The stairway spiraled downward like the spine of a dead god, each step carved from translucent crystal that glowed faintly beneath Kael’s boots. The deeper they went, the quieter the world became — until even breath felt like an intrusion. Lira’s torch flickered, its flame bending sideways as though the air itself resisted their presence. “It’s colder down here,” she muttered, her breath fogging. Kael’s eyes shimmered faintly blue, the Aetherheart pulsing against his chest. “Not cold,” he said quietly. “Hollow.” The Tower’s second circle was known in the oldest fragments of the Grimoire as Somnus Requiem — the Chamber of Dreaming Echoes. A place where the souls of mages once bound to the Tower lingered, unable to move on. Now, their whispers filled the air like a faint song. The group of survivors — what remained of the Guild’s scattered warriors — followed cautiously. The crimson-clad huntress Seris, the scholar Ren, and the twin sentinels Thalen and Mireya, all moved in a half-

The song did not end in the Tower’s depths. It spread. Across the torn horizon, through shattered ley lines and scarred skies, the melody unfurled — not through air or sound, but through Aether itself. Invisible, incorporeal, yet felt in every pulse of magic that still dared to live. In the southern citadels, scholars awoke screaming as their crystals sang back in forgotten tongues. In the western sands, buried relics of the old Mage Wars stirred beneath dunes — gears shifting, runes reigniting after millennia. Even the oceans trembled, and ships on the Horizon Route reported hearing choirs beneath the waves, as if the sea itself remembered the hymn of the dead. The Tower’s song had become a contagion of memory. Kael stood at the edge of a crumbling plateau, staring at what used to be a forest. Now, it looked like glass — trees frozen mid-motion, roots turned into translucent cords of light, their branches humming faintly with the same tune he heard beneath the bones. Lira j

The night stretched silent across the ruins of the Choir, glass dust swirling like ghostly ash. Kael’s body lay motionless, faintly pulsing with red-blue light beneath his skin. His heartbeat had slowed to an unnatural rhythm—three beats of life, one of silence, over and over. Lira sat beside him, exhausted but alert, watching over him as if her will alone could stop him from slipping away again. The Codex flickered dimly near his hand, its inscriptions fractured from the Tower’s resonance storm. “He’s burning and freezing at the same time,” she whispered, voice raw. “How can anyone survive that?” The Codex’s voice crackled, glitching like broken magic. He is not merely surviving. He is… rewriting the laws of containment. Lira frowned. “What does that even mean?” When flame and frost merge without collapse, they create Aether Equilibrium—a state no human body can maintain. But he is not human anymore. The Aetherheart within him has begun… integration. As if answering the words,

The Tower no longer sang — it listened. The silence that followed Kael’s ascension was not absence; it was anticipation. The entire structure seemed to lean toward him, its spires humming faintly in time with his new heartbeat. The air rippled with invisible threads of energy — fragments of the Tower’s ancient will that had once bound the world together. Kael stood in the hollow of its shadow, the Runeblood Core pulsing faintly beneath his skin. Its light shimmered between silver and deep crimson, flickering like the breath of a sleeping god. Each pulse resonated through the ruins, and with it came whispers — fragments of knowledge, voices from ages before the Mage Wars. Lira approached cautiously, her eyes wide. “It’s… answering you.” He nodded slowly. “It remembers.” The air thickened. All around them, the echoes of mages who had once defended the Tower began to stir again — no longer spectral, but aware. Their translucent forms drifted closer, kneeling in slow, reverent unison

The path to Valenor was no longer one of sky and wind. The floating bridges that once led to the city now twisted through storms of fractured time — corridors of lightning that replayed moments of the past with every step. Kael and Lira pressed forward, cloaked in Aetherlight, their reflections splitting and rejoining as the world struggled to remember what year it was. Below them, the lands of the Lower Continent were still shifting from the Tower’s awakening. Rivers had begun to flow backward; forests whispered in languages no one had spoken in millennia. The world was being rewritten — and Valenor, the city of mages, was at its trembling center. “Hold steady,” Kael warned, his tone sharp as he drew his blade through the distortion ahead. The runes along the steel flared, stabilizing the crack long enough for Lira to step through. When they emerged, the floating city was unrecognizable. The once-pristine citadels of white stone and gold sigils hung in the air like broken pla