Darkness.
Not empty — but full. Full of everything that could not be written. Words that tried to form but dissolved, light that refused to take shape, sounds that existed only as almosts.
Jinryu and Maeryn stumbled as they entered. Their glyphs sputtered, unstable, unable to hold.
Maeryn gasped. "I… can't summon it."
Her glyph flickered like dying breath. Jinryu's Haeryun felt heavy, a dead blade.
"This place," Jinryu whispered, "rejects everything that makes us."
The Un-Walking
They walked, though there was no ground. They breathed, though no air moved. Each step twisted into something else — sometimes a child's stride, sometimes a corpse's stagger.
Time bent. Sometimes they were moving together. Sometimes Jinryu walked alone for centuries, then blinked and Maeryn was beside him again.
Whispers followed them — but not like before. These weren't the Scarlands' screams.
These were their own thoughts, spoken before they thought them.
You'll fail her.You'll kill him.You'll never be enough.
Maeryn covered her ears. "Make it stop!"
Jinryu grabbed her wrist, grounding her. "Don't listen. They're not truths. They're possibilities bleeding through."
The Broken Tower
Shapes emerged in the distance. Not a tower — the memory of one. Stone that shifted when you looked, bleeding ink like veins.
"The Tower That Bled," Maeryn whispered.
As they approached, figures appeared. Not Vael — not yet.
Corebearers.
The other Ten.
All dead. All alive. All fractured between their last moments and their first. Faces Jinryu had forgotten returned, speaking lines they had never spoken.
"Why didn't you save us?" one asked."Why did you follow him?" another demanded."You should have been the Thirteenth."
Jinryu fell to his knees, clutching his chest. Every voice dug into the wound of choice.
The Arrival
The Tower groaned. Its bleeding slowed. Its ink froze.
And then — silence.
A figure emerged at the base.
Tall. Robed. Hands still wrapped in bandages. Blindfold untouched.
Vael.
Not an echo. Not a memory.
The man himself.
Jinryu tried to speak, but no sound came. Even words betrayed him here.
Vael raised his head. Though blind, he saw them perfectly.
And when he spoke, it wasn't with a voice. It was with the silence between broken words:
"At last… you came."