The Hollow bent inward.
Walls of shifting ash closed in like a throat, swallowing the team into a silence so dense it crushed the air from their lungs. Sid felt his body tremble as the shadows bled into shape ahead of him — not a beast, not a demon, but a warrior in a mask. Its armor was fractured like burnt glass, its blade scorched black, and yet what unsettled him most was not the figure's form.
It was the way it breathed in unison with him.
Each inhale. Each exhale.
"Another Hollow?" Kael muttered, though his tone lacked conviction.
"No," Lucien said, his eyes narrowing, timeglass sigil flickering faintly. "This one isn't Hollow. It's… tethered."
The masked warrior tilted its head — exactly as Sid did in that moment, as though mocking his every motion. A low hiss of voices spilled from beneath its mask, overlapping, twisting, each whisper clawing through Sid's mind:
"You are the vessel. You are the fire. You are the break."
Sid's knees threatened to buckle. He gritted his teeth, trying to steady his breath. The whispers weren't Ravh'Zereth's alone. Beneath them, another tone — smooth, deliberate — slid like a knife into his skull.
Velgrin.
"Don't you hear it?" Serrath's voice cracked, stepping back. His violet Crest flared instinctively. "That's no trial. That's a mirror."
The warrior lunged.
Sid met it head-on, daemonflame roaring to life along his arm, clashing against the shadow-blade with an impact that rang like thunder. Sparks scattered, though no fire caught — the Hollow devoured flame as though hungry for it.
Every strike came faster. Every parry heavier. And with each clash, Sid felt his own body growing more sluggish, his heartbeat syncing with the warrior's until he could no longer tell if he was fighting the enemy or himself.
"Why do you resist? You are already undone."
The mask cracked. A single fissure split across its surface, revealing a sliver of molten red beneath — an eye. His eye.
"No…" Sid whispered. His grip faltered.
The warrior pressed forward. Its blade kissed his throat. The whispers surged, Ravh'Zereth's voice now loud enough to drown all others:
"This is not an enemy. This is you. The you that will remain when you stop pretending."
Sid roared, igniting a torrent of black flame that tore through the Hollow ground. He struck the mask with all the force of his soul. The impact shattered it.
Fragments scattered like ash on the wind.
And the face beneath—
It was Sid's.
Burned. Hollow-eyed. Twisted by daemonfire until he could barely recognize the remnants of humanity. His own lips moved, but the words were not his:
"Ascension is not theirs. It is mine."
Velgrin's voice.
Flowing perfectly through the ruined doppelgänger, as if the Silent One himself had worn his body all along.
The Hollow groaned around them, fissures spreading through the ash walls. The ground buckled. From the broken self's mouth spilled not flame but black roots, twisting upward into a symbol etched in the air — a fragment Sid recognized at once. The Nightroot's mark.
Lucien grabbed Sid's shoulder, dragging him back as the arena convulsed. "This isn't just a trial—someone's inside it!"
The whispers overlapped, Velgrin's final words searing through Sid's skull as the corrupted double collapsed into cinders:
"Your Ascension begins when you fracture."
And then the Hollow split open.
Reality tore down the middle, bleeding a light that was neither holy nor profane, but both. Sid staggered forward, clutching his chest as Ravh'Zereth's laughter echoed — deep, victorious, unstoppable.
He had passed the trial.
But in doing so, he had let Velgrin in.
The last thing he heard before the collapse was Nox's voice, reverberating as if from another plane:
"Sid! The Seal—don't let it—"
The world imploded into flame and silence.