The sky had no stars here—just a great rift overhead that pulsed like a wounded heart. Lightning stitched through the void, casting ghostly reflections over Kael's bloodstained gauntlet. The platform beneath their feet floated in an abyss where gravity stuttered and time itself bled into fractured echoes. This was the Sovereign's Domain—the Final Rift.
Kael stood at the edge of a broken stairwell that led nowhere. He could feel the vibration of the realm deep in his bones. His Gauntlet buzzed faintly as if it were whispering warnings he couldn't yet decipher.
Behind him, Ryssa adjusted her grip on her twin daggers, eyes sharp and locked forward. Seris crouched low, flames flickering up her arms in rhythm with her breaths. Veyr stood farther back, one palm glowing with runes and the other tracing stabilizing patterns in the air. Toran, silent as a shadow, adjusted the steel bow slung across his back. The tip of an arrow shimmered faintly with a glimmering dark poison—his own special brew.
They had all seen horror before, but this place? This was different. It was not just hostile—it was personal.
"Do you feel that?" Toran said finally, his voice steady but grim.
"It's not just Rift energy," Seris murmured. "It's like... memory. Twisted, infected."
Kael gave a faint nod. "It wants us to break before we even fight."
The ground trembled.
The Sovereign's Echo emerged from the swirling mists ahead, no longer a half-shadow like before. It had shape now. A humanoid form cloaked in writhing chains of void matter. Its face—Kael's own—stared back at him, twisted by malevolence and hunger. Behind it, smaller Riftspawn pulsed into existence, screeching in fragmented echoes of past enemies—corrupted by time and the Sovereign's will.
No more delays.
Kael leapt first, Gauntlet blazing with crimson light as he slammed into the nearest Riftspawn. His fist punched through corrupted flesh, dissolving it into shards of glimmering memory. Ryssa danced past him, spinning and slicing through another with graceful, merciless speed.
Seris summoned a circle of flame and cast it forward—incinerating three shadows in one roar of fire.
"Above!" Veyr shouted.
Toran was already moving. One foot anchored on the edge of a broken pillar, he drew and fired in a single breath. His arrow pierced the skull of a descending Riftspawn mid-leap, detonating in a dark explosion of alchemical smoke that staggered others nearby.
But the Echo didn't move.
It watched them—Kael especially—with something between recognition and contempt.
"You fight as if it matters," it said, voice crackling like dying stars. "But you've already lost."
Kael stood tall, breath steady. "I've heard worse things scream before they died."
The Echo responded with silence, then stepped forward. Reality rippled.
Toran grunted and fell to one knee. His eyes widened. "I—what is this?"
Kael turned in time to see Toran's body flicker—an echo of his younger self superimposed over his form. A memory from the war. Screams. Fire. Blood. The arrow that should have saved his brother, missing by inches.
Toran gasped.
The Echo was using corrupted memories against them.
"Hold your minds!" Veyr shouted. He stabbed his rune-sigil into the stone. Golden light burst outward in a protective ring. "Anchor to now!"
Kael surged forward, ignoring the pain clawing at his own head—images of the orphanage burning, his body discarded, mocked, broken.
He reached the Echo.
Their fists collided. Reality buckled.
The Gauntlet screamed in Kael's arm. The Echo hissed in fury and pain, its left side cracking open into threads of void. Kael didn't stop—he followed through with a spinning uppercut that shattered another chunk of its chest.
Behind him, Seris used the moment to release a phoenix-shaped burst of fire. The flames spiraled toward the Echo, locking it in a storm of heat and pressure.
Ryssa took advantage. She vanished into shadow and reappeared behind the Echo, sinking both blades into its shoulders. "You're not Kael," she spat. "You're just the parasite that couldn't kill him."
The Echo screamed—louder than sound.
Dark tendrils exploded outward, shoving everyone back. Kael slammed into a fractured wall, wind knocked from his lungs.
The world tilted.
Above, the rift tore wider. Visions flickered across the sky—Kael's first death, Seris's imprisonment, Ryssa's betrayal at the hands of her mentor, Veyr's failure to save his brother's soul. Toran saw the face of a boy he couldn't protect.
They were breaking.
"Toran," Kael called out hoarsely, pushing to his feet.
Toran's hands trembled. His next arrow refused to fire. The ghosts were winning.
Kael limped to him, placing a bloodied hand on his shoulder. "You can't change the past."
Toran's jaw clenched.
Kael looked him dead in the eyes. "But you can damn well stop it from happening again."
That was enough.
Toran exhaled.
He raised the bow.
And this time, when he fired—the arrow soared true, landing in the Echo's eye with a thrum of finality. The creature staggered, shrieking, void bleeding from its skull.
"Now!" Kael shouted.
Seris summoned all her fire into a sword the length of her body. Ryssa sprinted forward, blades twirling like silver rain. Veyr weaved final runes, lashing golden chains around the Echo's legs.
Kael drew power deep from the Gauntlet.
Blood Echo: 78%.
His bones groaned. Muscles tore and repaired mid-motion. He leapt—breaking the sound barrier—and slammed a fist wreathed in time distortion into the Echo's core.
The platform shattered.
The Echo cracked apart, limbs unraveling into swirling embers of corrupted memory. As its body fell into pieces, it whispered, almost longingly:
"The Rift remembers…"
And then it was gone.
Silence fell over the void.
All that remained of the Sovereign's Echo was a slowly fading smear of starlight across the fractured platform. The realm itself began to shift. The chaotic drift of islands slowed. The sky above—still torn—dimmed from rage to exhaustion.
Kael collapsed to his knees. Blood pooled at his side. The Gauntlet hissed as if overheating.
Ryssa reached him first. She gripped his hand, firm and unshaking.
Seris exhaled, the fire leaving her eyes. "Is it over?"
Veyr stepped forward, sensing the air. "This echo is defeated. But the core Rift… still remains. One gate more."
Kael coughed, smiled faintly. "Then let's finish it."
Toran nodded. "No more ghosts. No more regrets."
They stood in silence for a moment.
Around them, the remnants of the Sovereign's Domain began to repair—not out of hostility, but resignation. The battle had been won. Not without scars. Not without cost. But won.
The Blood Echo read: 84%.
Kael felt something new inside him—not just power, not just rage.
Purpose.
He looked at his companions—his family, bound not by blood, but by survival and sacrifice. Ryssa. Seris. Veyr. And Toran—who had once trusted no one, now standing with them, arrow nocked and ready for whatever came next.
Kael rose.
The sky rippled one last time, and ahead of them, a glowing path began to form—winding toward a distant heart of pure light and shadow.
The final Rift.
Home.
Kael spoke, voice clear, calm.
"We end it together."
They walked forward as one.