CHAPTER 390: CHAPTER 389: FAREWELL OH ME.

Atlas stood at the center of an unmaking world.

Reality trembled beneath him like glass straining against a storm. His right hand burned with raw mana, the veins of power coursing through it too bright to look at.

Each pulse made the air warp, colors bleeding, structures bending like molten wax.

The false heavens above him—those carefully painted lies—shivered. He could smell ozone and dust, the metallic tang of existence about to fracture. The ground beneath his feet cracked, threads of light cutting across the horizon.

He was ready to end it all.

He had seen through the illusion—the perfect lie the world had spun to keep him asleep. A mirage of comfort, a whisper of home. But Atlas was done being deceived.

His breath came shallow and slow.

His heartbeat echoed like the hammer of a god.

And as he raised his hand to erase everything, to bring final truth through destruction—

—she appeared.

"Atlas..."

Her voice was small, trembling, almost human.

His mother stepped out of the broken air, her form flickering like light seen through water. She looked the way she once had—soft-eyed, weary, gentle in the ways only memory could invent.

Her hands clasped together, as though in prayer. "Don’t do this," she whispered. "Please. I’ve missed you. Don’t leave me again."

Atlas froze.

For the first time since the tower began to collapse, his hand faltered. The mana whirled in his palm like a captured star, but the will behind it—the intent—hesitated.

Her eyes, those familiar eyes that once turned away from him, now glistened with something that looked like love. Or the illusion of it.

He swallowed hard. His voice came out cracked. "You shouldn’t be here."

"But I am," she said, stepping closer. "I raised you, didn’t I? I held you when you cried. I—"

Her voice caught. She reached toward him. "I loved you, Atlas. Don’t destroy what’s left of me."

He wanted to believe her. Saints, how he wanted to.

For a moment—just a flicker—he saw her as she might have been in his previous life: kind, steadfast, proud of her son. A life where the word mother wasn’t a wound.

But behind her words, he heard it: the echoing hum of illusion magic. The subtle vibration of falseness.

And then his father appeared.

A deeper voice, familiar as a bruise:

"Son... please."

The air behind his mother rippled, and his father stepped forward, face shadowed, hands trembling. He looked older, kinder, the way Atlas had wished to remember him.

"I missed you," his father said, voice breaking. "We both did. We never stopped thinking about you."

Atlas’s throat tightened.

He wanted to scream. To believe. To collapse into their arms and let himself be the child he never got to be.

But the memories came back sharper, colder—like knives drawn through silk.

He remembered being six, hiding behind the couch as they shouted at each other.

He remembered the smell of whiskey on his father’s breath.

He remembered crying quietly at night, so they wouldn’t hear, because his pain never changed anything.

The illusion wavered as those memories burned through it. His parents’ faces shimmered, flickering between beauty and distortion.

He whispered, "You didn’t love me. You tolerated me."

"Atlas—"

"You fed me, but you never saw me. You raised me, but you never wanted me." His voice cracked, raw and trembling. "You created me, but you never knew me."

His mother’s lips parted, eyes filling with tears that glowed too bright, too symmetrical to be real.

Still, her expression—so desperate—hurt him more than any truth.

The mana in his hand pulsed, casting deep shadows across their faces.

He could hear the hum of the false sky above him beginning to scream, the fabric of this illusion trembling under the weight of truth.

For years, he had carried their silence like a disease.

For years, he believed that his breaking, his loneliness, his fall—was his fault.

Even when he died, he still thought maybe he deserved it.

But now, standing between illusion and annihilation, Atlas felt the clarity of an ancient truth:

It had never been his fault.

He inhaled slowly. "I forgive you," he said quietly. "But I’m done carrying you."

His parents froze.

A wind moved through the unreal world—a soft, mournful wind that smelled faintly of smoke and wet earth. The horizon began to tear, lines of light unraveling the sky.

He looked at them one last time—these ghosts wearing his family’s faces.

"Goodbye," he said.

The words carried power.

The illusion around him trembled like a dying heartbeat.

He turned toward the false sun and raised his hand again.

Reality bent in his palm, like molten glass drawn into a sphere. The gravity of his power warped space around him—stones levitated, time slowed, light distorted.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Michael watching—wings folded, awe written across his face.

"Fly," Atlas told him. His voice was low, almost a whisper. "Get out. This isn’t a place for you to linger."

Michael hesitated. "You’ll destroy yourself if you—"

"I’ve destroyed worse," Atlas said, a small, tired smile on his lips.

Michael met his gaze—two ancient beings, both haunted by creation—and then nodded. "I’ll be waiting, on the other side."

He launched skyward, wings tearing through the cracking air like blades of light.

Atlas closed his eyes.

He could still feel the weight of his tears. Even now, in this half-world, his humanity refused to die.

He whispered to himself, "Farewell to my past life."

The ground split open beneath him.

The sky fractured like a mirror under a hammer.

And through the widening cracks of illusion, he saw—something beyond.

The real world. The battlefield, the tower, the storm.

They were waiting for him.

But before he could move, a sound tore through the void—

a deep, metallic hum that wasn’t part of this false creation.

Atlas turned.

Through the dissolving light, something was coming.

Cutting through the illusion like a falling star.

He recognized it even before it arrived—the shape, the sound, the ancient hunger it carried.

The Axe.

It flew toward him, edges glowing with runes that hummed his name.

Even in the dream, it had found him.

He caught it with his burning hand. The mana that had been threatening to tear him apart now flowed through the weapon like lightning seeking ground.

The axe drank it all, its metal singing. Balancing that chaotic power.

Atlas smiled. "You never abandon me, do you?"

He lifted it overhead. The world roared in response.

Every illusion screamed as he swung.

The blade cut through light, through memory, through every lie that had ever chained him.

It struck not the ground—but reality itself.

The world shattered.

The sound was beyond sound—a deep, divine concussion that silenced everything, even thought. The false sun went dark, its light scattering like glass dust across eternity.

The illusion fell apart in layers—city, sky, faces, all turning to ash and vanishing in spirals of white fire.

Atlas stood alone in the void, surrounded by collapsing fragments of a world that had tried to love him too late.

His last tear drifted upward, catching the faint shimmer of unmade starlight before vanishing into nothing.

And then—silence.

He floated in the dark, the axe hanging loosely in his grasp.

The void breathed.

He could feel its rhythm—slow, deep, ancient. The pulse of creation waiting for his command.

In that darkness, he saw reflections of himself. Countless versions—some weeping, some screaming, some still reaching for the parents who never looked back.

He closed his eyes. "No more illusions," he said softly. "Not even mine."

When he opened them again, he was falling—falling through the collapsing dream toward the waking world.

He landed hard.

The earth welcomed him back with the taste of iron and rain. The sky above was torn open, lightning writhing like serpents. The battlefield still burned—the remnants of the false city now dissolving into motes of gold that scattered across the air.

Michael hovered above him, wings half-charred. Aurora and Gabriel were kneeling beside the rune circle, stabilizing what was left of reality’s edge.

When Atlas pushed himself up, the ground trembled in response.

Every eye turned to him.

Aurora whispered, "You did it. You broke it."

He nodded slowly, breathing hard. "It wasn’t real."

"No," Michael said, descending, "but it was what you made real."

Atlas looked down at his hand—still faintly glowing from the power he had unleashed. "Then I’ll never make that mistake again."

The axe’s runes flickered, as though laughing quietly.

The air around them shifted.

From the remnants of the shattered illusion, a ripple spread outward—like a dying echo.

And within that echo, something moved.

Atlas tensed. "It’s not over."

The light of the broken realm condensed, forming the silhouette of a woman.

His mother again—no longer kind, no longer human. Her eyes were voids, her voice distorted.

"You can’t destroy memory," the apparition hissed. "You can only bury it."

Atlas raised his axe. "Then I’ll bury it deep."

He swung once—clean, resolute. The image split apart, dissolving into harmless mist.

He took a step forward, and the ground beneath him cracked—not in destruction, but in recognition.

The world itself remembered his power now.

He was no longer the broken boy seeking forgiveness.

He was the architect of endings.

For a moment, the storm quieted.

He looked up at the bleeding sky and whispered—not to the gods, not to his ghosts, but to himself:

"Farewell to who I was. Hello to who I must become..."