Ashardio stood alone beneath the fractured firmament, where the sky above the Hollow of Still Echoes rippled like glass submerged in sorrow. The battle with Kaelthar had ended not in death, but in fracture—of purpose, of certainty, of the very fate the Ascendants had been forged to uphold. And in that fracture, Ashardio had glimpsed something far more dangerous than any blade.
Doubt.
He moved through the shifting sands of halted time, dragging the weight of a wound that wasn't just physical. Kaelthar's strike had not only carved across his chest—it had marked him. Branded him with a resonance that thrummed in his bones, as though the laws of the Architects were beginning to rewrite his very presence.
But Ashardio was not so easily overwritten.
He reached a cliff that overlooked the grave of echoes—an expanse littered with monuments to events erased from all memory. Here, forgotten wars had ended, fallen lovers had wept, and gods had died in silence. It was the realm of what-ifs and never-weres, and it was here Ashardio now sought the only being who might understand what came next.
The Oracle of Scars.
He descended the cliff, his steps marked by the flicker of unwelcome visions. Kaelith's face, strained with determination. Kaelthar's shadow turning away, the faintest flicker of memory beneath his mask. The Voice of the Codex whispering of seals and obedience.
But louder than them all was the heartbeat in his own chest—a thrum not bound to fate, not encoded in the Codex. It was chaos. Creation unanchored.
Ashardio knelt before a broken altar of blackened glass and murmured a name no longer spoken in the Celestial Realm.
The sand recoiled. A seam in reality split open, and the Oracle emerged—not as a figure, but as a cascade of wounds and voices, each syllable dripping blood and prophecy. They were clothed in torn veils stitched from the thoughts of those who had defied the Architects and vanished.
"Ashardio," the Oracle rasped. "You carry within you the first fracture. And now the second."
Ashardio met their gaze, unwavering. "Kaelthar hesitated."
"The Harbinger is faltering. That is true. But one fracture opens to a thousand. You've begun to unmake what was written in light. Do you understand what that means?"
"I didn't come for understanding. I came for direction. What lies ahead?"
The Oracle paused. Then reached out a limb that was neither hand nor blade, and touched Ashardio's chest.
Visions assaulted him.
A temple split by time.
Kaelith, running through memories that bled into one another.
Ascendants torn between judgment and remembrance.
And himself—standing at the edge of a vast void, staring at a mirror that did not reflect.
"You are no longer merely a rebel," the Oracle whispered. "You are becoming something the Codex has no name for. You are Unwritten."
Ashardio reeled back, breath ragged. He had always thought he was defying fate. But now, he was something worse. Something more dangerous. A thread that did not belong on the loom.
"If I am unwritten," he said quietly, "can I not then write anew?"
The Oracle did not answer. Instead, it bled light, then vanished into the sand, its final words etched into the stone beneath Ashardio's feet:
"Those who escape the design… become the next designers. Or destroyers."
Ashardio rose.
His wound throbbed.
His blade pulsed.
And far in the distance, Kaelith screamed—just once—as the first of the other Ascendants descended upon the Temple of Forgotten Threads.
Ashardio turned toward the sound.
And began to walk.
Not on the path made for him.
But on one only he could carve.