The smoke over the sea hadn't cleared.
It wasn't smoke, not truly just the residue of unmade reality, the vapor that followed in Elia's wake. The world didn't burn where she walked.
It simply ceased.
Evelyn stared out from the edge of the shattered cliff where Yurellon had once stood. "There were children there," she whispered. "Families. Artists. A whole choir school…"
Her voice trailed into a tremor.
Torren stood motionless. For once, even he had no words.
Aeryn was already walking.
He didn't look back.
Within the Folded World
Elia sat on nothing.
Time didn't pass here. She had made sure of that. This was her cradle where sound couldn't follow, where memories twisted to her will.
Across from her knelt a fragment.
Not a person. Not even a soul.
It was her younger self.
The Elia of yesterday. The girl who cried in corridors, waiting for someone who never came. Who believed in heroes.
"I kept you alive," the elder Elia said, her voice like bells ringing backward. "But I don't need you anymore."
She reached out.
The younger Elia smiled… and dissolved like morning frost.
In the Ruins of a Shrine
The remaining survivors of the Temple gathered in silence. Dozens of them. Wounded, frightened, trembling with disbelief.
"Is it true?" a boy asked Mira. "She was one of us?"
Mira looked to Aeryn.
He gave a bitter nod. "She was. Before I failed her."
Mira clenched her fists. "Then we have to save her."
Aeryn's eyes met hers and for a flicker, the old hope returned.
"No," he said. "We can't save her."
His fingers curled around the hilt of a blade not made for mortals.
"But we might still stop her."
The Echo of a City That Once Was
Elia walked where Yurellon had once stood.
Now there was only sand, smooth and cold. Footprints faded as she moved, not from wind but because memory itself rejected permanence in her presence.
She stood where the Great Bell Tower had once chimed.
Closed her eyes.
And listened.
Silence.
Perfect. Pure.
Unbroken.
"Soon," she whispered, "they'll all understand."
The Artifact of Unmaking
The stars above shimmered not with light, but with warning. Constellations twisted subtly out of shape, symbols reshaping themselves into forgotten glyphs. The heavens were trying to speak.
And Mira listened.
She knelt beneath the broken dome of the last Moon Temple, hands splayed across an altar that pulsed with breathless urgency. Beside her, Torren thumbed through the last pages of a tome bound in skin.
"This is the place," he said. "If it exists… this is where we'll find it."
"The Artifact?" Mira whispered. "The one the Silent Sisters sealed away?"
Torren nodded grimly. "The only thing that can sever a soul from its anchor. From power. From this world."
Elsewhere – Beneath the Rift
Evelyn's descent felt like a heartbeat stretched across hours.
Every step down the obsidian stairs resonated like memory. She carried with her a shard of the broken mirror Arlen's idea. A piece of herself, wrapped in reflection.
Below, the dark writhed like liquid.
"I know you're watching," she called out into the void. "And I'm not afraid of you."
The shadows didn't answer in words but they moved, and Evelyn's breath caught as the shape of a girl began to form.
Elia's silhouette.
But not Elia as she was now.
Elia as she had been.
Barefoot. Bloodied. Crying.
"Help me," the girl whimpered.
Evelyn hesitated.
And the moment she did, the shadows lunged.
The Broken Blade
Aeryn stood atop the Watcher's Spire, gazing at the horizon where light no longer reached. The sword he held Sorrow's End was reforged now with bone, memory, and something else.
Something he didn't yet understand.
The blade hummed in his grasp, like it hungered for a purpose.
"She's still your sister," Mira said softly, approaching behind him.
"She was," Aeryn replied. "Now she's a god wrapped in grief."
He turned to her.
"That's why I have to be the one to end her."
Mira stepped closer and laid a hand over his.
"No," she said. "That's why we do it together."
Below the Sanctuary
Torren chanted words that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries. His voice cracked as the runes beneath his feet flared, forming a burning spiral.
In the center something emerged.
Not gold. Not crystal. Not even metal.
But silence.
A device shaped like a prism, forged from compressed nothing.
The Artifact of Unmaking.
Torren nearly dropped it.
Even touching it felt like the memory of drowning.
He turned to Mira.
"If we use this," he warned, "there's no undoing it. It doesn't just break power."
Mira met his eyes.
"It breaks the soul."
---
Beneath the Rift, Beyond the Veil
The mimicry of Elia's form lunged from the shadows like a starving beast but Evelyn was faster.
She twisted, using the shard of mirror Arlen had given her. The glass flashed silver as it caught the creature's false eyes, and for an instant, the illusion faltered.
The child dissolved.
In her place was something far worse.
A woman draped in rotting lace, her face stitched together from dozens of expressions grief, rage, love, betrayal—all sewn into one impossible mask. Her mouth opened in a smile that didn't move her lips.
"You carry his name," she said.
"And you think that gives you power?"
Evelyn gritted her teeth. "It gives me purpose."
The specter's form flickered againnow Arlen, crumpled and bloodied, lying at her feet.
Evelyn's knees almost buckled.
"He's already given himself to the dark," the thing purred. "He's gone. Would you really follow him into the abyss?"
But Evelyn remembered something Arlen once told her, when they first walked the borderlands together.
"If you're going to follow me… be sure you know where I'm going."
She stepped forward, the mirror shard clutched like a dagger.
"I'm not following him," she whispered. "I'm dragging him back."
The specter screamed.
The stairs fractured.
The veil between realities split open and Evelyn fell into lightless memory.
Meanwhile – In the Sky Above the Hollow
Elia sat upon a throne of petrified bone, her eyes closed, her fingers twitching as if pulling unseen threads.
She had changed.
No longer just human, no longer the girl who wept at night and clutched family heirlooms. She was the storm between worlds now a god made of regret and fury.
But something new stirred.
A tremor.
Not in the earth.
In the weave.
Elia's eyes opened. Entire galaxies seemed to orbit within them. She turned to the closest of her acolytes blindfolded, veiled, and chanting in the tongue of the Unborn.
"Where is it?" she demanded.
The acolyte fell to his knees. "The Artifact, my lady. It's been unearthed."
Elia rose.
The wind died.
The sky flickered.
"The fools," she said, her voice thunder and whisper. "They would sever what they cannot comprehend."
She stepped forward and the entire sanctuary shook.
"I built this world from pain and ash. I forged it with my name."
Her eyes narrowed.
"They think they can unmake me?"
In the Temple Below
Torren nearly dropped the Artifact as the room pulsed with unnatural cold. The spiral of runes beneath him went out not failed, but consumed.
Mira caught his arm and steadied him.
"She knows," Mira whispered.
"How?" Torren croaked. "She's on the other side of the Void."
"She's part of the Void now," Mira answered. "We didn't just awaken the Artifact. We rang a bell that echoes through every layer of her domain."
Torren looked at the object in his hand still silent, still small.
"Then we use it now," he said. "Before she gets here."
Mira stepped back, unsure. "We don't even know if it'll work. We don't know who it will take with it."
Torren's jaw tightened. "Then I'll find out first."
He raised the Artifact.
A white flame ignited from its center.
And far away, Elia began to scream.