Before there were stars, before silence had a name, the Reaper was. It did not rule and it did not speak. It was simply the truth that hung over everything yet to come: whatever begins must, in time, end.
The thirteen Gods rose in answer to it, the way a blade is forged because something needs cutting. They built worlds and time and souls and Heaven and the long architecture of balance, and they did all of it for one quiet purpose — to delay the Reaper's patience for as long as creation could be made to hold.
It has not moved in any age that the celestial scribes can remember. It does not need to. It waits behind every other thing in this chronicle, untouched and undisturbed, and what every God and every Archangel guards against, in the end, is the moment balance fails badly enough to wake it. If that moment comes, the war between Drexel and the Light and the Infernum will no longer matter. Everything will end.
