Ember Oath: The Pyre Genealogy

The bronze forest pulsed like a diseased heart in the void, its roots burrowing through dimensions to siphon the death-throes of dying universes. Seryn's mechanical heartbeat—once a steady metronome for reality—now thundered arrhythmically. With each contraction, three parallel worlds aged millennia, their stars bleeding entropy into the forest's vascular system. He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling gears grind backward beneath crystallized flesh. Quantum static crackled under his skin, unraveling his form into shimmering probability clouds. 

Gurak's consciousness erupted from a root fissure in a burst of corrupted pixels, morphing into a bioluminescent jellyfish made of glitching error codes. "Congrats, maestro," she crackled, tentacles sparking with holographic projections of Seryn's alternate selves. "Your existential crisis just became the multiverse's worst fucking metronome." Her stinging filaments displayed the first Octavius' confession logs—data streams meant to be erased now seeping into newborn realities through fractal root capillaries. 

When Seryn brushed a trembling hand against a leaf, its surface collapsed into a Klein-glass viewport. Through the warped pane, he witnessed grotesque reflections: a tyrant version of himself force-feeding ash-biscuits to mewling infant gods; his leviathan doppelgänger using tentacles to demonstrate recursive logic to wide-eyed starfish children. Deeper still, a flickering signal cut through the noise—Eluinora's coral dagger fused to the causal chain of Universe #7741-Δ, its blade melting under the weight of accelerated entropy. 

Black resin oozed from bark fissures, coagulating into the first Octavius' visage. "Every mended fracture leaves new cracks," the effigy intoned, its voice resonating through Seryn's corroding bones. "To observe is to infect. To correct is to corrupt." 

Gurak's jellyfish form convulsed with pixelated laughter. "Cheer up, corpse-heart! At least your fuckups make great fertilizer!" She ejected a data-pod containing the original sin—footage of the first Octavius weeping over his lover's entropy-ravaged corpse. The pod dissolved into the roots, poisoning three nascent universes with recursive grief. 

Seryn's erosion-marks flared as bronze dendrites erupted from his sternum, tethering him to the forest's central trunk. He became the axis of a dying cosmos, his every breath a countdown to someone else's apocalypse. Somewhere in the bleeding roots, Eluinora's dagger pulsed like a trapped heartbeat. 

The observer had become the plague.