They did not return to the city. There was no time for farewells. The Echo was close. They could feel its approach now as a mounting pressure in the mind, a static that blurred thought and eroded memory.
They stood on the barren, windswept plain where the Crystal of Atlan had once stood whole. The air was dead here, the land still scarred by the primordial crime. It was the right place. The only place.
Luka held the Shard of Ending in one hand. With the other, he touched his chest, where the Crystal hummed its final, defiant chord.
Are you ready? he asked the united consciousness within him.
The response was a wave of pure, unadulterated love—for the world, for its struggles, for its beauty, for the man who had been its partner. It was not the serene peace of the Hammer, but the fierce, joyful pain of being alive.
Together, the Crystal replied.
Luka reached out with his mind, with the Crystal's power, and he did not push the Echo away. He pulled it. He made himself the brightest, most coherent, most tempting thing in all of creation. A perfect feast for the void.
The Echo responded. The sky tore open. Not with light or sound, but with an absence so profound it was a physical force. The plain beneath their feet began to grey and crumble into dust, not falling, but simply ceasing to be. The very concept of "ground" was being deleted.
Kael, standing a hundred paces back, felt his own memories starting to slip. The name of his first pet. The face of his mother. He clung to one thing: Luka's back, straight and unyielding against the dying of the world.
Luka looked into the heart of the advancing nothingness. He saw the end of stories. The end of music. The end of love. He felt the Crystal gather all of its power, all the truth it had gathered, all the potential it held, all the will it had forged, into a single, focused point.
And then, he brought the Shard of Ending to his chest.
He did not stab himself. He pressed it against the Crystal, and he gave the final, willing command.
Now.
The universe did not explode. It sang.
The three-note chord of the Crystal—Truth, Potential, Will—swelled into a crescendo that shook the foundations of reality. And then, a fourth note joined it. The note of the Ending, pure and clear and final.
The four notes harmonized for a single, timeless instant, creating a chord of such devastating, beautiful perfection that it could only exist for a moment. In that moment, the Shard of Ending fulfilled its purpose, and in doing so, unmade itself.
The chord collapsed.
The resulting silence was not the hungry silence of the Echo. It was the silence after a great piece of music has ended, a silence full of meaning and memory.
The advancing void stopped. It shuddered. And then, like a mist burned away by a sun it could not comprehend, it began to recede, fading, dissolving, until there was only the scarred plain and the empty sky.
The Crystal of Atlan was gone. Luka was gone.
All that was left was the echo of the final chord, and a single, tiny, new shard that fell from the empty air into the dust at Kael's feet. It was clear and colorless, and it hummed with a soft, fragile, but living light.