Nysha blinked. "You're saying the echo was guarding it?"
"No." Lindarion's voice grew colder. "It was testing if I was compatible."
Ashwing's small forehead wrinkled. "Compatible with what?"
Lindarion didn't answer.
Because he didn't know the full answer yet.
Only that the crystal pulsing in his grip—
it felt like the missing half of something buried deep within his own core.
And it frightened him more than the echo ever had.
They reached the top of the stairway just as the desert wind swept in, a hot, dry gust carrying sand and fading sunlight. The fissure that had cracked open above now revealed the sky, painted in late-afternoon orange.
They stepped out.
And froze.
Because the graveyard was gone.
Where titanic constructs once sprawled in shattered ruins, now the dunes were smooth—untouched—like the desert had erased the battlefield entirely.
Nysha scanned the horizon. "The landscape shifted. Completely. As if the ruins never existed."
