Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 147: After the Stars

Six months had passed since the Unmaking ceased, and Alexia had learned to hate silence.

She stood atop the Obsidian Spire—a tower she’d carved from crystallized void-matter at the heart of what had once been the multiversal nexus. Below her stretched an endless expanse of grey wasteland punctuated by the skeletal remains of dimensional gateways. No wind stirred the ash-covered ground. No birds sang. Even the cosmic background radiation had been muted to barely perceptible whispers.

The war was over. They had won.

But victory, Alexia discovered, could taste remarkably like defeat.

"Status report," she commanded, her voice carrying across the desolate landscape through will alone. Her body had changed since absorbing the fragments of her family’s power—she stood nearly seven feet tall now, her once-human form stretched and refined into something that could withstand the pressures of reshaping reality. Crystalline growths sprouted from her shoulders like wings, pulsing with the captured light of dead stars.

The few survivors who answered her call were no longer entirely human either. The Consciousness Plague and the Reality Death had left their marks on everyone who endured. Some bore physical mutations—extra limbs twisted into fractal patterns, eyes that saw in spectrums beyond mortal comprehension. Others had become more concept than flesh, their thoughts bleeding into the quantum foam around them.

"The Eastern Wastelands show no signs of spontaneous reality generation," reported Thane, once a merchant from a dimension of eternal autumn, now something resembling a living equation. "The void-storms continue to consume any attempts at matter creation."

"Dimensional barriers remain unstable in Sectors Seven through Twelve," added Mora, her form flickering between states of existence. "The cascade failures are spreading."

Alexia nodded grimly. This was the New Silence—a universe purged of most conscious life, where the survivors struggled to rebuild from the corpses of infinite worlds. She had proclaimed herself the Last Sovereign not out of ambition but out of necessity. Someone had to take responsibility for the aftermath. Someone had to try to make sense of the senseless.

"Begin the Restoration Project’s third phase," she ordered. "Focus on stabilizing the quantum foundations before attempting any large-scale reconstruction."

As her followers dispersed to their impossible tasks, Alexia returned to her private chambers within the Spire. The walls were lined with containment crystals, each one holding a fragment of consciousness she’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of reality. Most belonged to strangers—echoes of civilizations she’d never known. But some...

She approached a pair of crystals that pulsed with familiar warmth. Inside, barely visible threads of thought and memory swirled like captive galaxies. Her parents’ scattered consciousness, piece by painstaking piece.

"Mother," she whispered, placing her palm against the crystal containing what might have been Lyralei’s capacity for love. "Father." Her other hand touched the crystal holding fragments of Reed’s determination and wisdom.

For six months, she’d been collecting these pieces, following quantum trails across the desolate multiverse. Each fragment was precious beyond measure, but also heartbreakingly incomplete. She had perhaps a thousandth of what her parents had been, and even if she could gather every scattered mote of their being, she wasn’t certain they could be truly restored.

A chime echoed through the chamber—the warning system she’d established to monitor dimensional stability. Alexia’s attention snapped to the viewing portal, where new horrors were manifesting.

Void Scars.

The wounds left by Kaedon’s Reality Death were healing wrong, like infected cuts that spawned tumors instead of healthy tissue. Where dimensions had been completely erased, new forms of existence were trying to fill the gaps—but these weren’t proper realities. They were aberrations born from the intersection of absolute nothingness and the desperate desire of the universe to exist.

Through her enhanced senses, Alexia watched as one such Scar tore open in the middle distance. From it emerged creatures that defied description—things that were simultaneously matter and antimatter, beings that existed in the spaces between thoughts. They moved with purpose, but their purpose was incomprehensible to any mind shaped by conventional reality.

"The Children of the Silence," she murmured, using the name she’d given these new entities.

They weren’t evil, exactly. Evil required intent, and these creatures seemed to operate on principles that predated morality. They simply were, in the same way that entropy was, or the passage of time. But their presence destabilized everything around them, turning solid matter into probability clouds and transforming the thoughts of nearby conscious beings into abstract mathematics.

Alexia had tried communicating with them, but the attempts had nearly driven her insane. Their language—if it could be called that—was composed of conceptual reversals and logical impossibilities. To truly understand them, she would have to abandon her grip on conventional existence entirely.

A task for another day, perhaps. Right now, she had more pressing concerns.

The Restoration Project was failing.

Every attempt to rebuild the multiverse created cascading instabilities. New dimensions would form, exist for hours or days, then collapse under the weight of their own impossibility. The fundamental constants that had once held reality together had been too thoroughly damaged by Kaedon’s assault.

Alexia moved to her war room, where holographic displays showed the current state of existence in all its tattered glory. Red zones marked areas of complete annihilation. Yellow zones indicated regions where reality functioned intermittently. Green zones—precious few of them—represented stable pockets where some semblance of normal existence persisted.

But even the green zones were shrinking.

"Perhaps," she mused aloud, "the answer isn’t to restore what was, but to create what could be."

She was contemplating this possibility when the dimensional sensors erupted in alarm. Something was happening in the deep void—in the spaces between the Scars where even the Children of the Silence feared to tread.

Alexia’s enhanced vision pierced through layers of distorted space-time, focusing on a disturbance that made her crystalline wings tremble with recognition. There, in the heart of the dimensional flux where physics went to die, something familiar was taking shape. freewёbnoνel-com

A figure wreathed in impossible geometries. A consciousness that bent reality not through force but through sheer stubborn refusal to be constrained by conventional existence.

Vexara.

But this wasn’t the sister Alexia remembered from their brief reunion. This Vexara was something new—something that had learned to survive in the spaces between thoughts, to exist in the gaps where reality forgot to be coherent.

As Alexia watched in growing horror and hope, her sister’s form began to stabilize. Vexara was pulling herself together from the dimensional flux itself, using the chaos of the void-storms as building materials for her resurrection.

And she wasn’t alone.

Around her, other figures were taking shape—beings of living paradox and crystallized impossibility. An army drawn from the intersection of existence and nothingness.

Alexia’s enhanced hearing caught fragments of Vexara’s voice, carried on currents of distorted space-time:

"...time to show them all... true restoration requires... complete dissolution first..."

The transmission cut off, but the implications were clear. Whatever Vexara had become during her time in the dimensional flux, whatever she had learned about existence and entropy, she was planning something that would make Kaedon’s Reality Death look like a gentle mercy.

Alexia’s hands clenched into fists, her crystalline wings flaring with captured starlight. She had thought the war was over. She had believed that the hardest battles lay behind them.

But as she watched her sister’s impossible army coalesce from the void itself, she realized that everything they had endured—the Consciousness Plague, the Reality Death, even the Unmaking—had been nothing more than preparation.

Follow curr𝒆nt nov𝒆ls on freew(𝒆)bnov𝒆l.(c)om