The world doesn’t care what gods want. It cares what Anchor witches demand.
I tighten my grip on the entity’s core. Drag it toward finality with magic that no longer burns me from within. The mating bond transformed what was always killing me into a weapon without cost—clean, silent, absolute.
“You cannot—” The god’s voice fractures across multiple registers, cycling through sounds that might once have inspired worship. “You are mortal. You are temporary. You cannot?—”
Kaster tears through its core.
I anchor every fragment.
The Veiled One screams.
The sound isn’t audible.It exists outside normal hearing—a vibration that passes through bone and organ and thought, a resonance that makes the world itself shudder. The god is dying, and the cosmos acknowledges its pain.
I don’t let go.
Every piece of the god’s essence that tries to escape, every mote of cosmic will that struggles toward reconstitution, I catch and drag back toward permanence. My magic locks onto the god’s unraveling existence and refuses to let the ending slip.
Stay dead.
The ground beneath us cracks. Fractures radiate outward from the death-point in patterns that remind me of shattered glass—precise, geometric, inevitable. Power dissipates in waves that make the sky flicker through hues it was never meant to display.
The world is adjusting.
I’ve anchored monsters. Anchored abominations. Anchored creatures that regenerated through divine mandate, that refused death with iron cosmic certainty. But this is different. This isa god—an entity that has existed since before mortal memory, whose presence was woven into the fabric of reality itself.
Pulling that thread out doesn’t happen quietly.
The Veiled One’s form destabilizes completely. What was once a coherent entity—however alien—becomes a cascade of dissipating light and collapsing geometry. It cycles through every shape it ever wore, every face it ever presented, as if trying to find one that might survive.
None of them do.
“Please—” The word emerges from everywhere and nowhere, fractured across dimensions. “I can offer—I can give—I can?—”
No.
The god experiences true ending for the first time.
I feel the moment permanence claims it. The resistance against my magic simply... stops. The cosmic struggle ceases. What was the Veiled One becomes an absence—not a body, not remains, but a void where divinity used to exist.
The silence that follows is deafening.
I standin a crater that wasn’t here moments ago.
Divine death reshaped the landscape—new valleys carve through what was once solid ground, elevation shifts creating ridges and depressions in radiating patterns from the point where the god stopped existing. The earth beneath my feet is still settling, micro-tremors working their way outward as existence accepts the new truth I forced it to acknowledge.
The Veiled One is dead.
The thought arrives without emotion attached. Not triumph. Not relief. Those will come later, when my body catches up withwhat my magic accomplished. For now, there’s only the crater and the fading shimmer of cosmic aftermath.
I extend my awareness outward before I let the relief settle—past the crater, past the corrupted territory, reaching for the dimensional edges the god described. The barriers it claimed to maintain are there. Strained at the margins, laboring under the new absence, but present. Whatever worse things wait beyond them are still waiting.
Every major anchoring before the mating left me trembling—magic burning through my system, life force depleted, body consuming itself to make death stick. I killed a god and my hands are steady. My lungs don’t ache. My vision isn’t graying at the edges.
The magic that was always killing me doesn’t hurt anymore.
I look up.
Kaster stands across the crater from me—ten feet of broken ground and residue between us. Blood darkens his scales, trickling from wounds along his ribs and shoulder. His breathing comes hard and fast, the aftermath of fighting an entity that predated mortal existence. The partial shift still ripples across his skin, claws extended, ready for the next threat.
