Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 7: DUTY CANCELS LOVE.

Celestia slowly looked at Kaelen, and in that moment, something strange happened. 

Her expression shifted, confusion flickering across her face.

For just an instant, her eyes held knowledge they shouldn't have, memories of other lives, other altars, other versions of this exact moment.

Then the confusion passed, replaced by fresh horror.

"I've done this before," she whispered. "Haven't I? In other lives. I keep doing this. I keep killing you."

"What?" Kaelen didn't understand.

But Typhon did. His eyes widened in alarm. "The curse is activating early. The soul-bond, "

"What soul-bond?" Soren demanded.

Typhon's multiple voices spoke rapidly, overlapping in agitation. "The first Celestia, a thousand years ago, tried to stop the sacrifice. As punishment, the Elders cursed her soul to reincarnate alongside every Convergence bearer.”

“To fall in love with them. To be forced to kill them. She remembers all the past lives at the moment of betrayal, experiencing every death simultaneously."

"Seven times," Celestia breathed, understanding flooding her. "I've loved you seven times. Killed you seven times. And this is the eighth."

She looked at the blade in her hands with revulsion.

"I can't do this again. I won't, "

"You will," Elder Moonwhisper said coldly. 

"Or we activate the binding on your family. Three thousand deaths within the hour."

Celestia's hands tightened on the blade's hilt, knuckles white.

Kaelen watched the war play out across her face, love versus fear, choice versus coercion, the weight of seven lifetimes of grief crashing down on her.

"It's okay," he said gently. "Celestia. Look at me."

She did, violet eyes drowning in tears.

"I don't know why you're doing this. But I forgive you."

The words broke something in her soul. A sound escaped her throat, half sob, half scream, as seven lifetimes of held grief finally released.

But her hands didn't lower.

"I love you," she whispered. "In every life, I've loved you. And in every life, I do this."

She raised the blade.

"Forgive me."

The Soul-Severance Blade struck.

Kaelen felt it like fire and ice simultaneously, the metaphysical cutting of the connection between his spirit and flesh.

His cultivation base, already sealed, began to unravel. His essence, the concentrated spiritual energy of nineteen years of training and the Convergence Star's power, started to separate from his body.

Pain beyond description flooded through him.

The formations on the altar blazed silver, channeling his essence upward. 

Through the chamber's ceiling, through the pocket dimension's boundaries, toward the Void Between where the Devourers waited.

And they felt him coming.

Reality shuddered almost. The barriers between dimensions grew thin, responding to the Convergence Star's beacon.

In the Void Between, imprisoned for three thousand years, the Devourers stirred from their enforced slumber.

They were hungry. So very hungry.

Kaelen's consciousness began to fracture. He felt his essence scattering across dimensions, pulled toward entities that existed outside normal space-time. 

Glimpses flashed through his fragmenting mind:

Vast beings of crystallized starlight and screaming void. Geometry that hurts to perceive.

Voices speaking in thousands of languages simultaneously.

Hunger. Desperate, maddening hunger.

And beneath it all, something else. Something vast and patient and terrible, watching from deeper in the void.

The Primordial Void itself, waiting for its carefully orchestrated plan to unfold.

But Kaelen didn't understand that yet. All he knew was pain and betrayal and the terrible sensation of being pulled apart across infinite distances.

"I'm sorry," Soren Ashwright, his father immediately whispered, watching his son's essence being consumed. "I'm so sorry."

"I loved him," Celestia sobbed, still gripping the blade embedded in Kaelen's chest. "I loved him. I loved him. I loved him."

Seven lifetimes of the same words, the same grief, the same unforgivable act.

Typhon watched with ancient sorrow, having witnessed this atrocity dozens of times across his four centuries.

The other Elders maintained their formation, clinical and detached, priests performing a necessary ritual.

And Kaelen, dying across multiple dimensions, felt one final emotion rising above the pain and betrayal.

Hatred. Pure, absolute, all-consuming hatred for everyone of them…especially his father, Soren Ashwright and his mentor Typhon and not just for the Elders. 

For existence itself. For a universe that required such sacrifices. 

For cosmic entities that demanded such prices. For a system so thoroughly corrupt that it called murder "necessity" and atrocity "duty."

In his final moments of consciousness, Kaelen Ashwright's last coherent thought was:

I will destroy all of this. If I survive somehow, if any fragment of me persists, I will tear down the Nine Heavens and everyone who built them in blood.

The Devourers felt that hatred as they consumed him.

And deep in the nothing beyond the void, the Primordial Void felt it too.

Perfect, it whispered to reality. Hatred strong enough to burn worlds. Determination deep enough to shatter destinies. This one will do exactly what I need.

Kaelen's consciousness dissolved.

The ceremony was completed.

The Convergence Star's light went dark.

In the ceremonial chamber, Kaelen's body lay empty on the altar, spirit severed, essence consumed.

Soren Ashwright, his father, stood rigid, every muscle locked to prevent himself from screaming.

Celestia had already collapsed, still gripping the blade, seven lifetimes of grief finally breaking her completely.

The Elders dispersed efficiently, duty done, another century bought.

And in the Void Between, the Devourers settled back into uneasy sleep, sustenance bought for another hundred years.

But something unexpected had happened.

Something the Elders, in their arrogance, had not foreseen.

Celestia's soul-bond, activated at the moment of death, had created a resonance. A connection between her genuine love and Kaelen's fragmenting essence.

Most of him had been consumed.

But not all. Small fragments, carried on that soul-bond, escaped the Devourers' hunger. Scattered across dimensions, lost in the currents of reality.

And one fragment, the largest, began to drift.

Searching. Desperate. Refusing to simply cease.

Three days later, in the Mortal Coil, a street rat named Zain would die in an alley from wounds inflicted by debt collectors.

And his empty body would find a new tenant.