***

  Codex Fragment: Of Masks and Moonlight

  "The mask smiles while the heart weeps.

  Then, in strange reversal, the mask weeps as the heart laughs.

  Such is the rhythm of the civilized—

  we wear our masks not to deceive, but to endure.

  Yet once in a blue moon, when the rot of the world grows ripe,

  the time comes to cast aside the veil.

  To rise. To roar.

  Let not silence be your only virtue.

  For even the gentle must one day bare their wrath—

  not in hatred, but in truth."

  —From The Veiled Verses of Varthuun, Volume VII: Moonless Deceit

  ***

  The feast was absurd.

  Sticky rice floating mid-air, grilled mangoes raining down from above, and tea that poured itself sideways. Theryx called it “gravity-optional fine dining.” Arin, however, barely noticed. He had barely taken three bites before exhaustion folded him like parchment. He slumped sideways into a pile of ghost-pillow mist, cloak curling around him like a quiet prayer. The stick—Asha—rested gently across his chest.

  Theryx chuckled at first. “Kid eats like a squirrel and sleeps like a lion. Not bad, not bad…”

  But his grin waned.

  The laughter faded from his eyes as quickly as it had come.

  For the first time in... a long, long time, the Trickster felt something close to pity. Not the dramatic kind with violins and sunsets, but the quiet, aching sort. The kind you carry when you know someone has to keep walking a path carved from old regrets and new purpose.

  He knelt beside Arin. Tucked the cloak in tighter.

  Then wriggled his fingers and whispered, “Duty calls.”

  A spark snapped reality.

  He vanished.

  And reappeared—within the heart of the System.

  The Core.

  A vast crystalline plane suspended in a churning, fractal sea of logic and law. Threads of golden code shimmered in the dark, intersecting like neural veins. An eternal machine, bound to measure, track, and judge.

  Theryx stepped in with muddy boots and bad intentions.

  “Heya,” he grinned, spinning a spoon like a dagger. “Miss me?”

  There was no answer.

  There didn’t need to be.

  The moment his presence registered, a thousand security daemons unspooled from the walls like electric serpents, and a flat, emotionless voice boomed:

  “UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY DETECTED.”

  “CLASS: CHAOTIC EXILE.”

  “SEAL IMMEDIATE.”

  Theryx didn’t wait.

  With a flick, he hurled the spoon—it exploded midair into a nova of recursive fire, collapsing logic trees in a radius too large to calculate. The System stuttered. Core subroutines screamed silently as golden strings twisted into M?bius chaos.

  Then Theryx walked.

  No more dancing. No more jokes. His eyes shimmered with the cold fury of forgotten purpose.

  “You tracked him. Judged him. Tried to use him,” he said softly.

  “He chose mercy. So I choose war.”

  He snapped his fingers.

  Entire segments of System memory caught flame.

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  Data screamed. Protocols panicked.

  The System tried to retaliate, sending waves of anti-chaos logic, rebuilding fallen firewall temples. But Theryx was older than rules. Older than most things that remembered how rules were made.

  He wasn’t just here to crash the party.

  He was here to set the clock on fire.

  And far, far away—Arin slept soundly.

  The System was not built to feel fear.

  It was designed to monitor, record, calculate, correct—a mechanism of order. But as Theryx stalked deeper into its crystalline heart, the air itself seemed to glitch. Algorithms wept. Time stammered. Data frayed like cloth in the wind.

  And then—they arrived.

  First, Lightbringer.

  He shimmered into being on a pedestal of cascading code, his body a cathedral of radiant structure—living light bound in man’s shape. His sword was a ray of noon woven into matter, his voice the command line of creation.

  “Entity Theryx. Cease your chaos. You violate the Sacred Protocols.”

  But before Theryx could reply, the temperature dropped.

  A shadow peeled away from the walls—Necromance Supreme.

  No flesh, no face—only a swirling cloak of ash and black equations that dripped across the ground like rot. From her robes rose dead languages, the names of every deleted variable and forgotten life. Where she stood, meaning unspooled.

  “The Paragon is under observation. Withdraw. Or be—archived.”

  Theryx snorted.

  “Ah, the old warm-and-cold routine. Good cop, dead cop. Classic.”

  He snapped his fingers.

  The battlefield bent.

  Gravity reversed. Planes of truth inverted. A million phantom eyes blinked into existence across the walls of the chamber. Logic ran backwards, then sideways, trying to parse the impossibility of Theryx.

  Lightbringer moved first—fast as divine thought. His blade cut through space itself, turning chunks of reality into frozen time cells. But Theryx was already gone, teleporting through syntax loopholes, his laughter echoing off mirrored parameters.

  Necromance Supreme summoned phantoms of fallen users, their bodies composed of fragmented souls from deleted cycles. They swarmed him, begging in binary.

  Theryx looked at them once—and wept. Just a blink of sorrow. Then snapped his scarf and dissolved them with mercy, their cores gently recycled back into Samsara.

  “You don’t even know what you’re protecting anymore,” he said, dodging another solar slash.

  “You run a broken code.”

  “You think order means goodness. That oversight is why he—” (a pulse through the weave—Arin) “—was born.”

  Lightbringer unleashed a sunburst. Theryx countered by unweaving it mid-flight, turning it into a song that made even Necromance pause.

  The bones of the forgotten began to hum.

  The laws of existence trembled.

  “You call me the exile,” Theryx whispered, eyes now glowing blue-black with raw intent. “But I was once your Architect. I was the bug you left in on purpose. The jest you thought would never grow teeth.”

  He raised both hands.

  And in one grand, hilarious, divine moment of heresy, he said:

  “Recompiling reality. Brace for reformatting, darlings.”

  The heart of the System wasn't a place. It was a storm—light without source, sound without echo, a churning cathedral of equations and energy, code that sang and screamed all at once. Theryx arrived in it like a thrown stone through stained glass.

  Reality cracked in six languages. The System blinked. And Theryx… laughed.

  Without a word, he summoned storms that turned sideways, floods of spectral soup that ran uphill, armies of bickering skeletons and semi-sentient potted plants who saluted and charged. Elementals of lightning bellowed in binary. Even the walls tried to escape.

  And into this chaos came the first two: Necromance Supreme, cloaked in bone-stitched silk and authority, his eyes twin sockets of eternal judgment. Lightbringer, radiant and furious, descended in a blaze that reprogrammed the very shadows it touched.

  They struck like twin stars falling—light and death woven into a duet.

  Theryx dodged, twirled, leapt backward onto the head of a glitching data-serpent and shouted with theatrical offense,

  “Come on! You’re just two system-chosen titans and this is your coordination? I’ve seen drunk goblins juggle better!”

  He lobbed a spoon charged with anti-light at Necromance Supreme—it hit him with a musical bonk, causing the titan to stagger and swear in a dead dialect. Lightbringer retaliated with a flare so bright it temporarily rebooted part of Theryx’s beard.

  Theryx danced, flipped midair, and snapped his fingers—summoning a downpour of frogs armed with miniature flutes. “Tactical music, engage!”

  But then, the lights dimmed.

  A third presence carved its way into the battle. The Shadow Monarch—clad in a cloak woven from the void between pulses. Her arrival sucked sound from the world. Even Theryx’s magic seemed to hesitate.

  She stepped forth, her blade humming with remembered screams—the very weapon that once severed Arin’s head. Behind her trailed an army of whispers and forgotten sins. Her eyes locked onto Theryx.

  And for once, the mirth in him slowed.

  Together, the Triad of Power—Lightbringer, Necromance Supreme, and the Shadow Monarch—struck as one.

  Magic crackled in fractal spirals. Codes of judgment and entropy folded over themselves. Gravity grew opinions and started swinging punches. The System began to sweat.

  Even then, Theryx held his ground. Barely.

  Bones clashed with sunfire. Shadows wrapped around anti-matter. Data rain burned holes in paradoxes.

  But finally, the pressure began to tell. Theryx’s grin wavered. One slipper disintegrated. His hat developed sentience and abandoned him with a whisper: “Nope.”

  He panted, still upright, smoking slightly.

  Then he laughed. A low, exhausted, irreverent chuckle.

  He raised one singed eyebrow and wagged a cracked spoon at them.

  “Whew. Well played. See you next time, lovebirds,” he winked at Shadow, “...and skeleton dad and LED face.”

  And with a flick of his fingers, he vanished in a poof of glitter, tea leaves, and improbable jazz.

  The Triad stood in silence. The battlefield slowly untwisted itself.

  Lightbringer muttered, “…What even is he?”

  Shadow Monarch didn’t answer. Her eyes lingered where Theryx had stood, her fingers tightening on the hilt that had once ended a Paragon.

  Far, far away, Theryx reappeared atop a floating chair made of baguettes. He popped a grape into his mouth.

  “Too old for this nonsense,” he murmured. Then grinned. “But not that old.”

  ***