched by story, that even Aiden felt himself unravel slightly at the edges.

Shapes moved in the dark beyond.

Ideas half-formed. Archetypes without context. Potential that had never been written.

Then they saw it.

A being.

No—less than a being, but more.

A skeleton of a story. Bones made of narrative arcs. Organs pulsing with metaphors. Skin stitched from unrealized myths.

It rose, sensing them.

And it hungered.

Myne stepped back.

But Aiden did not.

“I know you,” he said.

The thing tilted its head. It had no face, but its form bent with curiosity.

“You’re the Dream That Didn’t Finish,” Aiden said.

The Book of What Was quivered.

“And you,” he added, “are afraid of what I might write.”

The creature lunged.

Reality screamed.

The Pact scattered, hurling remembrance like fire.

Nexus channeled forgotten laws, weaving shields of once-true physics. Myne danced with blade-forms drawn from abandoned fables. The others—Eidolon, the Memory-Eater; Shur, the Last Witness; and a dozen more unnamable—fought not to win, but to remind.

Every clash was a story retold.

Every block, a memory reasserted.

Aiden stood at the center.

The Dream That Didn’t Finish howled, shaking the bones of creation. It lashed out with endings it never earned. It vomited paradoxes. It bled foreshadowing.

But Aiden opened the Book.

And on that blank page, beneath the seed-symbol, he began to write.

One letter.

Then another.

He wrote not in ink, but in sacrifice.

Each word cost him a memory.

Each sentence, a part of his own name.

But the story grew.

The creature staggered.

And when Aiden reached the final word of the first sentence—

“Remember.”

—the sky cracked again.

This time, not with color.

But with music.

The sound of a story beginning again.

The creature reeled.

And Aiden stepped forward.

“You are not the One Without a Page,” he said. “You are only what it left behind.”

The Dream That Didn’t Finish screamed.

Then it ended.

Not in battle.

Not in glory.

But in being understood.

And therefore, written.

The Rift pulsed.

Then sealed.

Later, beneath the now-wavering sky, the Pact gathered.

Aiden, gaunt and pale, sat with the Book.

“I lost my brother’s name,” he said softly. “To write that.”

Nexus lowered his head.

Myne placed a hand on his shoulder.

“But we gained a beginning,” she said. “That’s more than we had yesterday.”

The stars didn’t return.

But the blankness above now had veins. Lines. Threads.

The idea of a sky.

A canvas.

Waiting for a story.