The descent into the Hollowspire was unlike any journey Liora had ever made.
It wasn't a passage through space, but through identity.
Every step downward shifted the air, not just in pressure, but in possibility. The canyon's walls pulsed with bone-veined stone, glowing faintly with fractured timelines. Here, truth had been undone long ago. Words lost meaning. Names came undone at the edges.
The deeper they went, the harder it became to remember who had spoken last.
Liora held tightly to her daughters' hands — one warm, one cold — each a flame of memory anchoring her to herself.
Behind them, Vaerion walked with his blade drawn, his other hand gripping a charm carved from dragonbone, a focus to keep him rooted.
But even that pulsed strangely.
"I feel like we're… walking into someone else's dream," he muttered.
"You are," came a voice.
Not Liora's.
Not either daughter's.
But her own.
Another her.
A crack opened in the canyon wall.
And from it stepped a version of Liora — or what she could have been.
This one wore white robes burned black at the hem, her face streaked with ash. Her eyes were hollow. Her fingers glowed with the raw energy of death magic pushed far past mortal limits.
"You should've ended it early," this version whispered. "Before they grew. Before they split. Before they chose."
The dark twin stared at her with interest.
The light-born turned her face away.
Liora stepped forward, heart steady.
"You're a fragment," she said. "A lost path."
"I'm the only path where they both survive," the shade said. "But in my world, the price was you."
With that, the echo shattered — not into dust, but into possibility, scattering like dying stars across the tunnel.
The path continued downward.
And it was not alone.
Liora saw her own lives ripple along the canyon walls.
One version knelt on a battlefield, alone, covered in blood.
Another died screaming in a cage, her soul used to power a failed god.
Another became a tyrant so feared, her own generals poisoned her and wept as they did.
And one… stood quietly in a garden.
The only one that smiled.
Her daughters stared at these echoes.
The dark twin reached out to touch the tyrant version — her fingers just brushing the wall.
Instantly, her hand burned.
Black veins surged up her arm. She screamed, dropping to one knee.
Liora caught her.
The corruption stopped just before the shoulder — but the girl trembled.
"It wants me," she whispered. "It knows I could be that."
Liora touched her cheek, fierce.
"You aren't."
"But I remember it. I felt what it was like to be her. Powerful. Free. Feared."
Vaerion placed a steady hand on the girl's shoulder.
"Being feared is easy," he said softly. "Being loved is the hard part."
Eventually, they reached the bottom.
The spiral ended not in stone, but in void.
A flat expanse of endless darkness stretched in every direction — skyless, depthless, undefined. Only the flickering memory-echoes of the world remained, glowing faintly like dying fireflies.
At the center of that space stood a single object:
A cradle.
Carved from the roots of the first worldtree. Burned black from the inside. Empty.
It pulsed once as they approached.
And from it rose the Unwritten.
Not as a beast. Not as a god.
But as a man.
Or rather, a mockery of one.
He wore the shape of a scholar, his robe stitched with living shadow, his eyes voids that swirled with every possible future.
His voice was calm, precise, and wrong.
"You've come further than any of your selves, Liora. I'm… impressed."
She kept her daughters behind her.
"You're the fracture," she said. "The thing we sealed beneath the bones of creation."
"I am the thing the gods feared you would awaken," he replied. "And they were right to be afraid."
He stepped forward.
His presence made time stutter.
One of the light-born's curls turned gray.
Vaerion stepped in front of her.
The Unwritten smiled wider.
"You brought them here. Both of them. You've already proven the theory: two opposing anchors held together by a mother's will. A paradox embodied."
He gestured to the cradle.
"I offer you a deal."
Liora narrowed her eyes. "Of course you do."
"One child," he said. "One daughter, in the cradle. I reweave the world around her. She will become a new anchor — one that neither god nor Shard can control. You'll live. She'll live. The war ends."
"And the other?" Liora asked.
"Gone," the Unwritten said simply. "Erased. Not killed. Never conceived. The paradox resolved."
Vaerion stepped forward. "You're asking her to choose between her daughters?"
"No," the Unwritten said, smiling at him. "I'm asking her to do what every god has already done. Rewrite the world in their image. She just has to pick one."
Liora looked at the cradle.
Then at her daughters.
One looked at her with tears.
The other… with silence.
She turned to the dark twin.
"Do you want to live?"
"I don't know what that means," the child said.
Liora knelt. "It means having a future. One you don't have to earn by being useful. One that doesn't ask you to be anything but yourself."
The girl blinked. "No one's ever told me that."
Then she turned to the light-born.
And the two reached out and took each other's hands.
Liora stood and faced the Unwritten.
"I won't give you either," she said.
"You must choose."
"I already did. I chose both."
The Unwritten's smile faded.
"So be it."
He raised his hand.
And reality fractured.
The void exploded in arcs of paradox lightning, burning through time, rewriting memory. Liora screamed as parts of her soul were pulled from her — visions of her past yanked out and devoured.
Vaerion was thrown into a wall, his blade shattered.
The twins cried out.
Liora fell to her knees.
Her hands dug into the void.
And she summoned the Shard.
Not as a weapon.
As herself.
It emerged from her chest in a beam of light, flaring like a second sun.
"I rewrite nothing," she said, voice breaking the air.
"I choose everything."
The Shard cracked.
And from its core poured two lights—one gold, one black.
They wrapped around the girls.
And merged.
Not into one being.
Not into a monster.
But into harmony.
The paradox didn't rupture.
It evolved.
The Unwritten shrieked, stumbling back as his own cradle cracked.
The roots that held it together rejected him, curling away like burnt fingers.
"No," he whispered. "You can't bind contradiction—"
"But I can raise it," Liora said.
And she stepped forward.
With her daughters—now fused in spirit but not body—beside her.
Together, they reached out.
And closed the cradle