The Moon Sigil’s light was a cooling balm on the searing memory of the Rift’s touch. Lyra stared at the mark on her palm, the crescent moon and star seeming to pulse with a rhythm that was both alien and deeply, fundamentally familiar. It was a rhythm of tides, of quiet cycles, of a light that did not burn but revealed.“The Silver Lady…” Lyra whispered, the title feeling strange on her tongue. “Who was she?”Morwen’s gaze was distant, looking into the granite archives of her people’s memory. “A myth from before myths were written. She who walked when the world was young, a balance to the first Sovereign’s dawn. Where his power was a roaring fire, hers was the silent, pulling sea. Where he built, she preserved. She was forgotten when the Star Age began, her gentle ways overshadowed by the Sovereign’s brilliant, brutal light.” The Chieftain’s flinty eyes returned to Lyra. “The stories say she did not die. She slept, waiting for a time when the balance would be needed again. It seems th

The industrial din of the Tribunal’s forge was a sacrilege. It was a mechanical scream over the Cradle’s deep, primal hum, a sound that made Ren’s teeth ache and the shadow within him coil in revulsion. From their high gantry, they watched the Talon warriors patrol with a predator’s disdain, their loyalty purchased with promises of dominance in a world scrubbed clean of the Sovereign’s chaotic influence.Kael’s grip on Ren’s arm was iron. “Not yet,” he breathed, his voice barely a whisper. “He’s bait. You charge down there, and you’re playing right into his hands.”Ren knew he was right. Valerius stood with his back to them, a picture of calm authority, but the air around him was threaded with subtle, probing energies. He was waiting. He knew the Sovereign would come. This entire operation, the Rift, the Manifest, the Talon alliance, was a snare designed for one purpose: to provoke the Beast Sovereign into a final, catastrophic loss of control.“The Manifest is the key,” Ren forced ou

The world ended not with a roar, but with a silence that screamed.One moment, Kael was there, a solid, stubborn, infuriatingly permanent fact in Ren’s universe. The next, he was… not. There was no body, no blood, no final word. There was only absence. A perfect, vacuum-like void where his friend had stood. The Dusk Manifest’s attack hadn't killed him; it had retroactively declared that he had never been.The supernova of grief that had vaporized the Manifest left nothing in its wake but a glassy, hollow crater and a silence so profound it felt like the universe itself had been punched in the gut.Ren stood at the crater's edge, his hand still outstretched. The golden light was gone. The star-mark on his chest was dull, inert. He felt… nothing. A vast, howling emptiness where his power, his purpose, his rage, had been. He was a shell. A Sovereign without a throne, a man without his compass.He didn't see the surviving Talon scrambling to retreat. He didn't hear Valerius barking orders

The world outside the Cradle was a study in muted violence. The sky, a bruised tapestry of perpetual twilight this far north, offered no comfort. The wind that scoured the frozen sea and black rock carried a new sharpness, the taste of ozone and something else, something metallic and final, like the air after a lightning strike that has claimed a life.They moved in a silence that was its own language. Anya and her warrior took point, their senses stretched to the horizon, reading the ice and wind for threats both tangible and unseen. Their forms were tense, not just with the alertness of soldiers, but with the weight of what had been left behind in the glassed crater.In the center of their small formation, Ren walked.He was a ghost of the Sovereign. The golden light that had once radiated from him was gone, extinguished. His star-mark was visible through his torn tunic, but it was inert, a faded tattoo on skin that seemed too pale. He did not hunch or stumble. His posture was strai

The blight was a physical weight, a greasy film on the world that clung to the skin and soured the tongue. But the deeper they journeyed south, following the ghost of the severed star-vein on the Starborne charts, the more the nature of the sickness changed. The grey, crumbling decay began to give way to a sharper, more frantic energy. The air, once stagnant, began to move.At first, it was just a breeze, a sigh through the skeletal trees. But within hours, it had built into a constant, keening wind that tore at their clothes and whipped stinging particles of dead earth into their faces. This was no natural weather. It was the Starwind, the celestial breath of the world, the great current that carried energy along the star-veins. And it was breaking.It whipped in chaotic, contradictory gusts, one moment hot and dry as a forge, the next cold enough to freeze the breath in their lungs. It didn't blow from one direction; it swirled and eddied, as if lost, screaming in frustration agains