The battlefield convulsed like a wounded beast.The triple fracture no longer separated into clear realms. Silence, blood, and the warped third all bled into one another, jagged seams tearing across the ground and sky. Armies clashed where they overlapped—soldiers of stillness colliding with shrieking wraiths, both suddenly swallowed by rivers of fire that flowed upward into torn skies.Damian stood at the epicenter, hammers clenched, lungs burning. His breaths no longer belonged to him—they were echoed in silence, roared in blood, and distorted into whispers in the third. He was alive in all three worlds at once, and every second, the boundaries frayed further.At the heart of it stood the third Damian, crowned in stormlight.The storm-crown spun like a broken galaxy, shards orbiting, each one a different possibility of him. His eyes glowed not red, not black, but an impossible shifting hue—like staring into countless reflections at once.And he spoke.“You are already mine.”With a

Damian’s Possession DeepensThe shadow-crown burned cold on Damian’s brow, darker than silence, sharper than blood. His body no longer moved by choice—every twitch of his hand, every breath in his lungs was driven by the whisper now lodged in his wound.Where silence once ruled with stillness, and blood with frenzy, this new force ruled with nothingness.The fracture bent.Rivers reversed their flow, shards collapsed into dust only to reform as black glass. Armies knelt, not in loyalty, but because their forms disintegrated when they tried to resist. Even the crowned self—impaled, fading—could not move against it.The battlefield had a new master.And it wore Damian’s skin.***The Battlefield TransformsThe silence-plane dissolved into blank white plains with no horizon. The blood-plane curdled into veins of dried, rusted ruin. The third path’s jagged glass melted, reshaping into a void-geometry that made Mara’s eyes bleed when she tried to look too long.It wasn’t a battlefield anym

The CollapseThe battlefield screamed.Silence shattered into shards of blinding crystal. Blood erupted into rivers of fire. The void spread like ink through both, swallowing everything it touched.Damian knelt at the center, both hammers raised, his body splitting into stormlight and shadow. His scream tore across all three realms, a sound of breaking bones and breaking time.Mara fell to her knees beside him, clutching his arm, her chains of memory flickering in and out of existence.Eryn stood a few paces away, bow trembling in her grip, one last arrow glowing with her essence.And above them, the fracture itself pulsed like a heart—ready to burst.The shadow’s voice crawled over their skin:“Choose. Kill him or save him. Either path feeds me. Either choice ends you.”***The Edge of DespairMara’s face streaked with tears, but her grip did not loosen.“He’s still here—I can feel him! The shadow wants us to split, Eryn. If we give it division, we hand it everything.”Eryn’s jaw loc

The sky screamed.Not with thunder, not with stormlight, but with something deeper. The battlefield of glass shivered beneath Damian’s knees as the horizon split open like paper torn by an unseen hand.Mara held him tight, chains glowing faintly around her arms, but even those chains trembled, as if ready to break on their own. Eryn lifted her bow, though she knew it was useless—the string frayed and rewove itself, caught in the shifting air.Above them, the wound in the sky widened. And from it came no silence. No blood. No void.It was something else.The shardstorm had been chaos. The fracture had been hunger. But this… this was command.A voice poured from the rift. Not loud, not soft. Just final.“Three paths were toys. Illusions. It was never silence. Never blood. Never unity. Those were scraps you were allowed to fight over. This—”The wound in the sky bled light so bright Damian’s eyes stung, and he clutched his chest.“—this is the Fourth Path. The only one that was ever real

Silence had a new sound.It wasn’t empty anymore. It pulsed — like the echo of something remembering how to exist.Mara woke first.She lay on a field of glass grass that shimmered like dew but cut like mirrors. Above her, the sky was no longer blue or red — it was something else entirely, a shifting canvas of colors that had never existed before.For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Then air found her lungs — strange air, too clean, too sharp.“Eryn?” she whispered.No answer.Her body trembled as she rose, the faint memory of the explosion still clinging to her skin. She remembered Damian’s voice — the moment he crushed the crown. The light. The void. The sound of everything ending.And then… this.A world reborn, yet hollow.The fracture was gone.But so was Damian.***Eryn’s ReturnFar across the horizon, beneath a broken crescent moon that pulsed like a heart, Eryn awoke in silence.Her bow was gone, replaced by a faint scar across her palm shaped like a crown.She sat up, head s