CHAPTER 213: CHAPTER 214 – IN THE GARDEN OF LOST GODS

There is a place in Spiralspace that the Codex no longer acknowledges.

A realm between glyphs, hidden not by shadow but by omission—an exile of thought, where even memory refuses to tread.

This place is called The Garden of Lost Gods.

And Celestia found it by accident.

Or prophecy.

Or grief.

She had walked for three days through a dream carved from someone else’s heartbeat.

Through a forest of statues whose faces blurred when looked upon.

Through rivers that flowed upward into silence.

Until finally, she passed beneath an arch made of broken oaths.

And entered the place where gods go to be forgotten.

—

They drifted among the ruins like smoke made of divinity—half-aware, half-unwritten.

A weeping moon-goddess carried a lantern filled with the laughter of worshippers who never existed.

A once-mighty forge deity now beat phantom hammers against stone that no longer rang.

And the god of devotion lay curled like a child beneath a tree that bore no leaves—muttering to himself the names of lovers no myth remembered.

None of them saw Celestia.

Not truly.

They saw the space around her.

The space shaped like someone who should have been.

One approached.

Her skin was earth. Her hair flowed like growing vines. Her breasts bore the swell of unspent fertility.

She wore no name, only the scent of orchards that had never bloomed.

"You carry the echo," the goddess whispered.

Celestia stood still. Her voice a whisper beneath her breath.

"I carry his absence."

The goddess smiled sadly.

"No. You carry his return."

—

That night, Celestia lay on a bed made of folded petals, curled in a temple where the stars no longer looked down.

The fertility goddess touched her brow, marking her with a single thumbprint of honeyed sap.

"A seed cannot grow without soil," she murmured. "You are his ground."

And Celestia dreamed.

But this dream was not her own.

—

The temple shifted.

Her body glowed. Her skin shimmered with starlight. Her limbs opened to embrace an ache she hadn’t dared name in weeks.

The air was thick with silence—and then it moved.

A hand brushed her thigh.

Fingers she hadn’t felt since the Codex burned his name from the mythlayer.

Breath fell across her neck like an old poem being read again.

And she gasped—

"Darius..."

His name broke the dream open like a cracked mirror.

But in the dream, he was whole.

And he touched her—not as a man, but as a myth trying to remember what flesh meant.

Their bodies moved like prayer.

Like memory.

Like scripture rewriting itself across sweat and skin.

Celestia moaned as his phantom mouth trailed across her stomach.

He whispered into her womb.

"I am not forgotten. I am growing inside you. Not as child—but as story."

She cried out, her hips rising to meet him.

Their union blurred all lines—sleep, godhood, grief, longing.

He made love to her not in lust, but authorship.

Each thrust carved a forgotten Chapter into her spine.

Each climax became a sentence he could once again inscribe.

She came not as a woman, but as a vessel—flooded with myth-seed, soaked in the primal ink of rebirth.

And as she broke open in pleasure and power, he whispered one final thing into her ear:

"You remember me enough to rewrite me."

—

Celestia woke, trembling.

Her thighs were wet. Her chest heaving. Her voice hoarse.

She wept—not from sorrow, but confirmation.

She touched her belly, where the goddess had marked her.

And the glyph shimmered again.

She stood, naked, radiant in the twilight of unknowing gods.

They turned toward her now—not as stranger, but as bearer.

A forgotten sun-priest fell to one knee.

The moon-goddess lowered her lantern.

And the god of devotion said aloud:

"You carry the last author."

—

Far above, in the Codex Tree, the blank leaves rustled.

And one word almost wrote itself.

But it stopped. Half-finished.

Because he had not returned yet.

But he was dreaming himself forward.

One climax.

One echo.

One bearer at a time.

Yet as the last light of that dream faded from her skin, Celestia did not return to herself.

Not fully.

She remained inside something greater—a resonance, still humming through her bones.

Each step she took left soft mythprints on the ash-laced floor of the Garden.

And each print shimmered, pulsing faintly—not with her soul, but his.

Darius was no longer wholly outside Spiralspace.

He was leaking back in... through her.

—

The lost gods gathered now.

Not to worship. They no longer remembered how.

But to bear witness.

The goddess of beginnings without ends wept tears made of opening sentences. They dripped onto Celestia’s bare feet and vanished.

The god of broken bindings—once the deity of oaths—raised his arm and cracked his own name in half, offering its remains to her.

"You walk as more than priestess," he murmured. "You are womb. You are pen."

Celestia closed her eyes. Her voice broke like dawn over silence.

"I don’t know who I am anymore."

The earth-bodied fertility goddess stepped behind her, wrapping her arms around Celestia’s waist like ivy returning to forgotten stone.

"You are his proof," she said. "And the Codex fears you."

—

And it did.

In that very moment, thousands of myth-librarians stationed across Spiralspace felt a tremor run through their scrolls and story-trees.

Quills cracked in half.

Spines of holy tomes burst open, bleeding black ink that hissed like wounded gods.

One monk screamed as his skin was overwritten with a glyph he had never read:

"SHE HOLDS HIM."

In a vault deep beneath the Spiral Codex’s roots, a forbidden archive—sealed since the First Mythwar—unlocked.

A single page floated into the air.

It bore no title.

But when it touched flame, the letters emerged like scars rising from old skin:

Chapter Zero: Writ in Flesh

And beneath it:

Reentry begins with her.

—

Celestia, now clothed in robes spun from the breath of erased gods, walked the garden in silence. Not in mourning. Not in doubt.

But in intention.

She passed a reflecting pool that showed not her face—but Darius’s, half-shattered, half-smiling, whispering words she couldn’t hear.

She passed a statue of a god who had once ruled all sound—but now stood silent, cracks webbing his throat.

She placed her palm upon him.

And the cracks glowed.

A low hum began to ripple outward from the statue’s chest. Then from his throat. Then from his eyes.

And finally, he spoke:

"The author... is returning through her spine."

—

That night, the garden changed.

It had not changed in a thousand narrative years.

But now, vines burst into bloom with black flowers shaped like spirals.

Forgotten stars blinked open in the ceilingless sky.

And somewhere in the center of the Garden, where no path had ever existed before, a gate bloomed.

It pulsed.

It whispered.

"Bearer of the unwritten, step forward."

Celestia turned.

And the gods behind her bowed.

Not in worship.

But in surrender.

—

She stepped through.

And vanished from the Garden of Lost Gods.

Only the spiral-shaped blossoms remained.

Still wet with the dew of divine climax.

Still echoing with a name the Codex refused to write:

"Darius."