The sky cracked open at dawn.
It began with a flicker—one subtle pulse above the eastern horizon, like a forgotten star winking in the wrong place. Then came the ring: a perfect circle of light, rotating slowly above the clouds like an eye forced open.
Duncan had only seen such phenomena in the deepest archives of the Dominion—a forbidden section of war journals labeled Temporal Convergences. But this was no phenomenon. It was the Breach.
And it was growing.
He stood atop a wind-blasted ridge, gazing eastward across a land now shifting by the hour. The ground writhed with veins of silver crystal. Trees split open to reveal bone. Wild beasts howled, confused, many of them retreating from their own kind as nature turned on itself.
The world was starting to remember.
And memory, it seemed, was a violent thing.
The Map of Madness
Unrolling the parchment Kael had given him before departing Fort Thorne, Duncan traced the path toward the Sea of Glass—a desolate salt basin once used by Dominion skyships for testing low-altitude flight.
But something had changed.
The map twitched.
Not in his hands—but on its own.
Lines redrew themselves. Landmarks shifted. Ruins appeared where none had been marked before. And near the edge, just beneath the Sea of Glass, a new symbol glowed faintly: a spiral enclosed by a ring of thorns.
The final gate.
Duncan clenched his jaw and packed the scroll. The Shardvale had shown him part of the truth. The Sentinel's final words still echoed in his mind: "Each act of remembrance cracks the seal."
The last gate hadn't just been hidden. It had been erased.
And now, the world was redrawing what had been forgotten.
Into the Twilight Lands
Three days passed in half-light.
The Breach grew larger with each night, casting false dawn over the world. Its glow warped shadows and stretched time—by the second day, Duncan couldn't tell if he was riding through dusk or dawn.
Along the way, he encountered things he couldn't explain.
A tree that whispered in a dead language.
A village made of copper bones, inhabited by echoes—shadows of people reliving the same day over and over.
Once, he passed a girl who stood ankle-deep in a frozen river, singing to a beast only she could see. She smiled at him as he passed and said, "The stars are melting, Flamebearer. Do you hear them scream?"
He didn't stop.
Some truths were better passed by.
The Fracture Storm
On the fourth night, it came.
A storm—like nothing Duncan had ever seen.
The sky pulsed violet. Thunder rolled backward, as if time itself was hiccupping. Rain fell upward in streams of liquid memory, fragments of forgotten faces swimming in every drop.
Duncan sheltered beneath the bones of a collapsed outpost, blade drawn, senses sharp.
Then he saw it.
Not a beast.
Not a man.
Something between.
A Wraithshard.
It hovered just beyond the storm's edge, skin translucent, wrapped in Dominion military armor half-fused to its body. Its face flickered between a soldier's and something far older—an echo given shape.
Duncan's grip tightened.
This wasn't just memory bleeding through.
This was possession.
Blade Against Memory
The Wraithshard drifted forward, dragging echoes behind it like chains—phantoms of dead officers, broken oaths, forgotten missions.
"Give it to me," it said in a dozen voices. "The Flame remembers. It does not belong to you."
Duncan raised the Emberblade.
"Come take it."
The thing shrieked, then launched forward with impossible speed.
Their clash shattered the storm around them.
Steel met memory. Flame met frost. The air warped with every blow, each strike creating ripples of past battles Duncan had never fought—but remembered as though he had.
The Wraithshard struck true once—splitting his shoulder open with a spear made of names.
But Duncan did not yield.
With a final roar, he drove the Emberblade through its chest.
The creature collapsed, whispering: "We failed… again…"
And vanished in a burst of silver ash.
A Message from the Rift
When the storm passed, the sky cleared just long enough for him to see the Breach fully.
It had grown into a full ring, hovering like a second sun. Lightning swirled within. Shapes moved across it—not stars, but silhouettes. Watching.
Then a voice boomed across the plains.
Not in words—but in thought.
"Fourth seal... breaking."
"Bearer approaches."
"Final judgment begins."
Duncan stared upward.
He didn't understand everything yet. But he knew this:
He was no longer just a soldier.
He was a catalyst.
And the Fourth Gate was waiting.