The Blade of Echoes hummed in Jack's grip like a live wire of fate, its light pulsing with every heartbeat. The Ash-Bound did not rise. They remained kneeling, unmoving, as if the drawing of the blade had locked them into some ancient vow.
Jack turned his back on them. His boots crunched softly over cinders and shattered bone as he stepped down from the dais.
"We're not ready for this," Marek muttered. "You saw what that blade did. It didn't just show you things—it changed you."
Jack's eyes flicked toward him, glowing faintly with the blade's light. "It didn't change me. It reminded me."
Lola approached slowly, staring at the blade with a mix of reverence and dread. "Are you sure you saw the Maw? That's not just a place—it's a wound in the world. It was buried when the first Starlighter died. No one remembers where."
Jack nodded. "I do now. It wasn't buried by stone. It was buried by time."
They stood in silence, surrounded by the echoes of the ruin.
Then Kael spoke, voice hoarse. "So we're going back."
Nyssa's brow furrowed. "Back where?"
Jack looked up, to the sky that boiled and warped above them. "To when it all went wrong."
They stood at the Threshold again.
The Ash-Bound did not stop them. As they passed the pillars and stepped back into the obsidian tunnel, Jack felt the Blade's weight grow heavier—not physically, but metaphysically. Like it was dragging the world behind it.
As they climbed, the temperature fell. Ash turned to dust. The hum of buried fire faded. And when they emerged from the tunnel, it was as if the Wastes had been forgotten by the stars.
Jack turned toward the horizon. "The Maw is not a place on this map. It's a scar in the weave of time. And we can't reach it walking forward."
"You're talking riddles again," Marek said, exasperated. "Say what you mean."
"I mean we have to tear a hole," Jack said. "Time is looped around that moment like a snare. The Blade showed me the anchor point. We cut through it—we fall in."
Lola exhaled sharply. "You're suggesting a temporal breach? That's madness. That kind of magic unravels reality."
Kael looked up. "That's what the Sundering is, isn't it? Reality unraveling."
Jack nodded. "I'm not asking you to follow. I can go alone."
"No," Nyssa said, stepping forward. "You don't face this alone. Not anymore."
Jack studied her face. Steady. Unafraid.
Then he drove the Blade into the ground.
It sang—not a note, but a tone of unmaking. The air bent. The sky above cracked like glass under pressure. Reality split at the seams, light folding inward like petals of a dying star.
And then—
The ground vanished beneath their feet.
They fell.
Not through space, but through memory.
Fragments of time whirled around them—glimpses of battles, betrayals, lives not lived. A dozen versions of Jack screamed past: one with golden wings, one with burning eyes, one reduced to dust, one crowned in void.
Then—impact.
They landed in silence, not with a thud, but a breath.
They stood at the edge of the world.
The sky was crimson, the sun broken and bleeding into a sea of clouds. They were on a plain of white ash, stretching endlessly to a black horizon. At the center: a vast chasm, impossibly wide, impossibly deep.
The Maw.
It pulsed, slow and steady. A wound in creation.
Jack staggered to his feet, the Blade of Echoes still in his hand. "This is it. This is where the world broke."
Kael stepped forward, his breath caught. "I remember this."
Jack turned. "What?"
"I… I don't know how. But I do. I was here. Before. In the moment the Devourer woke." Kael's hands trembled. "This is where I changed."
Nyssa knelt beside the Maw, eyes wide. "The veil here—it's paper-thin. I can feel the other side pressing in."
"Not pressing," Lola said. "Leaking."
Dark vapor spilled from the Maw in slow, endless streams—like smoke that forgot how to rise. It whispered with a thousand tongues. The Blade began to glow again.
Then a shape emerged from the abyss.
A figure—not of flesh, but memory and ruin. Cloaked in starlight, crowned in void. Its face mirrored Jack's—but older, cold, unblinking.
"Welcome home," it said, voice like a dozen Jacks speaking as one.
Jack raised the Blade. "You're not me."
"I am what you become when you give in," the echo said. "I am the price. The conclusion. The truth."
The others moved to Jack's side, weapons raised.
The Echo raised a hand—and they all froze. Not physically, but temporally. They were locked in moments not their own—Marek watching his father die again, Nyssa reliving the massacre in the Hollow, Lola lost in her years in Vaelmir.
Kael alone remained untouched.
The Echo turned. "And you, broken shard. You were always meant to fall. The Sundering needed a bridge."
Kael took a step forward. "I am not your bridge. I am the storm you didn't see coming."
He unleashed a pulse of raw will—breaking the illusion. The spell shattered, freeing the others.
Jack charged.
The Blade of Echoes met its twin—an inverted version clutched in the Echo's hand. Light and shadow collided, time screaming between them.
"You were made to end things," the Echo whispered.
"I was made to change them," Jack roared.
Their blades clashed again—and the Maw widened.
Above, the sky peeled back.
And from that tear, something began to descend.
Not the Devourer—not yet.
But its voice.
"I remember you," it said, echoing through every thought, every breath.
"You were mine before you were born."