The wind screamed through the ruins of Cindertide.
Black sand carved scars into metal bones — once skyscrapers, now graves.
Beneath the shattered skyline, fires flickered low. Not from war — but from ritual.
A circle of masked figures stood motionless.
Their robes were stitched from scavenged skin and wire.Their eyes, glowing with hollow light.
In the center of their circle lay a boy.
Maybe twelve.
Skin pale. Veins glowing red like magma.He wasn't breathing.
He didn't have to.
The robed ones chanted in a dead language.
"From ash, we summon.From silence, we wake.From shadow, we rise."
They spilled blood — not their own.
The boy twitched.
The earth trembled.
And then —he opened his eyes.
They weren't human.
They weren't anything.
They were filled with a fire that remembered the Reaper.
Elsewhere… deep in the Ashrift
Shadow watched from the edge of the world.
He stood at the lip of the Abyssal Rift — where reality still bled from the war.
He wore no armor now.Just a cloak made of shadows and teeth.His sword — broken. His wings — scorched.
But his eyes burned with new fire.
The Forgotten had gone silent, disappeared into the storm weeks ago.
Eve hadn't returned since the Final Lightfall.
Shadow whispered to the Rift:
"They called me the end.But what comes next... even I don't understand."
Something answered.
A voice made of rust and thunder.
"They remember you, Reaper.And they want their throne back."
Shadow turned.
The wind carried a scream.
A city was dying — again.
And Shadow?
He walked toward the fire.
In the Temple of Echoes…
Eve gripped the silver shard — Shadow's soul fragment — as it pulsed with heat.
Visions swarmed her.
A boy with magma in his veins.
Cities devoured by flame.
Shadow, fighting himself in a void that bent like bone.
And a name spoken through blood:
Ashblood.
Eve gasped.
"It's not over.It's just beginning."
She turned to the ancient AI that housed the last light of the Architect archives.
"Find him," she commanded. "Find Shadow."
The machine stuttered.
"Locating...Warning.Multiple signatures found.Reaper identity… fractured."