The descent from the high cavern was a blurred, frantic rush. The Screaming Pinnacle, its central purpose violated, was convulsing around them. The pulsing violet mycelium that veined the walls was turning a sickly, frantic magenta, throbbing like an infected wound. The very stone groaned and shifted, and the air, once thick with silent menace, was now filled with the shrieks of the Blessed Affliction as their controlling intelligence faltered.Kaelen and the others met them in a trembling corridor, their faces grimed with soot and streaked with sweat. Roric’s shield was dented, and Lyra leaned heavily on her staff, but their eyes blazed with triumph at the sight of Sophia, Ethan—alive and walking—and the new, softly glowing shard in her hand.“The understanding is ours,” Sophia said, her voice cutting through the din. “The Prophet is broken. But the fortress is collapsing.”As if to emphasize her words, a massive chunk of the ceiling sheared away, crashing into the corridor behind th

The world had become a crucible of focused agony. Inside the shimmering dome of Kaelen’s will, Sophia knelt, her face a mask of excruciating concentration. Opalescent light, a fragile fusion of Fire, Wind, and Understanding, flowed from her hands into the small boy. His screams were the only sound that mattered, a raw, human counterpoint to the silent, oppressive dread of the blight. Each one was a shard of glass twisting in Sophia’s soul. She was making progress, unpicking the malicious threads that bound the Spirit shard to his life force, but it was achingly slow. A snail’s pace against an onrushing tide.Outside the dome, chaos reigned: Roric's shield rang like a great bell as earthen fists, summoned by the child with the Earth shard, hammered against it. Lyra and Elara were a blur of motion, not attacking the children but deflecting, diverting, creating barriers of force, and striking disarming blows against limbs guided by an alien will. They were holding back a hurricane with t

Sylvanthol was not a city of ruins. Ruins implied a past life-a memory of grandeur. This was a carcass. The great trees were skeletal fingers clawing at a perpetually twilit sky, their bark replaced by the same pulsing, violet mycelium that veined the earth. The air was a stagnant broth, thick with spores and the psychic residue of mass death. The silence here was not an absence of sound but a presence: a heavy, hungry void that pressed against the eardrums and the soul.At the city’s heart, where the Great Tree of Veridia had once cradled the Aegis Spire in its branches, was the epicenter of the blight. A massive, pulsating mound of the violet fungus, a hundred feet tall, throbbed like a diseased heart. Tendrils of corruption radiated from it, burrowing into the earth and strangling the sky. This was the Womb of Silence. The place where the First Spire had fallen.This entire journey here had been a gauntlet of grief. The image of Ethan offering himself to the Shadow to save them was

The light did not fade so much as it was absorbed, drank in by the woman standing at its center. The cataclysmic radiance of the shard fusion, which had scoured the Womb of Silence from existence, collapsed inward, pulling into the form of Amelia like a star becoming a black hole. For a heartbeat, she was a silhouette against the dying glare, and then she was simply… there.Solid. Real.The silence that followed was different. It was not the hungry silence of the blight, but a breath held by the world itself. The grey ash of the defeated Womb settled around her feet like a shroud. The air, once thick with spores and despair, was now clean, scoured by the final, purifying shockwave.Sophia was the first to move, a half-step forward, her hand outstretched. The word “Amelia” formed on her lips, but no sound emerged. The figure before her was both utterly familiar and profoundly alien.She was the woman from the echoes—the same weary kindness in the set of her mouth, the same sorrow-haunt

The celebrations in Silverhold lasted three days. The city, so long a bastion of grim endurance, gave itself over utterly to a euphoria it had forgotten it could feel. Wine ran in public fountains. The air was thick with the scent of roasting meat and the music of lutes and pipes-a symphony that had been drowned out for a year by the clang of armor and the cries of the sick. They called it the Mending Tide, a wave of relief so powerful it felt like a new season.Amelia moved through it with the same gentle, unhurried grace: allowing adoration, accepting the tears of gratitude, blessing the children brought before her. The carvings that traced her form in the obelisk pulsed steadily with a soft light-a beacon of stability within the turbulent sea of joy. She smiled and listened, rested a hand on the trembling shoulder, and everywhere she went, a deeper quiet followed in her wake-not the silence of the blight, but a profound, healing peace.But Sophia, who carried the echo of the shards