The air in the Nexus had shifted.What was once a silence of dust and memory now breathed.Kael stood at the edge of the monolith’s cracked reflection, watching faint currents of gold light twist through the air like veins of liquid thought. Every pulse matched the beat of his heart and every time it struck, he could feel the world around him answer.Selene circled him warily, hand near her blade. “It’s getting stronger,” she said softly. “The Rhythm. You’re feeding it.”Kael didn’t look at her. “It’s feeding me.”The light flared, rippling outward in concentric rings that shimmered through the dust. The entire cavern responded, the walls vibrating faintly, the very air trembling with an unseen resonance.Selene took a step back. “Kael, stop!”He flinched, the gold in his eyes dimming. For a moment, she saw the man beneath the weight of everything, the exhaustion, the guilt, the desperate need to understand what he’d become.“I can’t,” he whispered. “Every time I pull back, it drags m

Dawn came slow.The horizon glowed dull red, bleeding through the haze of sand. Kael woke before the light reached them, his body stiff from the cold stone beneath. For a few seconds, he couldn’t remember where he was. Only the steady sound of breathing beside him pulled him back to himself.Selene slept lightly, her arm draped across her pack, hand still close to her blade even in rest. The wind lifted a few strands of her hair across her face, and for a brief, quiet moment, Kael felt the world shrink to the fragile simplicity of that motion, the rise and fall of her breath, the pale line of dawn creeping up the curve of her shoulder.He should have let her sleep longer. But something had changed in the air.He sat up, wincing as pain lanced through his ribs. The mark on his wrist, the Dominion sigil that had burned itself into his skin at the Fane was glowing faintly. Not the bright, consuming light from before, but a soft pulse.When he turned his hand toward the rising sun, the pu

Dawn came like a wound, sharp, bleeding color across the horizon.Kael and Selene crested the final dune before the desert opened into a vast basin of black stone. The air hummed faintly, as if the earth beneath their boots were inhaling.At the center of that basin stood a monolith towering, smooth, half-buried in sand.It wasn’t carved, it was grown, its surface a fusion of glass and metal that seemed to shift colors with the rising light.And from deep within it, Kael could feel the pulse, the Second Rhythm, steady, waiting.Selene stopped beside him, shielding her eyes.“That’s the Stone Vein?” she whispered. “It doesn’t look asleep.”Kael nodded slowly. The Rhythm inside him was resonating, almost painfully.“It’s been awake longer than we thought.”The wind hissed through the basin. Sand skittered across the stone like whispers running between graves.They began their descent, cautious and silent. Each step drew them deeper into the hum, until it felt less like sound and more li

Every movement sent ripples of fractured reflections across its surface, so that each step they took seemed to echo in light.A low hum vibrated through the soles of their boots. It wasn’t quite sound, not fully. It was a pressure that lived inside bone.Selene squinted into the glare. “It’s… beautiful,” she murmured, then frowned. “And wrong.”Kael didn’t answer. His pulse had already started syncing to the hum beneath their feet, an invisible rhythm threading through marrow and thought. The air tasted of iron and ozone, like a storm that had forgotten how to rain. When he blinked, the world seemed to split for half a heartbeat, two horizons, overlapping. Two Selenes walking slightly out of step with each other.He stopped.Selene turned. “What is it?”Kael pressed a hand to his temple. “I… saw...” He hesitated. “You. Twice.”“Heat mirage?” she asked, but her voice carried that careful edge she used when pretending she wasn’t worried.“Maybe,” he said. But it wasn’t. The mirage didn’

He woke to silence.Then came the pain.It crawled up from his ribs, slow, crawling, wet like something remembering how to live inside him. When he finally opened his eyes, the world was sideways. The ground glittered with black dust, and smoke coiled upward from what used to be the Dominion’s outpost.The air stank of ozone and blood. The shard that once lived in his chest lay inches from his hand, cracked into dozens of mirror splinters. Every fragment reflected a different piece of him, eyes, lips, jaw but none of them aligned.Dorian stared at them for a long time before whispering, hoarse, “You failed me.”The wind answered by scattering the pieces like ash.He tried to stand and nearly collapsed. The golden sigils that had once covered his arms were gone, leaving only faint burns in their shape. His body once a conduit of near divine power felt suddenly mortal. Weak. Breathing hurt, his pulse beat unevenly, like a clock missing half its gears.“You shouldn’t be alive,” a voice m