# Chapter 464: The Brother's Strike
The wave of silent force slammed into Soren, a physical blow that stole the breath from his lungs. But where it brought pain and oblivion to others, it brought fire to him. The suffocating blanket on his soul was ripped away, and his Gift, starved and compressed for so long, roared back into the void. It was not a gentle return. It was a dam bursting. Power, raw and scalding, flooded every fiber of his being. His Cinder-Tattoos, once dark scars, ignited, burning with a ferocity that turned his skin into a glowing roadmap of his suffering. The pain was excruciating, a white-hot agony that threatened to unmake him, but beneath it was a terrifying, exhilarating strength. He pushed himself up from the wall, his muscles screaming, his vision swimming. He saw the hole in the world, a perfect circle of black that seemed to pull at the light. He saw Nyra and Rook, still forms on the floor. And he saw Valerius, the once-god, now a flickering candle in a hurricane, his light drawn toward the rift like a moth to a flame. The Inquisitor was trying to close it, his fading power a pathetic gesture against the encroaching abyss. Then, from the heart of the darkness, something moved. A tendril of pure shadow, colder than the deepest winter, uncoiled and reached into the chamber.
Soren's gaze snapped from the rift to the source of the catastrophe. The shattered remnants of the great crystal pulsed with a dying, malevolent light, the fractured pieces still humming with the energy of a thousand stolen souls. Valerius was a fool, a puppet who had cut his own strings only to find himself dangling over a much deeper abyss. The shadow tendril lashed out, not at the Inquisitor, but at the nearest source of life energy—Rook Marr's unconscious form.
A raw, protective instinct, older than thought, surged through Soren. He didn't plan. He didn't think. He moved. His body, a vessel overflowing with uncontrolled power, responded with a speed that defied his wounds. He slammed a glowing fist into the stone floor, and a wall of shimmering, superheated air erupted between Rook and the shadow. The tendril struck the barrier with a sound like cracking ice, recoiling as if burned. The air filled with the acrid scent of ozone and burnt sugar, the smell of his Gift unleashed.
The shadow tendril writhed, testing his defense. Soren gritted his teeth, the effort of holding the barrier sending fresh waves of agony through his overloaded system. His Cinder-Tattoos flared brighter, the skin on his arms beginning to crack and weep ash. He was a candle burning at both ends, and the wax was his own flesh.
"Soren!" a voice cried out, thin and reedy.
He risked a glance. Finn was pushing himself up from the floor, the boy's face pale but his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and fierce determination. He was alive. The sight of him, small and defiant against the backdrop of cosmic horror, was a rock in the churning sea of Soren's pain. The boy held the warden's dagger, its silver blade seeming to drink the dim light of the chamber.
"He's still connected to it!" Finn yelled, pointing a trembling finger at Valerius. The Inquisitor was a pathetic sight, his form of light flickering wildly as he was pulled in two directions: one toward the rift, the other toward the dying crystal. "The crystal is his anchor! We have to break it!"
Soren knew the boy was right. The ritual wasn't over. Valerius had become a conduit, and the crystal was the pump, drawing the Withering King's power into their world. Destroying the crystal was their only chance. But the shadow tendrils were now multiplying, lashing out from the rift like the whips of some unseen slaver. One snaked toward Nyra. Another whipped toward Soren himself.
"I'll cover you!" Soren roared, his voice a raw, guttural sound that was barely his own. He pushed off the wall, every step an exercise in torture. He met the tendril aimed at him with a blast of pure kinetic force, a concussive wave of heat that sent the shadow screaming back into the void. The effort made him stagger, his vision blurring. He could feel his own life force burning away, the Cinder Cost demanding its due with terrifying speed.
Finn didn't hesitate. The boy saw the path Soren was carving, a fleeting, dangerous corridor through the writhing shadows. He broke into a limping run, his small legs pumping, his knuckles white around the dagger's hilt. A tendril, faster than the others, shot from the rift, intercepting his path. It was a spear of pure nothingness, aimed at the boy's heart.
Soren reacted on pure instinct. He threw himself forward, not with power, but with his body. He hit the ground hard, rolling, and slammed his glowing hand flat against the stone floor. "Get down!" he screamed.
Finn dropped instantly. A wall of incandescent cinders, a miniature sandstorm of Soren's own burning essence, erupted from the floor. The shadow spear slammed into it, and the chamber was filled with a deafening hiss, like a thousand blacksmiths' quenching troughs erupting at once. The cinders and shadows annihilated each other in a flash of blinding, silent light. When it faded, a smoking trench was all that remained.
Soren lay on the ground, gasping, his arm a smoking ruin. The Cinder-Tattoos on it had gone dark, the skin beneath blackened and dead. He had paid a terrible price for that one defense. But Finn was safe. The boy scrambled to his feet, his eyes locked on the pulsating crystal, now only twenty paces away.
Valerius seemed to realize their intent. A flicker of his old arrogance returned. "You cannot!" the thousand voices shrieked, a sound of desperation now. "You will doom us all!" He raised a hand, and the remaining shards of the crystal around the room levitated, spinning into a vortex of razor-sharp glass that flew toward Finn.
Soren pushed himself to his knees, his body screaming in protest. He had nothing left. No grand blasts, no walls of fire. All he had was the core of his Gift, the unrefined, brutal essence of it. He focused on the spinning vortex, not to destroy it, but to heat it. He poured the last of his conscious will into his power, a desperate, final gamble.
The shards of crystal, hurtling toward Finn, began to glow. First red, then orange, then a blinding, searing white. They didn't stop; they melted in mid-air, transforming into a rain of molten slag that sizzled against the stone floor. The air shimmered with the heat, the smell of vaporized rock thick and choking.
It was the opening Finn needed. The boy sprinted the final distance, his face a mask of fierce concentration. He leaped, a small, determined figure against the vast, broken machinery of the ritual. He landed on the base of the crystal, his boots finding purchase on the fractured obsidian. The core of the artifact, a fist-sized, perfectly cut diamond of crimson light, pulsed before him, its beat slowing, faltering.
Valerius let out a sound that was part scream, part sob. He was tethered to that core. To destroy it was to destroy him.
Finn raised the warden's dagger high. The silver blade hummed, not with magic, but with a singular, profound purpose. It was a key, designed to break a lock. He looked back, his eyes meeting Soren's for a single, fleeting moment. There was no fear in the boy's gaze, only a solemn, unwavering resolve. He was not just Soren's squire; he was his brother in arms.
"For my family," Finn whispered, the words lost in the hum of the dying ritual. "For yours."
He plunged the dagger into the heart of the crystal.
The effect was not an explosion. It was an implosion.
For a nanosecond, there was only silence. The crimson light in the crystal's core vanished, sucked into the point where the dagger struck. The thousand voices of Valerius choked off into a single, perfect, soundless scream of agony. The Inquisitor's form of light flickered violently, then collapsed inward, imploding into a single, blindingly bright point of energy.
Then, the world broke.
The chamber exploded. Not with fire and shrapnel, but with pure, unrestrained reality. A shockwave of absolute silence blasted outwards, a pressure that felt like it would crush Soren's skull. The stone floor beneath him buckled, then cracked, then fell away into an abyss of swirling grey ash. The walls of the monastery dissolved like smoke. The ceiling became a vortex of screaming, colorless chaos.
Soren was thrown through the air, his body limp, his Gift finally extinguished by the cataclysmic feedback. He tumbled through the maelstrom, a leaf in a hurricane of un-creation. He saw Finn, the boy still clinging to the dagger, his body dissolving into motes of light. He saw Nyra, her unconscious form protected by a faint, shimmering bubble that was already failing. He saw Rook, swallowed by the crumbling earth.
And he saw the rift. The hole in the world was no longer a neat circle. It was a jagged, gaping wound, tearing wider and wider. The connection between the two worlds—the Withering King's prison and the monastery—had not just been opened. It had been ripped wide open. The silent, screaming chaos of the Bloom-Wastes poured through, a tide of pure desolation hungry for a world to consume. And from the heart of that tearing abyss, a presence, ancient and patient, finally turned its full attention to the new, shattered world it had been granted.