The flame spread in silence.
Not with fire, but with absence—a hunger that devoured not matter, but meaning. Memories turned brittle. Names slipped from minds. Maps lost their shape. It was not destruction. It was reversion. Undoing.
And it had a voice.
Krael heard it first in the dream-plane, where time folds like silk. He walked through a corridor of black mirrors, each reflecting a version of himself he never lived. At the end, a cradle of light flickered—then extinguished.
From the darkness came the whisper:
> "The world you saved was not yours to free."
He awoke in a cold sweat, hand instinctively reaching for the Severance Edge. It thrummed again, dimly—like an old sentinel forced from slumber.
Elsewhere, Ashira descended into the Vault of Shattered Stars, following a trail of burned glyphs. The Hollow Flame had reached even here—etched into the walls of a realm beyond realm, devouring runes once thought indestructible.
She retrieved an artifact none had dared touch: the Heartshard Compass—a crystal orb that could trace soul imprints across timelines. It spun wildly now, pointing toward a name the cosmos itself refused to remember.
"It's begun," she whispered.
Krael met her at the Crossroads of Silence, where reality's threads intersected like a glowing web.
Ashira didn't greet him with words. Instead, she opened the Compass. It pulsed a dull crimson—and revealed a sigil scorched into the void:
A burning eye wrapped in unraveling thread. Beneath it, in script too ancient for language, a title emerged:
> The Nameless King.
Krael's eyes narrowed. He had felt this presence once—at the edge of the Loom, in the void between seconds. A being that had watched even then. Not acting. Not guiding. Waiting.
"He's not trying to rule," Ashira said. "He's trying to undo every story that ever was."
The Hollow Flame was no simple cult. It was an infection—spreading across realms, carried by echoes and forgotten gods. Former Loom constructs had begun to stir—some aiding, some resisting, all unstable.
The rebellion reformed not as an army, but as a Pact—a secret fellowship across timelines: relic-hunters, old-world cartographers, fallen weavers, and exiles who remembered.
Their task: to find the First Flame—the origin point of the Nameless King's unraveling. Before he extinguished the multiverse from the storybooks up.
Krael stood at the threshold of a decaying realm called Nythis, where the stars no longer recognized each other.
As he stepped forward, the Severance Edge whispered in its sheath.
The prophecy of the Hollow Flame had begun.
But prophecy alone could not stop what was coming.
Only fire could.
Only memory could.
Only those willing to burn to preserve what once was.