God of Death: Rise of the NPC Overlord -
Chapter 82 - 83: The Broken Choir
Chapter 82: Chapter 83: The Broken Choir
The stars had no voice.
Not anymore.
Where once the heavens sang of balance, of harmony, of gods and mortals woven in cosmic rhythm... now there was only silence. That silence stretched from the Ashen Cradle into the first shattered realm claimed by the Hollow Pantheon.
A world called Aetherion—once a realm of song.
Now a graveyard.
The choir had once stood at the edge of reality, a pantheon of godly bards who held together a realm crafted entirely from music and memory. They were not warriors. They were not tyrants. They were creators.
Their melodies kept the skies intact. Their hymns held cities in the air. Their songs healed, soothed, elevated entire races.
But music, like all things, could break.
And when Darius arrived with the Hollow Pantheon, the first note to shatter was hope.
Darius walked the steps of the Sky Symphony Hall, surrounded by silence.
The architecture still echoed its former beauty—great spiraling arches of glass-harmony, walls that shifted color with sound, crystalline balconies floating without support. But all of it was cracked. Dissonant. Ruined.
At the top of the hall, they waited—the Broken Choir, the last of Aetherion’s divine defenders.
Six in number. Beautiful, bleeding, defiant.
Their voices could still shape reality.
But they sang not with unity now.
Only war.
The leader, Maelistra the Last Note, raised her staff of silver-thorned chords and pointed it toward the Hollow King.
"You are not welcome here, god of hunger," she said. Her voice echoed with ancient power—sweet and bitter and endlessly sad.
"We remember what you were. Mortal. Bound by love. Fueled by fear. We do not fear what you’ve become."
Darius stepped forward, his cloak of dark law unraveling behind him like a black aurora.
His voice cracked the stained glass.
"I have no use for memory," he replied. "Only obedience."
Maelistra closed her eyes. "Then you will have neither."
The Broken Choir sang.
Their song was not beautiful—it was desperate. Raw. It clawed at the walls of the realm itself, summoning storms of sound, blades of resonance, shields of memory. Each note conjured new life: spectral guardians, spirit-song beasts, reflections of old love.
For a moment... the sky turned gold again.
For a moment... the world remembered what it meant to hope.
But Darius was done with hope.
He raised a single hand.
And from the Ashen Cradle’s heart, his Pantheon answered.
---
Kaela arrived first, dropping from the void with a scream like glass being ground into flesh. Chaos exploded from her limbs—unpredictable, beautiful, monstrous. She spun through the spirit beasts and shredded melody into discord.
"Pretty notes," she laughed. "Let’s see what they sound like when I snap their necks!"
Nyx followed—silent, cloaked in midnight hate. Her blades did not sing; they whispered. And every cut she made stole more than blood—it stole harmony, stealing the Choir’s song from their throats before they could cry.
One by one, the Choir faltered.
One by one, the music broke.
Maelistra held her ground, blood pouring from her mouth, still singing—voice hoarse, soul unraveling.
"You were beautiful once," she whispered to Darius, collapsing to her knees. "You could have saved us all."
Darius stepped forward.
"I was never here to save."
He pressed his hand to her chest.
And in a burst of blackened light, Maelistra’s song was devoured.
When the battle ended, Aetherion fell.
Its floating cities crashed to earth.
Its musical winds fell silent.
Its people knelt or burned.
From its ashes rose a new choir—the Choir of Silence, stitched together from god-corpses and spectral echoes, bound by Darius’s new law.
They would not sing.
They would scream.
Later, in the ruined temple of Echoes, Celestia wept.
She sat alone in the shattered choir pit, her hands coated in divine dust. Around her, the last remnants of harmony faded into ash. Aetherion had been a place of peace, and she had watched it fall by the hand of the man she still called king.
She didn’t cry for the gods. Not even for the dead.
She cried because part of her still loved him.
And she didn’t know if that part deserved to live.
Meanwhile, far across the void, in a shadowed sanctuary untouched by gods or time...
The Rebellion stirred.
They had seen Aetherion fall.
They had heard the scream of Maelistra echo across fractured realms.
And they knew:
The Hollow King was not invincible.
He bled.
He doubted.
He remembered.
And so, beneath a banner of broken stars, they began to gather:
the Dreaming Saint,
the Shattered Prophet,
the Twice-Killed Queen,
and the last heir of a fallen world—
the boy who once knew Darius by name.
They would rise not with swords, but with memory.
Not with gods... but with truth.
and the stirring storm within Darius.
The ruins of Aetherion smoldered like a ruined cathedral. Winds no longer sang. They howled.
Darius stood at the shattered summit of the Sky Symphony Hall, looking down upon the corpses of a divine realm, his dark cloak billowing in silence. Around him, the Hollow Pantheon waited, bloodied but victorious.
Kaela, crouched atop a broken obelisk, hummed mockingly, fingers playing with strands of spectral hair she’d torn from a slain spirit.
Nyx cleaned her blades in quiet ritual, eyes never leaving Darius.
Celestia stood apart—gazing toward the edge of the realm where nothing moved. Her golden light flickered like a dying candle.
"Another one falls," Kaela purred. "You’re becoming quite the collector of ruined heavens."
Darius didn’t respond.
Because something was wrong.
He felt it.
A tremor in his soul.
A voice not his.
A sensation not of power—but of loss.
In the hollow beneath the ruins, deep in the old choir’s resonance vaults, Darius found it.
A memory.
Not his own... but left behind by Maelistra, encoded in the echo of her last song.
It activated as he stepped into the vault.
A vision formed.
Not just sound—but truth.
Maelistra appeared, her body made of fading starlight. She stood before him not as an enemy, but as a witness.
"If you’re seeing this," she said softly, "then I failed."
Her voice trembled. "But you must understand... even in failure, I sing."
Behind her, images shimmered—the Choir’s first day, when they sang the song that saved a dying world. Darius as a boy, once wide-eyed and mortal, listening to their harmonies in awe through a cracked screen on Earth.
"Before you were a king... you were a child," Maelistra whispered. "You cried when our music ended. You believed it should never die."
Darius’s expression darkened.
She stepped closer. "So tell me, Hollow King... if even the part of you that remembers joy still lives..."
"...why do you keep killing it?"
The memory ended.
Darius was left in silence, fists clenched, breath uneven.
His eyes—burning like twin stars—flickered.
For one fragile moment...
He looked human again.
Above, on the ruins, Celestia watched him emerge from the vault.
She saw the shake in his hand. The slowness in his step.
And for the first time in many Chapters of blood and fury...
She feared for him.
Not as a soldier.
Not as a follower.
But as the only woman who knew what his silence truly meant.
He was slipping.
And not even he knew it.
Far across the void, beneath the veil of an unborn realm, the Rebellion prepared.
The Dreaming Saint awoke screaming—his visions fractured and chaotic.
He had seen Aetherion fall.
He had heard the broken music.
But what made him weep—
—was not Darius’s power.
It was his hesitation.
"There’s still something left in him," the Saint whispered to the other rebels, voice ragged.
The Shattered Prophet shook her head. "And that’s what makes him dangerous."
But the Twice-Killed Queen knelt before their map of fallen realms and placed a single, shaking finger on the Hollow King’s next destination.
"If we are to stop him... it begins with the Womb," she murmured.
"And ends... with the girl."
Back in Aetherion, as night fell across the ruins, Darius stood alone on the last floating shard of the realm.
The stars above refused to shine.
His voice, when it came, was no longer thunder.
Just a whisper.
"...Maelistra."
A single line of golden blood ran down his cheek.
And the Hollow King turned away.
Toward war.
Toward rebellion.
Toward something he could no longer name.
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