The Hollow was coming apart.
The world itself screamed.
Black stone bled light. The air split open with lines of red, violet, and burning white. The ground beneath Sid cracked and folded like shattered glass, the Hollow's walls collapsing inward as though the realm no longer wished to exist.
Sid staggered forward, demonflame bursting from his skin in ragged surges. Every step felt like walking through fire and knives, his veins burning with something more than heat. His head pulsed with voices — his own, the daemon's, Velgrin's.
"You are not whole. You are not one."
Velgrin's voice thundered across the hollow chamber, but it wasn't just sound anymore — it was the collapse. His form, half-shadow and half-shape, grew taller, vast and skeletal, ribs arching open like gates. From within, a storm of eyes glimmered, each whispering different truths.
"This is the purpose of Ascension… not destruction, but division. The vessel cannot contain both flame and light. One must be carved out."
Sid's vision blurred. Baros's divine crest burned faintly across Lucien's shield in the distance, trying to stabilize the collapsing Hollow, but even divine memory was splintering like sand. Nox stood near the far edge, glyphs spiraling around his arms, his voice hoarse from shouting counter-incantations.
But all Sid could hear was the breaking inside him.
The demon's laughter.
The god's silence.
His own heartbeat turning into a war drum.
"Stop… stop talking like I'm some… experiment!" Sid roared, clutching his chest as blackfire burst from his palm, scorching the air. The demonflame flared, but with it came something else — a piercing radiance, a gold-white brilliance that lanced outward, cutting through Velgrin's shadow for a moment.
Both flames collided inside him, tearing at his flesh from within.
Velgrin's mask-like face tilted, a smile forming without lips.
"Perfect. The fracture begins."
The Hollow floor split wide, revealing not ground but an abyss — and within that abyss churned Hal'Zirath. An ocean of flame, bone, and ruin. The demon realm clawed upward, tendrils of molten darkness reaching through the rent in reality. Sid's demonflame answered, stretching toward it like a starving beast recognizing home.
Lucien shouted something, but his words warped, fragmented in Sid's ears. Reinhardt slammed his fists into the earth to brace the collapse. Kael hurled lightning into the fissures, trying to seal them, but the Hollow only bled wider.
Then Sid heard the words that froze his blood.
Nox, screaming above the chaos.
"—The Seal is breaking!"
Sid's breath stopped.
The Seal.
The First Seal.
The ancient binding that had locked Ravh'Zereth away after the war of gods and demons. The same Seal that chained his demonflame inside him, barely restrained. The same Seal that Velgrin's Ascension had been pushing toward all along.
Sid staggered back as the light and darkness within him finally ripped outward. His body arched, torn between two fires. Black flames roared up one side of him, while the other split with blinding radiance, gold patterns carving themselves across his skin like divine runes.
For one heartbeat, he felt infinite.
For the next, he felt himself splitting apart.
Velgrin's voice coiled into him, silk and steel:
"Break, vessel. Let the god and the daemon be freed. You are not Sid — you are the fracture."
Sid screamed.
The Hollow shattered.
Reality peeled open like wet paper, and Sid was dragged half into the abyss of Hal'Zirath, flames clawing at him, divine light searing the other half. The Seal cracked audibly, like glass under a hammer.
And then—
It broke.
A shockwave tore across everything, light and flame spiraling into Sid's chest. His body convulsed, suspended between worlds. He saw Hal'Zirath's endless infernos. He saw Baros's unreachable throne of time and memory. He saw himself — a shadow and a radiance, one screaming to consume, the other to protect.
And then, silence.
The Hollow collapsed fully into the abyss.
The last thing Sid heard was Nox's voice, distant, panicked, yet resolute:
"Sid—hold on! Don't let go of yourself!"
Then the Seal's fragments became fire and light, and the boy named Sid vanished into the fracture between worlds.