The kneeling figures filled the chamber like broken statues. Their silence was not obedience, but expectation. Each mirrored mask gleamed faintly in the dying light of the Crown, distorted reflections of Kairen's own face staring back at him.
The weight of their gaze was unbearable. He gripped his sword tighter, his knuckles white, the blade trembling. He wanted to lift it, to swing it downward, to shatter the Crown and scatter the remnants of the Watchmaker's will. But the muscles in his arm refused him.
The voice was still there. Low. Patient. You think you hold the blade, but the blade holds you. Do you not see? You've already begun.
The Crown pulsed again. This time, Kairen didn't resist the pull—his vision clouded, and the world around him warped. The chamber's walls dissolved into endless clockwork. Gears rotated in spirals across infinity, great pendulums swung like the heartbeat of a dead god. In the center of it all sat the Throne of Gears, no longer empty.
Safaa was there.
Or something wearing her face.
She was draped in the cloak of ticking shadows, her skin now glimmering with the metallic sheen he had seen moments before she was consumed. Yet her eyes… her eyes were still hers—filled with sorrow, filled with truth.
"Kairen," she whispered, though her lips did not move. The sound was inside him, threading into the cracks of his soul. "It was never meant to be me. I was the key… but the lock was always you."
The vision trembled. He saw himself seated upon the throne, gears coiling around his arms like serpents, the Crown of Shards resting upon his brow. He looked regal, terrible, infinite—and utterly alone.
Kairen ripped his gaze away, gasping for breath. His knees nearly buckled, but he held himself upright. "No," he growled, his voice raw, as if he could snarl away destiny itself. "I am not him. I am not the Watchmaker."
The Crown disagreed.
It flared with a sudden, blinding light. The shards spun outward like blades, circling him in a deadly halo. The Mirror Masks pressed their foreheads to the ground, whispering broken fragments of praise. He rises… He returns… The chain inherits…
Kairen's chest heaved. Sweat stung his eyes. He raised his sword, its edge catching the light of the spinning shards. For one final moment, his mind split—warrior against heir, destroyer against inheritor.
And then—
The Crown moved.
Not downward, not upward—but forward. Toward him. The halo of shards collapsed in a storm of glass and light, pressing against his body, burning into his skin, trying to fit. The inheritance wasn't asking. It was claiming.
Kairen screamed, caught between fury and agony. His sword clattered to the floor. His reflection fractured across every shard, showing a hundred versions of himself: soldier, tyrant, savior, Watchmaker.
The last thing he saw before the light consumed him was Safaa's face, hovering in the blur—half sorrow, half acceptance.
And then, silence.