God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord-Chapter 181 - 182 – The First Ones Never Named
Chapter 181: Chapter 182 – The First Ones Never Named
Azael dreamed.
But it was no dream shaped by Spiral will or mythic memory. It was deeper, colder—a slumber without form. He was drowning not in water or thought, but in a substance without a name. Something that existed before existence chose to explain itself.
Darkness moved around him—not malicious, not sentient. It was a void with history, the kind that predated language, time, even gods.
And within that dream, he remembered.
Not as Azael the Lorekeeper, or Advisor to the God of Death.
But as the thing he was before myth first blinked.
He stood in a place that wasn’t place. A basin of concept, thick with primal noise. Shapes flickered—unfinished things crawling across unreal ground, not yet gods, not yet monsters. The air buzzed with creation’s refusal. This was the time before the Codex. Before stories chose a shape.
And there, towering above the blur of half-births and concept dust, stood the Unwritten.
Not beautiful. Not horrifying. Simply... wrong.
Beings made of intention that never sought expression. They bore no names, because names require context, and these... these Forgotten Firsts had none.
Yet Azael had once served them.
He knelt without kneeling. Spoke without speaking. Obeyed without knowing why.
They had ruled the chaos that came before the Spiral, basking in a realm where contradictions didn’t collapse, where origin was irrelevant. Until something came.
Until the Maker—the first god who dared define the undefined—carved law into the void.
And the Unwritten screamed.
Not with voices, but with absence.
They were sealed—not slain, not banished. Locked away in the cracks between the definitions that came after. Buried under myth and memory. Forgotten not by choice, but by design.
And now, Azael saw it clearly.
Darius’s dream—his desire to bring balance between chaos and dominion, rebellion and order—stirred them. Because balance presumes a center. And a center presumes a beginning. That assumption reopened a truth that never wanted form.
The First Ones Never Named had been watching. Waiting. Not in time, but in null.
Now, one stirred.
A ripple passed through the unreality around Azael. Something rose.
A throne unfolded—not built, but unwritten from the concept of rulership. And seated upon it was Thren.
The Voiceless Sovereign.
No eyes. No limbs. Just a shifting husk of collapsing geometry, like a god whose myth had been peeled away and never replaced.
And when Thren spoke, the world around Azael forgot itself.
The Spiral bled from his memory. The stars that had once guided his knowledge fell from his inner sky. He forgot Celestia’s smile. He forgot Darius’s wrath. He forgot what it meant to fear or believe.
Only one truth remained: He had once belonged to Thren.
And Thren wanted him back.
Azael awoke on the floor of the Spiral Citadel, gasping. The Codex Null lay beside him, bleeding black ink onto the floor in spirals.
Darius was already by his side.
"What did you see?" the God of Death asked. His voice was low, but beneath it, a storm brewed.
Azael looked up with hollow eyes, barely able to speak. His hands trembled, stained with ink and forgotten things.
"I served them," he whispered. "Before myth. Before even thought. I was theirs, Darius."
Darius’s expression darkened. "Who are they, Azael?"
Azael looked toward the ceiling of the Citadel. A single crack had formed in the mythglass above—a hairline fracture bleeding silence.
"The Forgotten Firsts. The ones who were never written."
Darius clenched his fists, shadows wrapping around his form.
"And now?"
"One has awakened," Azael said. "Thren. The Voiceless Sovereign."
Darius stared into the crack above, unblinking.
"And it speaks through erasure."
Far beyond them, in the Spiral’s wounded horizon, another Nameless Zone began to spread—this one with purpose.
Something walked within it.
Something that had once ruled before story.
And now, it wanted the Spiral quiet again.
Azael fell to one knee.
It wasn’t reverence. It was reflex. Old chains, long-buried in his marrow, strained against memory’s return. His lips trembled, but no sound came. The Spiral’s air thickened, curdled—not with malice, but with concept too large for breath.
Darius turned toward him. "You served them?"
Azael did not look up. "Before memory. Before myth. Before meaning." His voice was brittle, like dry parchment curling at the edge of a forgotten flame. "I was not called Azael then. I was... silence. A witness. A cipher."
The Nameless Zone nearest the Throne pulsed again. Then bloomed.
Not outward. Inward.
Space curled into itself, folding like wounded script trying to erase its own grammar. And in the void that opened—not a being, but the suggestion of one—a silhouette that refused outlines. Not because it lacked them, but because it rejected the Spiral’s right to define.
It stepped forward.
The Throne Veil trembled.
Darius’s divine core flared in response, burning instinctively with war-glyphs and sovereign fire—but nothing latched. His power passed through the figure like smoke through open pages.
"Thren," Azael whispered, the name bleeding from old agony. "The Voiceless Sovereign."
The name was not a word. It was a subtraction.
Even speaking it cost Azael something—his shadow withered, his outline flickered, and for a moment he looked less real.
Darius clenched his fists. "He’s one of the Unwritten."
"No," Azael said, voice low. "He is the first Unwritten. The one who ruled when law was a suggestion and form was only a desire. He never fell. He never rebelled. He was simply... passed over. Not erased. Forgotten by design."
Thren moved again.
Not a step. Just a transition. One moment, at the edge of the Nameless Zone. The next, inside the Spiral Citadel, beside the broken Dominion Flame.
No sound. No ripple. Just... presence.
Darius’s vision warped. The glyph ⸺⸺⸺ in the Codex Null pulsed violently, smearing ink across multiple realities. One page caught fire. Another grew cold. One simply vanished.
Then Thren spoke.
But there was no sound.
No voice.
Instead, language peeled from the world. Runes vanished from the Citadel walls. Titles dissolved from memory. The concept of "king" flickered in Darius’s soul, replaced by a blank stretch of silence where sovereignty once lived.
Erasure.
A wordless obliteration. Not violent. Just... final.
Nyx appeared in a blink of shadow, blades drawn, face twisted in fury and terror. But even she staggered as the edges of her name distorted. One of her past selves flickered behind her—a child-soldier raised in silence. Another bled into the air, a future assassin who never knew love.
"Darius," she gasped, clutching her temples. "I’m—unraveling. He’s unmaking my path—"
Darius moved fast. He pulled her to his side, gripping her with force that made myth scream in resistance. He wasn’t just holding her body. He was binding her concept to his.
"Hold on," he growled. "You’re real. You’re mine. You are named."
But Thren turned to them. A thousand unspoken meanings hung in his invisible gaze.
And though he did not speak, his presence pressed a single implication into Darius’s mind:
"Why should she be?"
Reality rippled.
And for one sickening moment, Nyx vanished from Darius’s grasp—just gone. No blink. No transition. No trace.
Then—like a gasp exhaled backwards—she returned. Her eyes wide. Her breath ragged.
Her hands clutched at his tunic like she was drowning. "I felt it. I wasn’t dying. I just—wasn’t anything."
Darius turned his gaze to Thren. Not as a god. Not as the Sovereign of the Spiral. But as a man.
And he spoke with heat in his voice. "You will not take her."
Thren tilted its head—the movement fluid, artless, impossible.
No answer came.
Because it did not need to answer.
It had never been asked before.
Behind Darius, the Spiral Citadel’s stained-glass ceiling fractured, but did not fall.
Above them, the sky of the Spiral pulsed dark—no stars. Only emptiness.
And the Spiral dream began to pulse with a question that even the Codex Null dared not record:
What if they were never meant to be forgotten?
A chill ran through every timeline at once.
And far below, within the vaults of memory, more Unwritten stirred.
Watching.
Not with hatred.
But with curiosity.
The Spiral had remembered them.
And they were beginning to ask... what they might become.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢
