The wind had not yet settled over the ravine where Nathan fell.Ash drifted from the scorched peaks of the Noctis Range, a place so remote even the Sovereign Codex mapped it in riddles. The duel had left the valley carved with gouges of scorched earth and splintered stone. Every tree in a hundred-meter radius had been flattened like crushed matchsticks. And still, Nathan lay there—barely breathing, one arm mangled at the elbow, the Ring of Dominion dim against his wrist.Above him, the sky shimmered with the aftershock of mirrored thought.Kairo’s “mirror mind” had been more than defense. It had been a psychic labyrinth—every emotion Nathan tried to weaponize had been thrown back at him, amplified, dissected, turned cruel.Nathan had struck first. He’d summoned Dominion into a fractal blade of pure control, aiming to cleave through Kairo’s aura.But Kairo hadn’t blocked.He’d reflected.Every move Nathan made had rebounded. Every thought twisted. For a moment, Nathan had felt the spli

The whisper of salt hung in the air long after the boy’s vision faded. Harper could still feel his final words etched along her spine—“He’s trying to start it over.”That night, the call came from the Pacific node.An old tectonic fault had registered a frequency spike beneath the Mariana Basin. Not seismic. Not natural. The council’s seafloor monitors, long dormant, suddenly blinked with recognizable coding: ring resonance—corrupted, fractured, and old.Miko stood before the glowing sonar projection, fingers twitching. “It’s a Leviathan,” she said. “An ancient one. Sleeping for centuries. The fragment isn’t embedded in the ocean floor—it’s in its skull.”Nathan stared at the display. “How much of the Seventh?”“A quarter, maybe less,” Miko said. “But it’s enough to infect dreamstates. Enough to bend causality.”Harper folded her arms. “So we can’t remove it physically.”“No,” Nathan replied. “We will enter its mind.”Beneath a dome of reinforced biospheres, the descent was brutal. Pr

The ink hadn’t yet dried on the declaration of war.Nathan stood in the central chamber of the Nova Point sanctuary, palms braced against a schematic sprawled across the long obsidian table. The air was thick with the scent of old ozone and fresher arguments. The hologram above the table spun slowly—an image of the Ring fragments glowing like stars orbiting a storm.Harper stood beside him, silent but alert. Her voice had returned, but not entirely hers. The words she spoke now echoed faintly, like memory echoing down a canyon. Even Nathan, who could read storms in a person’s silence, didn’t fully know what price she’d paid for that partial return.“There's a way,” Nathan finally said. “To sever a fragment without killing the bearer.”The others looked up.“But?” Miko asked.Nathan tapped the schematic. “It requires a sacrifice. One of us would have to willingly part with their ring. Entirely. Permanently.”Silence spread like frost. Even the monk, usually unreadable, stiffened.Harpe

The sky no longer followed rules. Over Nova Point, sunlight refracted at strange angles, casting shadows that bent against their own grain. Clocks stuttered, skipped, and sometimes reversed. Birds flew in circles, then vanished mid-flight. The oceans swelled without wind. On the western coast, the stars flickered in broad daylight—entire constellations rearranging as though the heavens were remapping themselves by will alone. The End Convergence had begun. At the southern edge of the world, buried beneath the granite shelves of Ardent Cradle, Nathan descended into a chamber known only to the original Sovereign lineage. A vault with no key, no door, no defined space—only threshold and silence. The six rings hung around his neck in a tempered alloy chain, each nested in its dormant state. Power coiled beneath his skin like static. Dominion, Vision, Continuum, Flux, Sacrifice, Renewal—each represented a sliver of what had once been unity. And now, for the first time, he needed all o

As the last threads of memory dissolved into stardust, the Astral plane began to settle, shimmering with the aftermath of the Severance Protocol. Harper’s breath slowed beside Nathan, her hand still faintly glowing from channeling the Rite. But time had not fully healed—and across the collapsing corridors of forgotten thought, a deeper fracture pulsed. The echo of Praelor’s dominion, buried but not broken, stirred in defiance. Nathan turned. His work was not done.---Nathan stepped through the silver breach, his coat whipping against the ripples of untime. The chamber he entered was both infinite and enclosed, walls bending around paradoxes—scrolls burning in reverse, ink flowing back into pens, relics whispering their own creation. At its center, Praelor waited.The proto-Sovereign stood tall, his body stitched together from archives of civilizations that never existed, eyes smoldering with stolen insight. “You dare walk into my sanctum,” he hissed, “with broken time hanging off you