**PROLOGUE: THE LAST STAR**

  The earth was a graveyard of flesh and steel.

  Corpses littered the ruins of OppS Headquarters—not just humans, but *things* that had once been human. Soldiers fused with machinery, their metal ribs bursting from rotting skin. A child’s skeleton, petrified mid-scream, clutched a stuffed bear whose glass eyes still glowed with rogue nanobots. Above it all, the sky wept ash, staining the bones of birds that fell like grotesque rain. A whale carcass lay impaled on the ruins of a skyscraper, its ribs curving into a cathedral of rot. The air reeked of ozone and decay, the only sound the *drip-drip* of acid pooling in the eye sockets of the dead.

  Clarke stepped over a soldier whose face had melted into his helmet. *Blazing Star insignia*. Her faction’s crest—a phoenix engulfed in blue flame—still gleamed on his chestplate.

  ---

  Director Elias Vorne awaited her atop the shattered throne of OppS, his body crackling with the corrupted energy of the *Oculus of Entropy*. The artifact hovered above his palm, a black hole masquerading as a jewel.

  “Clarke of the Blazing Star,” he sneered, his voice warping as spacetime frayed around him. “Come to join your family?”

  She didn’t answer. Her fists ignited—cobalt flames, the signature of her fallen faction. The fire roared to life, devouring the air as she lunged.

  The battle shattered the ruins:

  - **Vorne** unraveled matter with a flick of the Oculus, reducing entire pillars to dust.

  - **Clarke** retaliated with infernos that bent gravity, her flames tearing holes in reality itself.

  - At one point, she hurled a dying starling’s corpse at him, its wings ablaze—a distraction to close the gap.

  “You think *fire* can kill a god?” Vorne laughed as her flames disintegrated inches from his face.

  “No,” Clarke spat. “But *this* can.”

  She plunged her hand into her own chest, tearing free a shard of the **Blazing Star’s Heart**—her faction’s relic, embedded in her ribs since she was sixteen. It seared her fingers as she rammed it into the Oculus.

  The artifacts collided. Reality screamed.

  When the light faded, Vorne knelt, his body fissuring like broken glass. The Oculus lay dead in his hands.

  ---

  Clarke knelt beside the corpse, her breath ragged, fingers trembling as they hovered over the lifeless face of the man who had doomed the world. Elias Vorne’s glassy eyes stared past her, frozen in a rictus of defiance even in death. She waited for triumph, for relief—*something*—to flood her veins. Instead, a hollow ache spread through her chest, colder than the ash-laden wind scraping her skin.

  *How could anyone feel joy when they were the last breath left in a graveyard?*

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  The ruins stretched endlessly around her—crumbling spires, skeletal trees, rivers of molten glass where cities once thrived. No birdsong. No heartbeat but her own. Just the silence of a planet gutted by greed.

  “If I ever get a chance to fix this,” she whispered, voice cracking like the parched earth beneath her knees, “I’ll do *whatever* it takes.”

  The vow clawed its way out of her, raw and venomous. Not a promise—a curse. She’d burn empires. She’d drown in sin. She’d carve her soul into kindling if it meant no one else would ever kneel in a wasteland and scream at the uncaring sky.

  A metallic tang flooded her mouth. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, smearing blood across her knuckles like war paint.

  ***“Hahahaha…”***

  The laugh slithered from the shadows—a sound like nails dragged across slate. Clarke spun, blade flashing, and buried it in the darkness behind her. The knife hung midair, suspended in the ribcage of a figure woven from smoke and static.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, rising unsteadily.

  The shadow tilted its head, its form flickering between a gaunt man in a moth-eaten suit and a shapeless void. “*Who am I?*” it echoed, voice syrupy with mockery. “No one. Everyone. A footnote in the epilogue of dead gods.”

  Clarke’s grip tightened on her remaining dagger. “Try again.”

  “Think of me as… a *helper*,” it said, stepping forward, the knife still lodged in its chest. “A gardener in need of a thorn.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To offer you a gift.” The shadow gestured to the ruins, its fingers elongating into skeletal talons. “This world is beyond salvation. But others? *Oh, little spark*… The multiverse is ripe with rot. I can give you a chance to change things—let you prune the infection at its root.”

  Clarke’s pulse thundered. *Back.* The word slithered into her mind, sweet as poison. She saw her best friend’s face—Lila, laughing as he taught her to navigate by the stars. Saw her mother’s hands, calloused from forging relics for the Blazing Star. All ash now. All gone.

  “How?” The question tore from her, desperate and dangerous.

  The shadow’s grin split into a crescent of jagged light. “Become my blade. Let me remake you. Burn away the fragile, trembling *human* and rise as something… sharper.”

  She recoiled, but the shadow pressed closer, its voice a velvet snare.

  “What’s the price?”

  “Your humanity. Your soul. The soft, sentimental *squirming* that makes you hesitate. Your laughter. Your tears. The part of you that still *aches*.” It leaned in, its breath reeking of burnt sugar and decay. “In return, I’ll give you power to carve fate itself.”

  Clarke closed her eyes. Lila’s voice echoed—*“Live, Clarke. Promise me.”*

  She opened them.

  “Do it.”

  ***Agony.***

  It began in her bones—a splintering crack, as though her skeleton were glass shattering in slow motion. She collapsed, screaming, as her veins ignited. Fire raced beneath her skin, melting her from within, and when she clawed at her face, her fingertips came away slick with molten amber. Her eyes—*her eyes*—were pooling, dissolving, replaced by twin suns that seared her skull.

  Her hair tore free in clumps, replaced by threads of silver-blue that slithered like serpents, hissing as they brushed her shoulders.

  But worse was the *emptiness*.

  She felt it—the severing. A thousand gossamer threads snapping in her chest: the warmth of her mother’s embrace, the sting of her first betrayal. They unraveled, leaving caverns where her soul had been. In their place, cold sigils bloomed across her flesh, glowing like forge-heated iron. Each mark pulsed with the shadow’s laughter, branding her a vessel of its will.

  And then—the *soulmark*.

  A jagged scar split her sternum, glowing faintly gold. Not a wound, but a grotesque *tether*. Through the haze of pain, she understood: this was what remained of her humanity. A shriveled, gilded thread binding her to the self she’d bargained away.

  ---

  Her reflection in a rain barrel: a stranger with hellfire eyes, hair like frozen starlight, that pulsed like a second heartbeat.

  A woman’s voice curled around her, and said

  “Hey, *darling*… look at our daughter.”

  ---