The ground trembled beneath their feet as the tear in the sky widened with a sound like metal splitting open. Diana tightened her grip on her staff, her pulse beating too fast, too heavy. Behind her, Alaric lay still—unmoving except for the weak rise and fall of his chest. She knelt beside him once more, brushing dust from his cheek. His skin was cold.“Father… please wake up,” she whispered.But he didn’t, and the world was running out of time.Xavier stepped between her and the growing darkness overhead. The priestess hovered beside him, her pale hands glowing with a soft blue aura as she tried—and failed—to shield them from the pressure spilling into the world.Aetherion stood at their front, shoulders squared, eyes fixed on the sky where four colossal silhouettes stepped out of the rift.The first one touched the earth and the ground cracked beneath its weight.Then the second, the third, the fourth, so smaller than the others but wrapped in a strange quiet that made the air tight

The world stood there all so frozen, just hanging between the breath and some sort of collapse.Diana lay on the cracked ground, struggling to rise as the Weaver’s thread tightened around her body like a glowing wire of black-silver light. Each pulse of it sent pain spiraling through her chest and limbs. She tried to move, tried to shout, but the thread bound her completely.Xavier lunged toward her. “Let her go!” but the Weaver lifted a hand. Xavier stopped mid-movement, suspended in the air like a puppet whose strings had twisted into knots. His body twitched as he fought against the invisible pressure, teeth gritted, sweat dripping down his face.“Xavier!” Diana cried out as her voice was now so cracked under the strain of the thread coiling around her ribs.Marcus staggered forward, dragging his wounded shoulder, spear trembling in his grip. “You touch her again… and I’ll rip you apart.” but even as he looked exhausted all the Remnants had drained him in a way that no god had eve

The world felt strangely silent after Erevan vanished into the veil, taking his Remnant forces with him. That silence was misleading, though. It wasn’t peace. It was pressure. It was the air holding its breath before a wave crashed over everything.Far beyond the valley where Diana, Marcus, and the others rested, the sky over the northern wastes shifted into a color that didn’t exist in normal nature of something between bruised violet and drowned blue. The clouds twisted into spirals like claws.The war had begun elsewhere, and Lyriana, the Oracle of the First Tongue, stood alone on the rim of an abandoned cliff. Her white hair blew over her face as she focused on the trembling horizon. Her staff—carved from bones of the earliest guardians—glowed faintly each time the earth rumbled.She whispered, “The seal is thinning.”The twins who had once traveled with Diana in the early chapters and Kora and Nima had appeared behind her. Older now, stronger, their once-bright eyes darkened with

The storm that had been building across the horizon finally broke above the battlefield, drowning the ruins in sheets of silver rain. The sky trembled not with thunder, but with the distant roar of something older than storms, something stretching awake from ages long forgotten.Marcus felt the tremor run through the earth beneath his boots. He didn’t need anyone to tell him what it was.Elysium was stirring.“Keep your guard up!” he shouted, as he was shielding Diana with his body as another blinding wave of celestial heat burst from the ruptured sky.She didn’t flinch. She stood drenched, hair plastered to her cheeks, eyes fixed on the heavens. “It’s not just the Realm opening,” she whispered. “Someone is forcing it.”Marcus followed her gaze, and his breath stilled.High above the clouds, a slit of pure gold widened like an eye cracking open.Through it, a silhouette stepped into existence.Chronos, he was the first Titan, the Father of all cycles and the one who had started everyt

For a heartbeat, everything fell silent, even the twisted field of distorted time paused, as if reality itself had forgotten how to move.Catherine—Diana’s mother, the woman Marcus had believed dead for years—stood between them and Chronos, her presence brighter than the rising sun. Her hair lifted gently in the faint wind of her own power, glowing in streaks of warm gold. The blade in her hand shimmered with morning light, its edge humming like a song from another world.Diana could not breathe.“Mother…” she whispered.Catherine’s eyes softened, only for a moment. “My star.”The words broke Diana’s composure. Tears slipped silently down her cheeks. Marcus felt her grip tighten around his sleeve, her body trembling—not with fear but with the shock of seeing the woman she had mourned half her life.Chronos’s voice cut through the moment like a crack in the sky.“You should not exist.”Catherine turned her gaze to him, calm, sharp, unshaken. “You failed to notice what I became. That w