The voice from the darkness didn't just sound like Adrian's mother—it smelled like her. That faint lavender-and-iron scent of her handkerchiefs, the starch from her nurse's uniform, even the particular acrid tang of the hospital antiseptic she could never quite wash away. The sensory assault hit with such violence that Adrian's knees buckled.

  Kaelis' fungal veins flared crimson, spelling out a new message across his rotting arm:

  DON'T LISTEN TO THE BONES

  Too late.

  The Lullaby of Decay

  The thing emerging from the eighth restraint's darkness wasn't a body—it was a memory given form.

  First came the hands—his mother's hands—down to the chipped pink nail polish she'd worn the week she died. Then the arms, the shoulders, the chest. But where the face should have been, there was only a swirling vortex of:

  

  
• 
  
    Shredded hospital gown fabric
  
    


  
• 
  
    Broken syringe fragments
  
    


  
• 
  
    Pages torn from Adrian's childhood diary
  
    


  

  It sang in perfect mimicry of her voice:

  "Hush now, my lightning bug... the doctor just wants to see how bright you can burn..."

  Adrian's VII-OMEGA brand unfolded like a grotesque flower, each petal revealing another repressed memory:

  

  
1. 
   
     Age 6: A plague doctor watching his sandbox through the backyard fence
   
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2. 
   
     Age 12: Waking during a tonsillectomy to see Vaulk's mask hovering above
   
     


  
3. 
   
     The Crash: Not an accident—a perfectly timed extraction
   
     


  

  The Alphas' Last Stand

  Alpha-6 moved first, his lightning scars forming a cage around the memory-creature. "It's mining your mortality!" he shouted as the thing's hands passed through his defenses like smoke.

  The effect was instantaneous. Alpha-6 aged fifty years in three seconds, his body collapsing into dust that spelled out:

  HE CONSUMES LOVE FIRST

  Alpha-3's fungal armor sprouted thorns as she charged. "We forgot this part last cycle!" Her attack connected—and the thing absorbed her, regurgitating a child's crayon drawing of their battle.

  Kaelis grabbed Adrian's face, his remaining eye weeping black fluid. "The brands weren't to mark us. They were to make us forget being marked already." His fungal veins showed one final image:

  A newborn Adrian in a hospital bassinet, his tiny chest already bearing a faint VII-OMEGA birthmark.

  The Mortality Engine

  The surgical rig transformed. Bone restraints became syringes, pumping with:

  

  
1. 
   
     Syringe #1: Alpha-1's stolen defiance (Kaelis' essence)
   
     


  
2. 
   
     Syringe #4: Alpha-3's fungal symbiosis
   
     


  
3. 
   
     Syringe #7: Adrian's childhood memories
   
     


  

  The machine whispered in Vaulk's voice:

  "The Demon King isn't a being. It's a process. And you're the final ingredient."

  Beneath them, the chamber floor dissolved to reveal the true Eclipse Vault—a colossal heart made from seven generations of hunters, each ventricle pulsing with a different demon lord's power. At its apex stood an empty glass incubator labeled:

  OMEGA PRIME: FINAL CYCLE

  The Choice

  The memory-creature extended its patchwork hand. "Come home, Adrian. Your sandbox toys miss you."

  Kaelis' corpse suddenly spasmed, his fungal network transmitting a final message directly into Adrian's optic nerve—a grainy memory of the original Surgeon weeping over the first Omega's corpse.

  The words scrawled in blood on the incubation chamber:

  THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO REMEMBER WHAT YOU DID