The blinding white dissolved, but clarity did not follow. Instead, Kael's mind was not merely overwhelmed; it was fractured. Like a pane of glass struck by a cosmic hammer, his perception shattered into seven distinct, overlapping shards, each revealing a vision that played out simultaneously, a symphony of disparate realities screaming for his attention. Agony still gripped him, but it was now a focused, splitting pain, each shard of his consciousness tearing him further apart.
His awareness was everywhere at once, yet nowhere coherent:
One vision consumed him more than the others.
The mark on his wrist pulsed with blinding light, perhaps resisting the glimpse of something no mortal was meant to see,filtering the unbearable, and letting only fragments slip through. The agony clawing through his mind dulled, if only for a moment.
The vast, ash-choked heavens, a wound bleeding blackness into the cosmos,it was a gaping void, yet to fully form. A jagged, raw scar, stitched across heaven with threads of cosmic ruin, stretched across its immense, unformed center, where something ancient and utterly alien was still straining to coalesce. It was an immense, sleeping shape that hadn't yet chosen to wake, a primal horror stirring just beneath the surface of reality, its full awakening foreshadowing an unimaginable doom. As Kael gazed, the vision shifted. He now stood, not on any ground, but at the edge of that world,a world being unmade even as it was born into his sight.
Before him: seven impossibly ancient figures stood in a fractured circle, atop a floating platform made of pale stone and laws shattered into impossible geometries. Each bore a terrible, contradictory symbol,one bled internal fire that devoured light; one wore a veil of living starlight that absorbed all sound; another was shrouded in smoke woven from a thousand forgotten, screaming names. Their forms flickered at the edge of comprehension, made of pure concept and paradox.
They were arguing. But no sound reached him only a terrible, grinding pressure in his skull, like their words were too heavy, too fundamental, for mortal ears to ever bear.
One turned suddenly. The figure's face was hidden in an abyss of absolute absence, yet Kael felt seen. Known.
No… it's looking at me. Through me.
His breath caught, if he even still breathed. His already burning mind flared with fresh torment as if the gaze itself unraveled the last threads of sanity holding him together, threatening to dissolve his very sense of self.
Before Kael could recover from the agony, another pressed harder against what little of his remaining awareness.
There was no ground beneath him,only sky, cracked like old, calcified porcelain, bleeding rivers of slow, viscous starlight that seemed to flow upwards into an unseen abyss. Kael hovered in a profound, dizzying silence, his body weightless, an inert consciousness adrift, his thoughts no longer fully his own but echoes of a profound cosmic weariness. The air itself felt thin, tasting of iron and static, as if a great machine had just ceased its grinding.
Somewhere far below, a battlefield flickered into agonizing view, a landscape of impossible contradictions. Soot-black sunflowers, with petals like dried skin, pulsed faintly amidst the carnage, their heads turned towards a sky that was no longer there. Fractured swords the size of mountains, their edges impossibly keen, lay embedded in melted armor,vast enough to have once clad something no mortal mind was meant to comprehend that still steamed with an unseen heat. Fires sputtered in strange, internal colors – greens that absorbed light, blues that burned cold to the touch – casting no warmth, only elongated, dancing shadows that seemed to whisper of unspoken suffering.
A lone figure staggered forward through this nightmare tableau. Their tattered robes, woven from what seemed to be threads of time itself, shimmered between eras, one moment ancient cloth, the next rippling with impossible future metals. Their gait was a testament to impossible burdens, each step a testament to an unending cycle.
He collapsed. Not onto the battlefield, but onto a vast, desolate expanse of grey dust, right before Kael's disembodied gaze.
At his feet: a crown of raw, unbleached bone, cracked down the middle with a jagged scar. His golden blood, bright and terrible, cascaded from his wounds, boiling upon the dust, instantly obliterating everything it touched. Where it struck the ground, the very dust seemed to flash through eons in a single instant, turning to glass, then to crumbling ash, then to utterly nothing. The air crackled with the sheer, raw force of accelerated time, leaving behind scorched, impossibly ancient craters. What remained of the landscape in his immediate vicinity was utterly annihilated, reduced to primal void. Despite this devastation, the golden blood reformed beneath the crown, drawing itself into the unmistakable shape of a spiral that pulsed once with a dark, hungry light before fading into the nothingness it had created.
"So this is how it ends...." the man whispered, though his mouth did not move. The words resonated directly in Kael's fractured mind, cold and clear as if spoken from within his own skull. "Why must we bear this fate?"
Now he stood beneath a golden sky that knew no sorrow.
The air was warm, almost fragrant, carrying the scent of honey and distant harp strings, like a lullaby hummed by a world that had forgotten how to mourn. Beneath his bare feet shimmered grass like fine glass, each blade humming with a gentle, childlike melody only the innocent might still remember. Trees of pale ivory stretched elegantly into the heavens, their silver leaves drifting downward in slow spirals, yet never touching the earth as if even gravity obeyed a gentler law here.
People moved through the scene.
Laughing. Smiling. Embracing.
There was no fear in their eyes. No weight in their posture. They strolled through the radiant meadows with perfect ease, untouched by time, unmarred by suffering.
In the distance stood the castle.
Impossibly white. Its spires shimmered with blue brilliance, piercing the flawless sky like needles of divine intent. Its walls gleamed with inner light, not reflected but born from within, humming with an alien harmony. The gates were not guarded—they didn't need to be. They were open, welcoming, as though the castle itself had nothing to hide.
From the tallest tower, a figure of light stood, arms open in radiant benediction. No face. No features. Just warmth. Acceptance. Erasure.
Above it flew a single white banner, motionless despite the breeze. Etched upon it in divine script, a single word:
"Rejoice."
The illusion shattered into an absolute, suffocating blackness. Kael floated in a void that felt colder than death, soundless, timeless.
Then, a flickering, sickeningly green flame. The blackness fractured around the flame, revealing Kael standing, or perhaps merely manifesting, at the edge of a ravine that cleaved reality itself. Its depths plunged impossibly far, lined not merely with cracked obsidian teeth, but with jagged, obsidian blades that hummed with a low, predatory thrum, glistening as if freshly wet. From its abyssal maw rose whispers like choking, sentient smoke sibilant, writhing tendrils of sound that snaked around him, filled with meanings no throat should utter, carrying the phantom scent of rot.
He wasn't alone.
Across the chasm, on a small, precarious ledge, a giant figure knelt before an altar. It was a grotesque monument of freshly broken bone and still-oozing melted coin, the metal flowing like molten pus. The figure was utterly diminished, its skin not just flayed in places, but stretched taut and translucent, revealing the raw, red muscle beneath, quivering as if alive. Limbs trembled, not from cold, but from an exhaustion that went beyond bone and sinew, an echo of unbearable, unending payment. The world around them was hollowed out and bleeding essence, the sky above choked with thick, cloying ash that swirled with unseen malevolence, the very earth beneath his feet shriveled and burned, its surface brittle as dried tears, actively crumbling into dust as if forcibly aged by centuries of torment. It was as if this entire realm had been fed to an unseen fire and exhaled as pure, concentrated regret.
Then came the whisper not from the figure, but from somewhere just beneath Kael's ears, a chilling, intimate resonance that bypassed his eardrums and burrowed directly into his inner mind.
"O' Lender of Hollow Might,
Take my flesh, but spare my sight.
What I owe, the End will claim—
Yours the hand, but His the name."
The words rang not like sound, but like a rusted needle, slow and inexorable, sewing itself into the soft tissue of Kael's brain. Each syllable was a fresh puncture, a cold thread of dread weaving itself into his consciousness.
He screamed.
He knew, instinctively, with a terror that clawed at his very being, he should not be hearing this. No one should. His very body revolted. Kael fell to his knees, hands clawing at the sides of his head, fingernails tearing at his skin in a desperate, futile attempt to rip his ears from his skull, but it was too late.
The words had already carved themselves into him.
Like slithering, parasitic worms of dread, they burrowed deep into his memory, writhing and wriggling, leaving behind the echo of a price not yet paid.
Then the world rang like a bell not soft, but a screaming, metallic peal that vibrated in Kael's very bones, distant, mournful, and unending. It shattered into a new scene.
A ruined sanctuary, not merely destroyed, but violated. The air itself was thick with silent screams, heavy with the weight of unspeakable sorrows. Stained-glass windows had melted into grotesque puddles of colored ash, still bubbling faintly with an unholy light, casting warped, shifting reflections across the desecrated floor. Golden chains, impossibly thick and scarred, hung from the splintered rafters like hanged regrets, their every link humming with an electric hum of torment, seeming to constrict the very air around them.
In the ravaged center, a woman knelt, bound not in body but in soul. Her chains pulsed with radiant agony,each link etched with a phrase in a language Kael didn't know… and yet understood with the raw clarity of pure despair:
Hope is the last burden.
She gazed upward as if gazing at something that no one else could see, her movement slow, burdened by centuries. Her eyes were like embers on ash before snowfall, soft, steady, impossibly ancient, and filled with an oceanic grief that threatened to drown Kael's fractured consciousness. The very air around her seemed to warp, shimmering with silent pleas and untold sacrifices.
"Tell her... we forgive her," she said, her voice a fragile whisper that nonetheless echoed through the vast, tormented space.
Before Kael could think who she was, the sanctuary imploded inward with a soundless roar, the melted glass reforming into jagged spikes, the golden chains snapping like living things and lashing out, consuming the woman and the vision itself in a tempest of agonizing light. Kael was sucked into the void, the raw despair of "Hope is the last burden" clinging to his shattered mind.
And finally,Kael saw himself, though not quite. It was a gaunt, younger version, his face obscured by grime and fear, dressed in tattered, blood-caked cloth, chewing on a piece of molded bread with a desperate, animalistic hunger. Around him, in the hollowed-out carcass of a ruined building, corpses were scattered like discarded dolls, filling the air with the thick, cloying stench of death and decay. Every breath was a taste of the grave.
Then, soft footsteps, eerily deliberate, echoed through the shattered halls. From the deep, oppressive darkness of the interior, a figure emerged. It was a pale and sickly young woman, her complexion so translucent and grey it was easily mistaken for the pallor of a walking skeleton. Her hair, lank and dull, hung like cobwebs, and her eyes, though shadowed, held a fierce, desperate intensity. This was Ash. She knelt before the cowering figure that was Kael, pulling back the tattered gloves. Her touch was cold, almost burning. With a small, wickedly sharp shard of obsidian, she carved into his flesh. Pain, sharper than anything he had felt until now, lanced through the phantom Kael, mirroring the mark that already burned on his own skin.
As the blood welled, she pressed her thumb to the wound, her own fingers thin and frail. In a rapid, almost magical motion, she began to shape something with the crimson. The mark formed beneath her touch. It resembled an incomplete wheel, not circular, but fractured into seven uneven spokes, like a sundial carved from obsidian and bone. Each spoke pointed outward, yet one was broken, frayed at the edge, as though it had been violently severed from something greater. Along the outer ring, faint symbols twisted like flowing script, always shifting, never the same when looked at twice, fragments of languages long buried by time and silence. At its center sat a closed eye, inked in spirals of deep violet and dull silver, framed by threads that curled inward like a web being rewoven. The eye did not open, but it pulsed faintly, like a heart that remembered too much.
Before the vision blurred, he heard her voice, the one he thought he would never hear again.
"This is the price of survival, Kae," she whispered.
The stench of decay battling the phantom pain of the mark, before it too began to unravel.
Then pain.
Real, unbearable.
Suddenly, Kael's mind was back in the Hollow Crown, gripped by an agony beyond measure. Deep claw marks marred his face, and his once brown eyes were now disturbingly pale, almost white. He could feel something squirming grotesquely inside his skull. With a choked gasp, he coughed up a thick stream of black blood before darkness consumed him.
Unknown to him, a figure stepped silently from the shadowed edge of the reliquary cloaked in tattered robes, pale and worn like mourning shrouds. A white mask, smooth and unmarked, concealed her face entirely,
She knelt beside Kael's unconscious form, now slumped amid cracked marble and dried blood, his breath shallow, the mark on his wrist still faintly pulsing with violet and silver light.
Without a word, she lifted him into her arms ,frail though she seemed, her grip was sure, steady.
As she carried him away from the shattered reliquary, the silence behind her closed like a tomb.