On the peak, beneath the Wishing Tree, Orion opened his eyes—he'd shut them at some point no one had marked—and in a single glance saw across ten thousand years, saw through true and false, broke the illusion clean.
"So that's how it is."
A wind kicked up around him, gentle at first, then violent, tearing at everything near and dragging it inward. Orion sprang up and came to rest on the Wishing Tree, neither grieved nor glad.
Then he became a great sun—one that drank light and darkness in reverse. Beyond the walls, the monsters locked in slaughter with the dream-spiders and the Death-Soul war-thralls dissolved into vapor, rose toward the sky, and were swallowed whole. Far off, the fog-pall blanketing the Blackstone City region drained away; the monsters stopped spawning, every shadow devoured. All of it Orion took in a single swallow, fuel for his own strength.
The war stopped, and the Mirage Void showed its truest face.
