Season 2
A month had passed since the Severed King's fall.
The world healed. Cities were rebuilt. Magic coursed freely once more. The cycle of reincarnation went unchallenged for the first time in centuries. Kairos was a whispered rumor—half myth, half warning.
But far, far in the depths of time, something stirred.
It began with a crack in the Nexus. A tiny one. Almost imperceptible.
Then… the dreams began.
---
Kairos stood in the middle of a silent field.
The sun was awry. Too crimson. The grass shimmered with pale gold. It was a memory—but not his.
A voice on the wind:
> "The Crown sleeps. But not forever."
-----
He turned—and saw a figure off in the distance. Clothed. Faceless. Wreathed with thorns and light.
As he took one step closer, the world around him broke apart like glass.
He woke gasping, the burning on his palm—the one the Soulforger had branded there—the searing hot metal that stung with flame.
---
That night, he stood on top of the Flamespire. Veyra approached him, her cloak billowing in the wind.
"You felt it too," she said with no doubt.
Kairos nodded. "Something's leaking through the cycle. Something old."
Arius progressed, clad in time-thread clothing. "We've seen strange resurrections. Men and women who return with memories not their own. Even some never born. are among us now."
Riven coalesced out of a burst of air, his deathly pale and concerned face worried. "I followed a dream-thread deep into the spiral far down. There is something in the heart of the soulstream. Something walled away there before the First Reign."
Kairos turned slowly. "What is it?"
Riven's gaze drifted to him. "A crown. Not just any crown. The Eclipsed Crown."
Veyra stiffened. "That is a legend. A relic born when the gods still cried blood."
The whisper of Riven was so soft it appeared his lips never parted. "It existed. And it's calling Kairos."
---
They walked to the Hollow Archive, an ancient ruin beyond the borders of time—where it was forbidden that the truths lay hidden. There, they discovered shadows of the truth.
> Before reincarnation, before memory… there was the Crown.
It jailed the first king. The one who ordered death itself.
He was buried not in stone, but in memory. Forgiven by design.
Jensen
As they went down into the archive, walls dripped with shadow.
And then—the first assault.
From out of nowhere, assassins wrapped in anti-light exploded out of the darkness. Their eyes burned with shattered stars. They spoke in unison in perfect harmony:
The Crown arises. The False Soul declines.
Kairos summoned his Soulforger, calling upon ghostly swords crafted of vital life-forces spent eons ago. Veyra shrieked out ghostly shields. Arius halted moments in flashes. Riven shattered himself across seven strands of dreams, blinding the assassins.
The battle was chaos.
Then one assassin broke rank—and shrieked.
His shape dissolved, revealing an aspect of Kairos himself—mad, distorted, twisted by an unrelated memory.
"I wore the Crown," it groaned. "And I saw the end."
Kairos struck him.
But he knew now—this was not just an enemy.
This was a future version of himself from a corrupted timeline.
---
They stood among the wreckage after combat.
Veyra bled. Riven disintegrated. Arius looked at burning shreds of a timeline.
Kairos approached the edge of a massive chasm, where the wind whispered forgotten names.
He looked down… and the voice returned.
> "You fixed the cycle. But not the source. You only delayed the fall."
>
"The Eclipsed Crown awaits."
>
"Come seek me out."
Kairos spoke to his friends.
"We're not done," he said. "This isn't a second war—it's the first one, stirring at last."
Arius's head nodded in relentless accord. "Where do we start?"
Kairos's eyes blazed with primal fires.
"We go after the first life."
---