The sky was bleeding.
The tear widened above the House of Echoes, spilling rivers of color no human eyes should see—violet that hummed like voices, gold that burned with sorrow, black that wasn't absence but hunger given shape. Every fragment of reality quivered as if struggling to hold itself together.
Kael stood in the shattered hall, his golden bindings coiled tight around Nyra's trembling form. Shadows writhed against the light like vipers, hissing, clawing, but Kael held firm. His teeth ground together as threads of power strained to keep her anchored.
"Kael!" Lyra's voice cut through the chaos, sharp and frantic. She stood at the archway, starlight pulsing from her skin, bow blazing in her grip. "That thing—what is it doing?"
Kael didn't answer. He couldn't. Because the tear in the sky wasn't just an opening—it was a birth.
From the gash, darkness poured like smoke and rain, folding into a shape that had no right to exist. Tendrils of ink dripped downward, fusing into a towering silhouette that shifted with every heartbeat—a being without edges, faceless, yet watching with a thousand unseen eyes.
The air turned heavy, pressing against lungs and bones. Whispers bled into the minds of everyone present:
"Choice… hunger… home…"
Students fled screaming, their voices swallowed by the pulsing void.
Nyra screamed too—not in fear, but in agony. Shadows ripped from her body, dragged toward the newborn entity like rivers returning to the sea. Her black eyes widened, tears streaming down her pale face as she thrashed against Kael's golden bindings.
"Kael—don't let it take me!"
Kael's grip tightened, sweat dripping down his temples as his aura burned brighter.
"I won't!" he roared, though every second his threads frayed, torn by the pull of the Abyss.
Lyra appeared at his side, her bow blazing like a shard of a dying sun.
"We kill it now, Kael! Before it takes her! Before it takes you!"
Kael shook his head, teeth clenched.
"If we kill it now, we rip reality apart!"
"Then what's your plan?!" Lyra shouted over the howl of the void.
Kael's heart slammed like a war drum as the truth hit him: he had only one option—an option that would damn him in ways he couldn't yet imagine.
He turned to Nyra. Her eyes—once endless void—now flickered with raw terror and something else: trust.
"Kael," she whispered through gritted teeth, shadows writhing like chains breaking. "Don't let me go."
And that was when the Abyss spoke—not as a whisper, but as a voice that shook the marrow of creation:
"Give her to us… or become what you promised."
The ground split beneath them, light and shadow colliding in spirals of chaos. The Abyss's form reached down, tendrils slicing through Kael's golden bindings like wet paper.
"Kael!" Lyra screamed, releasing an arrow of pure starlight. It streaked upward, striking the tendril and exploding in a blaze of silver—but it only slowed the thing for a heartbeat.
Nyra's body jerked as her last threads of control snapped. Shadows surged from her skin, twisting into wings of black flame. Her voice broke as she cried his name: "Kael!"
Kael moved without thinking. He caught her in his arms as the golden threads shattered, and then he did the unthinkable.
He opened himself.
A roar tore from his throat as the entity inside—the god-force that had slept within him since rebirth—burst outward in a storm of light and sound. Golden threads ripped free, spiraling around him like a living sun, clashing against the Abyss in a collision that warped the sky.
"So be it," the Abyss whispered, almost tender. "Become ours."
Kael's aura flared to a brilliance that seared the heavens, and for the first time, Lyra and Nyra saw what he truly was—not a savior, not a man, but a living axis of creation and destruction.
He looked at them both—Lyra with her defiant fire, Nyra with her desperate shadows—and spoke in a voice that was his and not his:
"Stay behind me. This ends now."
But deep down, Kael knew the truth.
This wasn't the end.
It was the beginning of the war the Loom tried to prevent.
And as the Abyss lunged, tearing through the sky like a god unbound, Kael launched himself upward—gold and black colliding in a battle that would decide not just who ruled the world…
…but what kind of world survived.