CHAPTER 1588: STORY 1588: THE VESSEL’S CRY

The split sky yawned wide, spilling light like veins of molten glass. From the rift poured fragments—shards of towers, rivers of fractured stars, echoes of faceless bodies—swirling together into a single, towering mass. The storm had given itself shape.

Kael staggered back, shielding his eyes as the mass coiled and twisted, trying to form a body from chaos. Each attempt failed, collapsing into dust, then reforming with a greater roar. “It’s trying to wear itself,” he growled, scars burning hotter, “and the boy is its thread.”

Elara crawled toward her son, her nails breaking on the stone as she clawed forward. The boy’s glow had grown unbearable, his small frame barely visible within the column of radiance. She sobbed through clenched teeth, “You’re not a vessel. You’re mine. Do you hear me? Mine.”

The widow knelt in the dust, her palms pressed flat. Heat boiled her blood, her lips trembling as she mouthed a warning only her eyes could scream: If he holds it, he breaks.

The scarred woman braced her broken spear and spat blood into the storm. Her laughter was ragged, nearly choked, but it held defiance. “Then we break it first.” She hurled her spear into the column of light. It struck true—yet instead of piercing, it dissolved, consumed as if the weapon had never been.

The farmer pounded his drum, desperate, tears streaming down his soot-streaked face. Each beat sent ripples into the storm, but the rhythm faltered, scattered, drowned by the resonance of the forming being. He gasped out, “It’s too loud. It drowns the song. I—I can’t keep it together.”

The storm convulsed. From the light stepped limbs of fractured stone and burning sky, wings made of broken towers, a face flickering between faceless void and the boy’s own features. Its voice rolled out in every direction at once, carried by the storm, shaking marrow and thought alike:

“Through him, I am flesh. Through you, I rise.”

Kael roared, throwing himself forward despite the burning light. His blade-shard cut into one of the forming limbs, shattering it into a spray of glowing fragments. But as the pieces fell, they reformed behind him, larger, stronger, coiling around like serpents of glass.

Elara reached her son at last, clutching him through the radiance, burning her hands raw. Her voice broke into a scream: “Fight it! You are not its mouth—you are my boy!”

For a heartbeat, the light faltered. The boy’s small face flickered through the storm, eyes wide with terror. He whispered—not in the Unborn’s voice, but his own, fragile and human: “Mother.”

The storm shrieked, the rift above collapsing further as if the sky itself resisted his refusal. The forming body writhed, its limbs cracking, collapsing into raw fragments again.

The widow pressed her palms harder, bleeding into the fissures, her silent vow blazing in her eyes: We’ll bind it with ourselves if we must.

Kael lifted his blade, voice hoarse but unyielding. “Then we fight not to slay—but to tear it from him.”

And the storm screamed back, birthing its body anew.