The silence of the place without glyphs was unbearable. Every breath, every movement, sounded like betrayal.
Vael stood at the base of the bleeding tower, still as stone. His blindfold fluttered in a wind that did not exist.
Jinryu tried to speak — nothing. His throat moved, but words died in this place.
Vael tilted his head. "You do not need words here. I hear the truth in your silence."
Maeryn's hands tightened on her useless sword. She thought, Why?
Vael answered aloud: "Why did I create Glyph Thirteen?"
The Philosophy of Vael
He stepped forward, each stride bending the Tower's ink. "You call it an abomination. An error. But it was the first true glyph. Every other was written by design. Balance, fire, storm, time, flesh — all bound to the Prime Core's order. They were never free."
He spread his bandaged hands. "But Thirteen? It was not balance. It was choice. It broke the Core because it was never meant to exist — a rebellion against the script of creation itself."
His blind eyes turned toward Jinryu. "And I birthed it… because I could not accept a world that had already been written."
The Accusation
Jinryu forced sound from his throat. The word came jagged, half-dead: "You… destroyed us."
Vael paused.
"Destroyed?" He tilted his head. "Or freed?"
"The Pact was broken," Maeryn snapped, her voice thin but audible. "You damned the world to Scarlands. To echoes. To un-glyphs."
Vael's lips curled, almost pained. "Did I? Or did I reveal the chains you all pretended not to see?"
He raised a hand. Ink bled upward, forming shifting scenes: children bound by glyph-scripts they never chose, lands warped by Corebearers enforcing balance that crushed free will.
"Order is a cage. Division of the Core was nothing but delay. You fear godhood — but what you created was worse: slavery by glyph."
The Wound of Belief
Jinryu stepped forward, shaking. "So your answer was to shatter everything? To birth chaos?"
Vael turned toward him fully now. "Yes. Because from chaos… comes the possibility of rewriting. The chance for a world not bound by twelve scripts. A world where even the weakest can choose."
He took another step closer. "Tell me, Jinryu… when you struck down my Echo, did you not feel it? The relief? Even fragments of me long to be unmade — because only in unmaking can we begin again."
Jinryu's chest ached. Somewhere deep, the wound of truth resonated. He remembered Arashi's words: He's not trying to destroy the world. He's trying to rewrite it.
The Offer
Vael extended his hand. Bandages unraveled, showing scars carved with half-glyphs, scripts that had never been completed.
"Come with me," he said softly. "You bear Haeryun, the blade meant to unite. With you, Jinryu, I can finish what began at the Spire. Not destruction — rebirth. A Thirteenth World."
The Tower's ink pulsed, bleeding harder, as if agreeing.
Maeryn's glyph flickered, desperate, resisting. She stepped between them, voice sharp: "Don't listen to him."
Vael did not look at her. "Of course she would say that. Her world was always order. Always silence. She does not understand you, Jinryu."
Jinryu froze. Between them both, his heart cracked.
The man who betrayed them all now offered choice itself.
And Maeryn's sword trembled — as if she feared Jinryu might accept.