**Chapter 19: Ashes of the Architect**
The battlefield held its breath. Dave's confession hung like smoke—thick, acrid, impossible to ignore. Marverick's sword trembled in his grip, not from exhaustion, but the seismic crack spreading through his understanding of *everything*. The mentor who'd pulled him from ruins, strategized their survival, stitched his wounds—now a sculptor of apocalypses.
"**You were supposed to be better than them,**" Marverick breathed, the words ash on his tongue.
Dave's smile was a razor. "**I am.**"
Marverick moved first.
Their clash was not steel on steel, but *cataclysm*. Dave's cane split into a serpentine chain of obsidian shards, each fragment humming with stolen Voidborn energy. Marverick's wings, though ragged, blazed with the last dregs of the Stone's power—a dying star's defiance. Every strike warped the air, reality itself recoiling from their duel.
Ava broke free of her crystalline prison, violet chains lashing out to bind Dave's limbs. "**Traitor!**" she screamed, her magic searing his flesh.
Cain roared, charging—but froze as Dave flicked a finger. The warlord crumpled, veins bulging black. "**Ah-ah,**" Dave tutted. "**Still my design, Cain. Still my strings.**"
Elijah's hybrid eye glowed, calculating trajectories, weaknesses. "**The cane's core!**" he shouted. "**It's a conduit!**"
Abigail's arrow was already nocked. It struck true—the gem at the cane's tip spiderwebbed. Dave snarled, the battlefield shuddering as his control frayed.
Marverick seized the moment. His blade, fueled by fury and the ghost of the Stone's light, pierced Dave's chest.
Silence.
Dave staggered, obsidian shards clattering to the ground. Blood—*human* blood—bloomed across his shirt. "**Clever…boy…**" he choked, laughter bubbling crimson. "**But the math…remains…**"
The ground split. From the fissure rose a holographic tableau—a world consumed by a black hole, galaxies snuffed like candles. "**The Voidborn…were a symptom…**" Dave gasped. "**The core…rots…**"
Marverick's rage faltered. The projection shifted—a timeline where Dave's "harvest" spared millions, where the Stone's power sealed the cosmic decay. "**You…saw this?**"
"**Planted…the choice…**" Dave slumped against a rubble pile, his breath shallow. "**But you…*chose*…**"
The truth was a knife twist. Dave, the monster, had gambled eternity on humanity's capacity for mercy. And lost.
Ava's hand found Marverick's. "He doesn't get to martyr himself," she hissed. "Not after the blood he spilled."
Dave's gaze locked on the crumbling sky. "**Rebuild…better…**" he whispered. Then stilled.
The battlefield exhaled. Demons dissolved into ash. The fissure sealed, leaving only scarred earth and the survivors—hollow-eyed, bloodied, alive.
Cain spat on Dave's corpse. "Rot in the plot you dug."
But Marverick knelt, closing the architect's eyes. "He thought he was saving us," he murmured. "From something worse."
Ava's chains flickered out, cradling the dead Stone's shard. "Doesn't matter now. We're here. And we're *not* his math."
They stood at the edge of the scarred world. No parades awaited them, no ballads—just the wind keening through ruins, and the work.
Elijah scuffed his boot in the ash. "Where first?"
Marverick looked east, where the sun—true and pale—pierced the smoke. "Home."
The road would be long. The Riggs' labs still hummed, the Voidborn's whispers lingered, and the cosmos' rot was a clock they couldn't un-wind. But as they walked, the survivors carried embers—not of the Stone's dead fire, but something quieter.
Stubborn.
Fragile.
*Human.*