The world was black. Blacker than absence, blacker than memory.
Emrys walked through it like it was water.
Each step rippled the dark, but didn't break it. Nothing here could break until he did.
He felt the pull. The cold, heavy ache of something gnawing at the edges of his mind.
The Scar was awake now.
It tried to slip fingers through his memories, hunting for what would hurt most.
A hand brushed his shoulder. Not human. The memory of his mother's voice, his father's sigh.
Himani's laugh, all layered on top of each other. The Scar tried to make them real. Emrys pulled back, jaw tight, refusing to let them in.
He reached for his scythe.
Not as a weapon, but as an anchor.
Steel met palm. The dark rippled.
He exhaled and swung.
Light split the void. Not true light, but the absence of absence. The black receded, torn open, and in the clearing it revealed her.
A little girl.
Pale, barefoot, hair hanging limp over her eyes.
She stood with her hands clenched tight, eyes shut so hard the muscles in her jaw trembled.
No sound. Just the terrible, heavy quiet of something that used to be worshipped.
Emrys froze. The scythe lowered.
For a moment, he saw not a monster, but a child who had never learned how to open her eyes.
Behind him, the air shimmered.
Morana stepped forward, her shadow slicing through the dark like a banner.
"That's it." Her voice was low, warning, old. "That's the Scar. Don't do anything. You're not ready for—"
But Emrys stepped closer.
Voice cutting through the hush.
"Hey."
The little girl didn't move.
The black shivered at her feet, drawn to her ankles like a tide that refused to recede.
For a heartbeat, Emrys thought she might open her eyes. Instead, a thousand memories howled around him. His first lost friend.
Every night he pretended not to cry. The warmth of family dinners that never happened.
It all pressed in.
Trying to erase him, to make him forget who he was. Emrys gripped the scythe.
"I know what you're doing,"
He said quietly.
"You want me to forget. You want me empty. But I'm not letting go."
Morana's hand hovered near her own blade.
But she didn't intervene.
The Scar's head tilted.
When she spoke, the voice was a chorus: old men, young women, children he never knew.
"You should have faded. Why do you remember so much?"
Emrys took another step.
The darkness tried to cling, but he kept going.
"Because somebody had to," he said. "Somebody had to remember what was lost."
He dropped to one knee.
Meeting the Scar at her level.
"You're not nothing. You're… what's left after everything else. But you don't have to hurt anymore. You don't need me to exist."
The Scar shuddered.
The dark pulsed around her, snapping like static.
"Let me go," she whispered. Just a little girl, just a god who forgot how to be anything else.
He pressed his palm to the ground.
The scythe's blade glowed.
Not gold, not silver.
A color that hurt to look at. Memory made solid.
"You're not alone. Not anymore."
He stood and, with one final swing.
Brought the scythe down.
Not to cut, but to sever. To set free.
The blackness recoiled, shrieking in a thousand lost voices, then burned away.
The Scar, the girl, opened her eyes.
For the first and last time, they were his own.
Light. Real light filled the clearing. The girl smiled. Not sad. Not afraid. Just free.
And then she was gone.
Silence settled. Real silence. No ache. No pull.
Morana stepped forward.
Her eyes didn't shine, but her voice softened with something that might have been awe.
"You did it," she said.
Emrys didn't answer.
He let the scythe fall, chest heaving, tears sliding down his face before he realized.
He hadn't destroyed the Scar.
He had remembered her and let her go.
…
That would have been a nice ending.
But darkness rushed back in, swallowing the light like a tide that never truly left.
The air shuddered. A roar, deeper than thunder, echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once.
The girl's shape dissolved, twisting, stretching, unmaking itself. The Scar shed innocence; its longing warped, desperate to be anything but forgotten.
It became monstrous. Bone and shadow and want, all clawing for identity, for meaning.
The world convulsed.
A shockwave ripped through the clearing, hurling Emrys and Morana back.
Emrys burning with eerie green
Morana streaked in cold, haunted blue.
They crashed, sliding across a surface that felt like memory and nightmare stitched together.
Emrys coughed, dazed, vision spinning.
Morana landed beside him, her blade out, eyes narrowed.
"I thought it was that easy," he breathed, getting up, scythe trembling in his grip.
Morana's lips tightened. "You were wrong."
She exhaled sharply, steadying herself, but her voice flickered with worry.
"You're not capable of handling this kind of monster. You're not re—"
She stopped mid-sentence, really seeing him.
Emrys was still on one knee, but his outline glowed brighter. Green motes sparking and swirling around him. His scythe pulsed.
Fed not by fear, but by memory.
The faces of everyone he'd ever loved, lost, or mourned flickered in the blade's surface.
Morana stared, voice hushed with something between disbelief and awe.
"You're… closer than I thought. How is this—?"
The Scar screamed.
Its form coiled above them, towering and twisted, a mask of longing and rage. The void stretched its jaws, every tooth a forgotten promise.
Emrys rose, gripping the scythe so tightly his knuckles went white. The pain, the love, the stubborn hope. They all burned in him at once.
He looked to Morana, then back at the god-shaped wound.
His voice was quiet, but unbreakable.
"I'm not done."
The green light surged, flaring through the black. For the first time, the Scar recoiled. Not out of hunger, but fear. And Emrys walked forward.
Memories flaring behind his eyes, ready to write the ending no one else could.
"I promised Himani I wouldn't make this hurt."
He spun his scythe, his power only rose.
Morana? She was amazed.
"He's SS+ level now… how is that possible? He's reaching her level in mere seconds of being in contact… he's not even a Shinigami?"
His form was more of a rainbow, he stood. Staring now the monster that was the Scar.
Memories flared behind his eyes, ready to write the ending no one else could.
"I promised Himani I wouldn't make this hurt…!"
Emrys whispered again, almost to himself.
The words barely left his lips before he felt the surge.
A pulse that started in the hollow of his chest and rolled out to the trembling edge of his scythe.
He spun the blade.
He let it sing through the stagnant air.
With every turn, its power didn't just grow.
It multiplied, drawing from places Emrys had never been willing to touch. The green glow intensified, but it was just the beginning.
Gold bled into it, then blue, then the white-hot fire of childhood joy and heartbreak, a deep, bruised purple of regret, a smoldering orange of rage, the silver sheen of hope not yet lost.
Color after color, memory after memory, all threading into the core of who he was.
It hurt, but the pain was good.
The pain was proof that he was alive.
Morana took a step back, her usual poise faltering as she watched him change. Awe flickered in her eyes, a tremor in her voice.
Emrys didn't see her. Or maybe he did.
But it was too far away, too small compared to the tidal wave building inside him.
His form was less a body now, more a silhouette painted in shifting rainbows, every color a story, every story a scar.
The monster before him.
Sat used to be the Scar, what now looked like hunger and longing given shape.
Roared and twisted, towering with every ounce of absence it could muster.
But for the first time, the void flinched.
Emrys stepped forward. The scythe hummed with anticipation, vibrating with every heartbeat, every breath, every moment he had refused to forget.
He looked at the monster, and instead of fear, he felt a strange, burning sympathy.
He remembered waking up in the hospital room, the world blurry and cruel, the face of his sister Himani looking so fragile and alive.
He remembered the ache of loss, the sharp sting of hope, the voices he'd heard in dreams.
Voices that told him to let go, to move on, to become empty and comfortable like everyone else.
He remembered every time he'd chosen not to forget. Every time he'd clung to the pain.
Every time he'd chosen love over numbness, memory over mercy.
The Scar lunged, black tendrils shooting out, claws seeking to rip his soul into shreds of nothing.
Emrys felt the cold bite at his skin, felt it scraping for memories, digging for something it could take.
But the colors wouldn't let go.
They burned hotter, bracing his mind, sealing his wounds. The scythe's blade glowed impossibly bright. A rainbow that had known the storm.
Morana's eyes widened. She raised her blade, ready to defend, but a voice.
Quiet, unshakable. Held her back.
"Let him do it," she whispered, not sure who she was talking to herself, the Scar, or whatever fate still watched them.
The monster shrieked, voice a storm of everything that had ever been lost. "Give it to me. Give me your pain. Make me whole."
Emrys shook his head. "I can't do that. But I can give you something else."
He stepped into the tide of black, letting the memories burn even brighter.
Every step hurt, every step threatened to erase him, but he refused to let go. Not now.
Not after everything.
He swung the scythe, not as a weapon.
But as a torch.
Cutting through the darkness, banishing the absence with the presence of everything he'd ever been.
Colors flared, memories sang, and for a single heartbeat, even the Scar hesitated.
"Himani, I promised. I promised I wouldn't make this hurt."
The Scar's monstrous shape flickered, warping, faltering. In the swirl of rainbow light, for a moment, it was just a girl again. Eyes closed, trembling, waiting to be remembered.
Emrys breathed in the pain, the longing, the love that made him who he was. He let the weight settle, let the scythe fill with everything he carried.
And then, as the world held its breath, he swung.
Emrys swung.
The scythe's arc was less a motion, more a command. A sweep that tore through the hollow dark like sunrise slashing the horizon.
Light exploded from its blade.
Not any light known to this world.
The rainbow wasn't just hue, but history.
Pain, laughter, promises, heartbreak, joy.
The reverberation of every name he had ever whispered in the dark.
The monster that was the Scar reared up, its absence shuddering at the touch of presence.
The blackness buckled, rippling outwards in rings of pure force. Space groaned. Memory screamed.
The world itself convulsed.
The dimension split.
A thundercrack of color erupting across the nothing, fissures of gold and indigo and blue racing outward, spilling across the abyss.
Time buckled; the ground became sky, the sky became memory, and for a heartbeat, existence itself teetered on the edge of being remade.
Morana watched with wide eyes, something very much like awe blooming across her face.
She lifted one slender hand and.
As if it was the most natural thing in the universe, conjured a black umbrella. The ribs snapped open with a sound sharp as fate.
She spun it once, slow and reverent, and planted it between her and the coming storm.
The blast roared out. Not wind, not flame, but raw, soul-breaking presence.
It surged forward, a river of everything Emrys had ever loved, lost, or endured.
It didn't just hit the Scar.
It filled her, wrapped her, remade her in the light of a thousand true things. At the eye of it all, the little girl looked up at last, eyes open, not afraid.
And as the rainbow tore toward her, just before the detonation erased the last of her shape, she smiled soft, small, utterly at peace.
"Thank you," she whispered, her voice small but infinite.
Then the blast took her.
The world screamed.
An orchestra of shattering glass, unmade silence, and the keening wail of a god's last memory.
The Scar—God of Absence—did not simply vanish. She was erased. Unwritten. Gone.
The shockwave hurled Emrys backward like a broken comet. He tumbled through the rift, colors sparking off him, the scythe burning in his hands, shivering and bright.
The blast was too much. The scythe flickered, then faded, dissolving into motes of memory and light, leaving his palms empty and raw.
He hit the ground, air torn from his lungs, every nerve screaming. All at once, it was over.
No pain, no darkness, no Scar.
Just silence, trembling, bright and hollow.
Above him, Morana spun her umbrella closed.
The last flecks of light sizzling off its fabric.
She stared at the place where the Scar had been.
Her lips parted. Something almost like reverence.
Emrys blinked up at the broken sky.
Chest heaving, hands aching with the echo of what he had lost and what he had set free.
For the first time since the darkness began.
The world was simply… present.
And he was still here.