The first breath after the dream broke was like drowning in light.
Haraza gasped, eyes wide, as the void around him evaporated into a thousand spiraling ribbons of flame and memory. The monolith cracked open not with thunder but with a sigh, like a weary titan finally laying down to rest. The entire dreamscape—the star-flecked sea, the ever-shifting sky, the space between—collapsed into a single brilliant pulse of energy that rushed through him like a second soul.
He did not fall.
He was thrown.
Reality reasserted itself with a scream.
Haraza landed on cold stone, the weight of gravity slamming into his bones as he crashed to the floor of Sigma-Twelve's inner sanctum. The chamber had changed—it no longer existed in the void-between-worlds, but in the real world, rooted now in the ancient cavern that once merely housed the Rift. All around him, the walls pulsed with golden veins of memory-light, the aftershocks of a cycle undone.
A soft groan to his right.
"Lirien!" he shouted, half-crawling toward her.
She stirred, eyes fluttering open, her hand on her temple. ("I feel like I got kicked through five planes of existence…")
He helped her sit up.( "You did.")
They looked around.
The chamber they'd entered—once a static monument to containment—was now alive. Strange vines of light and stone coiled around the monolith's shattered remnants. Where once there had been nothing but stillness and cold, now streams of warm air passed through vents high above. Faint glimmers of birdsong echoed from impossible heights.
Something was changing.
And not just within Sigma-Twelve.
Haraza could feel it in his blood. The Seed was gone—not dead, not dormant, but released. The core of his being no longer burned with the Rift's echo. Instead, it pulsed with something quieter.
A choice fulfilled.
He stood and looked up through a crack in the roof that hadn't been there before. Through it, he could see the sky.
Not the violet-tinted voidscape of before, but a sky of piercing blue and gold, clouds slowly swirling around a sun that shone brighter than it had in centuries.
And far in the distance—impossibly far—something was falling.
A piece of the sky, descending slowly like a petal caught in a breeze.
Lirien stood beside him, watching. ("The Veil.")
("What?")
She pointed. ("It's breaking. The Rift's shroud—the veil that kept the old energies locked away—is unraveling.")
He stared in silence. ("What does that mean for the world?")
Lirien's voice was quiet. ("It means the truth is coming back.")
And truth, Haraza knew, had a terrible weight.
They left Sigma-Twelve that day as if rising from a grave.
Outside the gate, the Wardens were waiting.
But something in them had changed. Some knelt when they saw him, not in worship, but in recognition. Serah Voran's eyes, once pale and clouded with Rift-sight, were clear again—gray and human and weary.
("You ended it,") she said.
Haraza nodded. ("I broke the cycle.")
("And what remains?") she asked.
"(I don't know,") he replied. ("But I think the world's going to decide that for itself now.")
She studied him for a long moment.("Then the world will need you.")
He didn't have the heart to argue.
They stayed in the outpost one final night, though neither he nor Lirien slept. Too much stirred in the wind—subtle tremors in the land, echoes of a boundary that no longer held. All across the world, Haraza could feel ancient structures stirring. Not waking like some slumbering beast—but reacting.
Reacting to his choice.
The Seed had not only shattered the monolith.
It had broadcast its death.
Somewhere in the north, the forgotten clock-cities of the Aeon Seers were spinning again. In the far west, the dormant rune-banks of the Graven Skyfields hummed to life. Entire systems long buried beneath stone and silence began to breathe again, their lights blinking into the dark like stars returning to a night sky.
He felt it all.
Not as a burden.
As a tether.
("Your choice has consequences,") Lirien said beside him. ("Every chain you break binds something else.")
He looked at her. ("Do you regret following me?")
("I didn't follow you,") she said. ("I chose you.")
That silenced him more than any vision.
By dawn, the Wardens had prepared provisions. The outpost's halls were quiet, as if the earth itself held its breath. Serah offered him a map, but he declined. The way forward wasn't marked by ink or stone.
It was pulling him.
There was something out there—an answer to a question he hadn't yet asked.
They left the outpost at midday, and within the hour, the world changed again.
The sky rippled.
A great tremor rolled through the ground, not violent, but deep—like a beast stirring far below the crust of the world. The clouds parted in a spiral, revealing a glimpse of something massive far above the firmament.
Not a structure.
Not a storm.
But a city.
Floating. Turning slowly like a coin in the sun.
Lirien stumbled. ("That's impossible.")
Haraza squinted. ("You recognize it?")
She nodded slowly. "It's said to be a myth. A lost Ascendant sanctuary—Halcyros. One of the twelve high sanctums lost when the Rift first opened."
("It's real,") Haraza said. ("And it's waking up.")
As they walked, the land around them shifted. Trees that once twisted under the burden of distorted magic began to straighten. Flowers bloomed in time-lost colors. Small creatures—once mutated, once corrupted—moved through the grass with hesitant freedom, as if trying to remember what peace felt like.
But not all was calm.
Because something else had sensed the change.
At dusk, the sky screamed.
A great howl echoed through the hills, and something fell from the heavens like a spear. It crashed into the earth miles away in a column of fire and smoke, the shockwave leveling trees and shattering stone.
Haraza and Lirien reached the crater by nightfall.
Within it, surrounded by scorched earth, stood a figure.
Tall. Clad in shimmering armor laced with crimson. Its face was hidden behind a mirrored helm that reflected nothing. In one hand it held a glaive forged of blackglass. In the other, it carried a sigil shaped like a broken star.
Lirien froze. ("No…")
Haraza looked at her. ("What is it?")
She swallowed. ("A Covenant Shard. One of the original enforcers of the Accord. They were bound in stasis when the Rift was sealed. If they're awake…")
The figure turned toward them slowly.
And bowed.
("Haraza Genso. Sleeper. Vessel. Unbinder.")
Its voice was like ice breaking.
("We have watched. We have waited. And now—we remember our Oath.")
Haraza tensed. ("What oath?")
The shard raised its blade.
("To end what you would dare to begin.")