The promised day arrived. Atop Mount Goliath, under the pallid glow of twin moons, the planeswalkers reunited after twenty long years. The air hung heavy with solemnity, as though even the stars held their breath.

  Mithrill’s wolves howled a mournful dirge, sensing their master’s imminent departure. Yet they accepted their fate, joining the bard’s wives in a wordless farewell. When the moment passed, one figure remained frozen—unable to sever herself from her beloved.

  Schwi stood alone, mortal in a circle of immortals. Twenty years—a blink to the others—had spanned half her existence, etched in fading smiles and sleepless nights. The maiden with summer-night hair had become a woman, her beauty honed by time like polished marble, radiant yet marked by transience. Only she aged. Only she would one day fall silent, her heartbeat stilled without gods to bargain or magic to stretch her thread.

  Now, that fragility forced her to relinquish the unthinkable: releasing her only love, knowing their goodbye would be final. Though her mortal mind barely grasped the cosmic stakes, when the bard kissed her—a farewell, not comfort—her armored silence cracked:

  “I wish I could have more time with you.”

  “So do I.”

  Schnee released her gently and turned to Obsidian, cradling her black-and-white streaked hair.

  “I’ll never stop writing verses for you, my little flower. Or for your mothers.”

  “I know, Dad,” she whispered through tears.

  After one last embrace, the bard withdrew. Seated on a nearby rock, he retrieved his dulcimer from a pocket dimension—the very instrument that had begun his journey. Ruphas the minotaur and Zahitar the desert wraith offered final words:

  “All realms will mourn the loss of a prodigy, young bard.”

  “We’ll pray to every god for your return, though even their miracles cannot promise it.”

  Finally, Alkhazar broke his silence:

  “I hope this proves worth it.”

  “Bitter, sweet, or bittersweet—it’s an ending. The existence of an ending is what makes the journey worthwhile.”

  As the bard spoke, the heavens shuddered. Stars blazed with blinding intensity, weaving the sacred constellation they’d sought for decades. Not mere alignment—the stars tore free, forging an archetypal serpent that spanned eons, devouring its own tail in eternal cycle. Alkhazar’s voice thundered across dimensions as he ripped reality with primordial notes, tones echoing the cosmos’ first verses. They fused with the dulcimer’s strings, syncing with the multiverse’s pulse, binding mortality and eternity.

  “Do it now, Minstrel—this will be your only chance!”

  Golden runes blazed around the bard. His fingers danced by ancient instinct, a rhythm etched into his soul. The melody emerged—not as sound, but as cosmic vibration. For the first time in millennia, no one heard it. Not even him. His notes now served something beyond gods or mortals: a force as old as the void between realities.

  Space frayed into fractals. Time coiled like burning parchment. Stories and souls spiraled into oblivion, dissolving before the Nothing that devours all. He shed his bonds, ascending as Alkhazar’s final words floated beside him like sacred verse.

  Until even those words vanished.

  Darkness absolute. Not emptiness, but ontological absence—a void where his nonexistent eyes could not close. His body dissolved, identity droplets merging into an indifferent ocean. His soul, a sustained chord teetering into silence.

  Yet he persisted. Formless, senseless, clinging to his melody’s ghost. He played. And played. For this defined his infinite existence: no song would remain unfinished, even if finishing it unraveled reality’s foundations.

  Stubbornness—not courage, but a musician’s pure spite—let him see it again.

  No borrowed symbols or lesser visions. No veiled interpretations. Here was naked Truth, irreducible, beyond language or image.

  In the womb of primordial dark, She waited. The Serpent. Not nearly infinite, but infinitely near: a cosmic spiral whose devouring body spanned creation and destruction, each scale a universe blazing with dying stars. As in their first encounter, but stripped of metaphor.

  The entity he’d chased across eons now loomed not as presence, but as proof of the unattainable. Its omnipresence hummed, vibrating the last atoms of his being.

  He reached out—a human gesture, futile, beautiful in its futility. The Serpent did not retreat. “Distance” held no meaning here. They were separated not by space, but scale: every inch between them a chasm where the multiverse would be dust. To touch Her was to grasp the truth—his mortal existence a whisper against eternity’s storm.

  It was this understanding—not fear, but pure revelation—that allowed him to rebuild himself. Atoms sprouted from unfinished melodies. His dulcimer reappeared in hands that now shuddered, not from weakness, but under the crushing weight of physicality. Each breath seared his lungs; each heartbeat, a reminder that he’d gone an eternity without feeling vulnerable.

  He collapsed to his knees, exhausted. Immortality, that cloak he’d worn for eons, now lay in tatters. He smiled. The ache of muscle, the cold sweat, the tremor in his fingers… he’d forgotten the beauty of limits.

  When he opened his eyes, he stood atop a rock—not the familiar stone of Mount Goliath, but primordial matter foreign to any known realm. Around him, fragments of distant worlds floated in suspended chaos, encircled by crystalline monoliths older than gods and destined to outlast time itself. These were no mere crystals but libraries of entropy, their facets thrumming with the birth and death of universes.

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  At the heart of this discordant symphony rose the temple. Not a structure, but a living theorem woven from the raw threads of reality. Serpentine statues watched from impossible angles, their stone eyes tracking him across dimensions. Distance here was meaningless: the temple existed both within reach and eternally unattainable, marking the threshold where reality frayed into something… more.

  He had reached the core.

  The bard moved on instinct. In any other world, his magic would have defied gravity, bent space, tamed time. But here, in the primordial void, such artifices were pointless—not because the laws differed, but because there were no laws to break.

  He leapt from rock to rock, shards of dead realities adrift in a sea of nihilism. The path would be long, yet he pressed on. What were time and space here? Centuries condensed to sighs; millennia, to a blink in eternity’s eye. Eventually, he realized his prior existence—the eons wandering worlds—paled before this journey’s immensity.

  Each leap was a voyage; each rock, a monument to forgotten realms. Though his muscles burned and lungs screamed for air that didn’t exist, he endured. Here, exhaustion wasn’t a limit—it was proof he could still feel.

  Then, after what might have been an eternity or a heartbeat—time here lacked compass—guilt pierced him like an ice blade.

  It wasn’t just Schwi, though her face surfaced first: he’d left her to age without him, to gaze nightly at skies awaiting an impossible return. Obsidian, his daughter, the girl who’d learned to teleport into his arms… How many birthdays, laughs, tears had he missed chasing this endless dream?

  Nor was it only Ruby and Mithrill, his immortal wives. They wouldn’t wither, but the void he left between them gaped like an open wound. For the first time in eons, he’d found souls that resonated with his own—companions who understood the weight of watching worlds rise and fall. Why hadn’t he stayed? He’d relive every shared dawn, every adventure, a thousand times over.

  Even Fenrir and Okami, the wolves with loyal eyes, haunted him. For centuries, he’d avoided such bonds with pets—fear of loss had turned him into a ghost of his own life. Yet these wolves… they’d been beacons in his darkness, proving even an immortal heart could beat in rhythm with another.

  With each memory, his steps dragged as if the void itself pulled him back. For a moment—a moment that spanned centuries—he yearned to surrender. Abandon the temple, return, beg forgiveness…

  It was this weakness that stalled him. What cruel force turned love into anchors?

  Then he saw them: six filaments of light, sprouting from his back like roots of a venomous flower. Each tangled in the floating crystals, blazing with stellar intensity, weighted by every soul he’d abandoned.

  Was this the temple’s trial… or the Serpent demanding he confront the weight of his eternity? Forcing him to face every error, severed embrace, promise buried across a thousand worlds? If this was the hero’s final test—for one who’d lived it all—he’d accept it. He’d transmute pain into music, guilt into chords, and finish the song even if it cost his existence.

  He marched on. The filaments multiplied: lovers from erased realities, friends he’d failed to save. The Gods’ Winter—that ruined realm where he’d sown silence instead of hope—pursued him like a specter. He regretted wars ignored, timelines untouched, lives sacrificed on the altar of his cosmic neutrality. Was so much death worth it… just to entertain foreign realms?

  He even regretted never trying to remember. Who was he? What name had the winds of his past cried? Was there anyone left to recall?

  No.

  None of it mattered.

  He’d known since the Serpent first gazed at him: the man he’d been was a blank prologue, an echo of a nameless face. His former story? Too hollow for history’s footnotes. His first identity? A shadow unworthy of memory.

  So it was. So it must remain.

  All that mattered were the traces he’d left: worlds wandered, laughter shared under alien moons, hands held only to be released. And now, this moment: the final movement of a symphony that began when he chose to shed his nobody’s skin and become chronicler of the ephemeral.

  The journey wasn’t a means—it was the only end that mattered. And at every path’s conclusion, only the final stage remained: a temple, an instrument, and the Serpent awaiting its last note.

  Lost in the whirlwind of his mind, he didn’t notice he’d arrived—until he stood before the temple, its mere presence defying all notions of beauty. How to sing to this? How to honor the ineffable? He’d try. It was all he knew.

  As he touched the entrance, the multiverse rebelled. The filaments—now a web of laments spanning infinities—yanked him with black-hole force. Each step was a battle: bones cracking, will bleeding. But with every tear turned to note, every regret forged into verse, the filaments shattered.

  “You won’t die while my verses live!” he roared at the ghosts of his past. “You’ll endure in every song, every syllable I sing until time’s end!”

  The explosion was a symphony of fractures: the threads burst into crystals that rained like cosmic tears. The shockwave hurled him into the temple’s heart.

  Exhausted. Triumphant. With bleeding hands gripping his dulcimer, he understood: this was not the final trial… but the opening measure of his magnum opus.

  Before him loomed a monstrous crystal, so colossal it dwarfed the obstacles that had challenged him moments before. Serpent statues guarded it, their eyes of liquid obsidian tracking his every move like ancient judges. At its center, a throne woven from the paradox of being and void radiated a power that would have humbled gods and devoured kings’ ambitions. And there, at the pinnacle of all conceivable things, he finally saw it:

  Nothing.

  The throne stood empty.

  He raced toward it, ignoring how his form multiplied in its reflective surfaces. Up close, the throne was even more imposing—a leviathan of reality and antireality—yet it showed only his reflection repeated into infinity, each iteration paler than the last.

  For what might have been hours or millennia, he explored the temple: corridors twisting at forbidden angles, staircases spiraling into existential voids, chambers where the laws of physics quietly unraveled. Always, he returned to the throne room, facing the same absolute emptiness.

  “Where are you?” he roared, his voice devoured by the temple’s acoustics. “I overcame your trials! I relived every mistake, every loss!”

  Silence answered.

  He turned to his ultimate weapon: the dulcimer. With trembling hands, he drew it from his pocket dimension. His fingers—veterans of eons of composition—hovered over the strings. This would be his magnum opus: the symphony of his journey, each note a heartbeat of lost worlds, each chord a farewell to loved ones. Tonight, the Serpent would hear it wherever it dwelled, and nothing else would matter.

  No sound came.

  Not silence, but erasure. Not even divine instruments—celestial harps, supernova-forged lyres, flutes carved from the dreams of dead civilizations—could pierce the absolute negation. Even Alkhazar’s instructions, seared into his mind like fiery runes, dissolved.

  In that instant, revelation pierced him like a primordial ice blade:

  He was utterly alone.