The Scarlands smoldered. Ash whispered like broken scripture, the ground bleeding light where the Echo of Vael had been struck down.
Jinryu stood silent, Haeryun's crimson glow fading, his breath uneven. Maeryn's glyph dimmed to a flicker, her eyes on Arashi's still body.
"Gone," Maeryn said softly, though her voice was steel.
"Not gone," Jinryu whispered. "She left us the path."
The Whispering Ash
The ash around them began to coil. Not just smoke—words. Whole sentences, unraveling in the air, like the world itself was remembering too much at once.
The Twelfth still lives.The Door is hers.Where the Glyphs cannot hold.
The whispers tangled, too many voices to follow. Maeryn clutched her head.
"Make it stop—!"
But Jinryu forced himself to listen. And among the chaos, one phrase cut clear:
Seek the Twelfth in the Hollow Spire.
The Hollow Spire
They left the Scarlands. Days blurred, time bending strangely—the aftershock of fighting an Echo. At night, Jinryu dreamed of a tower of flesh and blood, walls weeping ink.
At dawn, they reached it.
The Hollow Spire.
Once a fortress of Corebearers, now an empty husk of spiraled stone, eaten from within. Glyphs scarred its walls, scratched over, rewritten, broken. Every step hummed with the ghost of Vael's rebellion.
Inside, the Twelfth awaited.
The Twelfth Corebearer
She sat in the center of the ruin. Hair white, robes stitched with fragments of dead glyphs, Core dim as a dying ember.
"Jinryu," she said, before he could speak. "And Maeryn. You finally remember."
Maeryn froze. "How do you know us?"
"Because I was the one who sealed your memories," the Twelfth said.
Jinryu's breath caught. "You—what?"
Her eyes, blind like Vael's, turned toward him. "It was the only way to stop you from following him. You loved him once, Jinryu. All of us did."
The Door That Isn't
The Twelfth raised her palm. The floor split, revealing not stone, but an absence—a wound in the world.
Not a rift like before, but something deeper. A place where glyphs unraveled, where language itself bled out.
"The Door," she said. "Beyond it lies the Origin Before Origin. Where Glyphs cannot form. Where Vael waits."
Maeryn gripped her sword. "And if we follow?"
"You won't return the same," the Twelfth whispered. "Every step rewrites you."
The Decision
Jinryu stared into the abyss below, feeling its pull. Haeryun vibrated like it wanted to fall in.
He thought of Arashi's last words. Of Vael's whisper when the Core shattered.
Not destruction. Rewriting.
If Vael succeeded… what world would remain?
And worse—what world did he himself long to make?
"Jinryu," Maeryn's voice broke his spiral. "Say it. Do we go through?"
The Twelfth leaned close, her words like a knife:
"If you step through, you will face not Vael first… but the world you yourself would create. And if it rejects you—"
The Door pulsed, waiting.
"—you will never come back."