There was no end to the fall.
No bottom. No scream. Just the slow unraveling of self.
Kael's body no longer felt like it belonged to him. The air around him pulsed—wet, heavy, oppressive. It wasn't wind. It was breath. The kind that seeped out from something old, something buried beneath time and memory, and still not dead.
Then suddenly impact.
He struck ground so soft it absorbed the shock. Not soil. Not stone. Flesh.
He rolled onto his knees, hands sinking into a floor that pulsed with heat, slick and veined. The space around him looked alive. The walls bled. The ceiling twitched. Kael was inside something.
Or someone.
He gagged but forced the bile down. Whatever had brought him here wasn't done yet.
A flicker of blue light danced ahead.
He followed it.
Step by step, breath shallow, he walked deeper into the wound of the world. Whispers clung to the air again—this time fragmented. Different voices. Younger.
"…he should've stayed dead…"
"…the fire chose him…"
"…we buried him beneath the oath…"
They weren't spirits.
They were memories.
His memories.
The deeper Kael went, the more the voices took shape. He passed shadow-figures reenacting moments long buried: his first blood-duel in the Temple of Ash, where he cut down a boy whose name he never learned. The burning of Elaran's gates. Serin standing in the snowfall, staring at him like she saw a stranger.
He reached a chamber at the heart of the wound. There, something waited for him.
It sat on a throne of bone and obsidian—his own face staring back.
But the eyes were wrong.
They were empty.
"Kael Azreth," the reflection said, voice colder than death. "You left me here."
"I never knew you were real."
"I was real. I'm what you killed when you ran."
Kael took a step forward. "You're the part of me that burned with the city."
"No. I'm what rose from the ashes. You crawled into the light. I stayed in the dark. I saw everything you tried to forget."
It stood.
The reflection drew a blade.
Kael's blade.
And Kael, feeling something primal stir inside him, drew his own.
Steel met steel with a crash. Sparks lit the fleshy chamber, the pulse of the room quickening with every strike. The two Kaels fought like mirrors gone mad—one graceful and cold, the other ragged and furious.
"You can't kill me," the reflection hissed. "You are me."
Kael ducked under a swing, brought his sword up, and slammed the hilt into the doppelgänger's jaw.
"I was you," Kael said.
The reflection smiled—then vanished into smoke.
The chamber fell silent.
Kael stood alone, breathing hard, sword still raised.
Then a voice behind him: soft, distant.
"…Kael…"
He turned.
It was Serin.
Not as she was now—but as he remembered her, before the war, before the betrayal, before the fire.
"I don't forgive you," she said. "But I'm not your ghost."
He stepped toward her. "Then what are you?"
"A reminder."
And with that, she vanished too.
The wound began to close. The fleshy walls peeled away. Light poured in from above. Kael, breathless and bleeding, looked up.
A single word echoed through his mind:
Ascend.
And then the ground beneath him rose, lifting him from the depths of his own ruin.