The ruins of the Skyfane loomed before them, jagged stone spires jutting from the earth like the broken ribs of a long-dead titan. Kael felt the air shift as he and Selene stepped through the shattered archway, the weight of something unseen pressing against his skin.
The shard pulsed harder now.
The second piece was here.
But they were not alone.
Kael's grip on his rifle tightened as he scanned the ruins. Shadows flickered between the collapsed pillars, moving with eerie silence. He didn't need Selene to tell him what they were.
The Hollow Order hadn't left.
Their masked warriors were still here, waiting. Watching.
Kael turned to Selene. "Tell me what we're dealing with."
Selene exhaled slowly, adjusting her mask before speaking. "The Hollow Order isn't like the Ashen Blight. The Blight wants the Crown's destruction. The Order wants to take it back."
Kael frowned. "Take it back? From who?"
Selene gestured toward the ruins. "From us."
Kael's stomach tightened. "Explain."
She knelt, brushing dust from an old carving on the ground. The faded etchings showed a spiral interwoven with a broken crown, surrounded by figures clad in flowing robes. Beneath them, jagged symbols pulsed with faint energy.
"Before the Fracture, before the first war, there was another world," Selene said. "A place beyond this one, untouched by entropy. The Hollow Order believes that was the true creation—the first existence. And they claim that the Fractured Crown wasn't forged by mortals… it was stolen from the ones who made reality itself."
Kael stared at her. "You're saying they think the Crown belongs to gods?"
Selene met his gaze. "Not gods. Something worse."
A cold feeling settled in Kael's chest. The stories of the Fractured Crown had always spoken of its limitless power, but no one had ever said where that power came from. It had always been a weapon, a tool, a throne waiting for its ruler.
But if the Hollow Order was right…
The Crown wasn't a throne.
It was a prison.
And the shards Kael now carried weren't just pieces of power.
They were locks coming undone.
---
The Descent
Kael and Selene moved carefully through the ruins, following the pull of the shard deeper into the Skyfane's heart.
The deeper they went, the heavier the air became. The stone beneath them was cracked, pulsing with faint traces of energy—echoes of whatever had once existed here. Kael didn't like the way the ground seemed to shift beneath his boots, as if the ruins themselves were remembering something.
The passage narrowed into a spiraling staircase, leading down into the dark. Kael could feel the weight of unseen eyes pressing on him.
"They're waiting," Selene muttered.
Kael glanced at her. "How do you know?"
She gripped her blade tighter. "Because they never left."
A whisper of air.
Kael ducked just as a spear shot past his head, slamming into the stone wall with a sharp crack. A second figure lunged from the shadows, blade flashing. Selene moved first, meeting the attack with a sharp, fluid motion.
Steel clashed against steel.
Kael twisted, raising his rifle, but another figure struck from behind. He barely had time to spin before the attack slammed into his chest, sending him sprawling across the stone floor.
Pain flared through his ribs, and for a moment, the world blurred.
His vision swam—flashes of something old, something buried deep within the ruins.
Chains. A throne of broken glass. A voice speaking in a language that no human should understand.
The shard at his chest burned.
And Kael felt something waking.
He gritted his teeth, forcing himself to focus as Selene tore through their attackers with brutal efficiency. The Hollow Order didn't fight like soldiers or scavengers. They moved like ghosts, their bodies flickering between solid and insubstantial with each strike.
Kael had seen something like this before.
Back at the Sanctum. When he had first used the shard's power.
They're using a piece of the Crown.
The realization hit him like a hammer.
The Hollow Order had their own fragments.
And that meant they were far more dangerous than he had imagined.
---
The Hollow Ascendant
The warriors of the Hollow Order did not die easily. Their bodies flickered between phases of reality, warping through the cracks in existence itself. Selene's blades cut through them, but their forms reassembled like shifting smoke.
Kael gritted his teeth, raising the shard in his palm.
It thrummed violently in his grip, pulsing with a hunger that wasn't his own.
A whisper coiled through his mind.
Break them.
Kael clenched his jaw.
No. Not like before. Not without control.
He focused—reaching, willing the shard to obey him rather than the other way around.
The ruins shook.
A pulse of force rippled outward, slamming into the warriors of the Hollow Order like a tidal wave. Their flickering forms collapsed, their bodies losing cohesion as they were thrown backward into the darkness.
Silence followed.
Selene exhaled, shaking blood from her blade. "You're getting better at that."
Kael let out a slow breath. The shard's glow had dimmed again, but its warmth remained. "Not good enough."
She sheathed her weapons. "Then we keep moving."
Kael nodded, following her deeper into the ruin. The second shard was close now.
He could feel it calling.
And for the first time, he wasn't sure whether he should answer.
---
The Chamber of the Fallen
At the bottom of the spiraling ruins, they reached a vast, hollowed-out chamber. Pillars of fractured stone rose toward a ceiling so high it vanished into darkness. At the center, half-buried in the floor, the second shard pulsed faintly with an eerie, cold light.
Kael stepped forward, his heartbeat matching the shard's slow, steady rhythm.
Selene placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Be careful."
Kael met her gaze. "You said they believe the Crown was stolen."
She nodded. "Yes."
Kael turned back to the shard. "Then why did they leave this one behind?"
The moment the words left his lips, the shadows above stirred.
The Hollow Order hadn't been trying to keep the shard from him.
They had been waiting for him to take it.
Kael barely had time to raise his rifle before a new voice echoed through the chamber—deeper, heavier, filled with something ancient.
"You have touched what does not belong to you."
A figure descended from the darkness, cloaked in robes of flowing obsidian, a mask carved with the same spirals that lined the ruins.
Kael swallowed hard.
This wasn't just another warrior.
This was a Hollow Ascendant.
One of the leaders of the Hollow Order.
And by the way the chamber trembled at his presence, Kael knew he had just stepped into something far bigger than he could comprehend.