The blood hadn’t stopped falling.Kael stood in the ash, boots sinking into the still-warm remains of something once alive. Smoke curled through the ruin like breath. All around him, silence gripped the field like a jaw. No birds. No wind. Only the soft, wet hush of blood soaking stone.His blade dripped red.Not with the blood of enemies.This time, it was his own.Lira pressed a hand against his shoulder. Her face was smeared with soot and streaked with something more fragile than fear.“You’re bleeding,” she said.Kael didn’t answer.His eyes were fixed on the thing that had crawled from the pit. A god, they said. Or what was left of one. Now it lay broken, limbs twisted like roots starved of sun, jaw wide in a scream that had never finished.Its last breath had burned the name of a forgotten world into Kael’s mind.A world he came from.Not this one.Not entirely.“I know who I am,” he said.Lira didn’t ask what he meant. She only looked at the spiral burning faintly on his wrist,

The wind howled over the shattered plateau as Kael stared down at the smoldering crater where the false god had fallen.Smoke rose in coils, thick with magic and blood.Lira stood beside him, face streaked with ash, her sword still humming with the aftershock of their strike. Behind them, the last of the Wyrmborne fled into the mist, their shrieks fading into silence.But Kael didn’t move.Not yet.The spiral on his palm had stopped glowing.The Veiled Crown on his brow was cracked, its fire dimming.And in his chest, something old had awakened.Not rage.Not grief.Memory.“Do you feel that?” Lira asked.Kael nodded.The ground was whispering.It started as a tremor. Then came the sound, not from above, but from deep below. A voice not made of words, but of hunger. As if the earth itself was remembering something it had tried to forget.“Beneath,” Kael said.Lira stepped back. “It’s not over, is it?”Kael shook his head.It never was.Behind them, Nyra limped forward, a gash across h

The ground trembled beneath Kael’s feet.Not from war.Not from thunder.But from something older. Something deeper.Something that had woken.He stood at the edge of the ruined sanctum, his boots pressing into ash that still smoldered from the last Rite. Behind him, the remnants of the Hollow Crown’s elite waited in silence. Blades ready. Faces grim. Varyn stood among them, her fingers still bleeding from the spell she had cracked open an hour before. Raen hadn’t said a word since the storm hit.No one dared speak now.Before them stretched the broken altar of Mairis, the Flame-Warden long forgotten by the modern world. Half her temple had collapsed when the Gate sent its first pulse. The other half was buried in prayer and dust.But it was the altar that mattered.Because it wasn’t cold.It was breathing.Kael stepped forward, sword drawn.The moment he touched the ancient stone, it hissed with heat and glowed.Symbols ignited. Flames crawled from rune to rune in a language no one a

The fire hadn’t died down.It roared behind Kael, sending waves of heat licking across his back as he stepped over the smoldering wreckage of the enemy’s siege engine. Smoke bled into the sky. The battlefield behind him was a graveyard of iron and bone.But ahead—was silence.Too clean.Kael moved carefully now. His breath was shallow, drawn through clenched teeth. Blood dried along his arm, flaking off with each movement. His blade hung low in his grip, blackened but not dulled. The runes along its edge still pulsed.There was something wrong with the silence.His boots crunched over ash. The ruined field stretched into a valley choked with dead trees, and beyond them, stone ruins half-swallowed by the earth. A dead fortress. Abandoned for centuries.But it wasn’t empty.He felt it before he saw anything. That buzz beneath the skin. That whisper crawling through his thoughts like fingers pressing into his skull. It was her power. Not the demoness—not Veyla.The Seer.“Come no further

The sky bled. Red poured over the shattered spires of Elreth’s old capital as Kael stood on the brink of the palace ruins, breathing smoke and ash. His cloak was torn. His armor dented. His left arm barely moved. But his grip on the Godpiercer never wavered.Ahead, across the jagged wreckage of a once-glorious throne hall, stood Maldrik.But it was no longer the sorcerer general who had chased Kael through fire and war.Maldrik’s body was wrapped in shadows. His eyes were hollow pits of silver flame. Curses crawled like ink over his skin, binding him to something far older than himself. The ancient glyphs pulsed with life, rewriting his essence, reshaping him into something beyond human.“You should have fled,” Maldrik said, voice hollow like it echoed from inside a tomb. “This isn’t a battle anymore, Kael. It’s a reckoning.”Kael didn’t answer. His fingers flexed around the Godpiercer’s grip. Every heartbeat sent pain down his spine. But he welcomed it. Pain was proof he was still al