--
The stars did not sing.
Not anymore.
Dexter stood on the edge of the battlefield, where the ashes of Thyatira swirled in the broken wind like embers searching for meaning. Around him, the Flamebound gathered in silence. Even the victorious burned quietly, as if afraid the ground might remember whose blood it had tasted.
Tulopia knelt beside the shattered sigil she had summoned—its celestial markings still faintly pulsing with residual power. Her hands trembled as she whispered the closing rites, sealing away the raw magic that had nearly torn the sky in half.
"We did it," zyre murmured, brushing soot from his arms. "She's gone."
Dexter didn't answer.
His sword—once alive with black fire—now hummed with something else. A low, almost mournful resonance, as though the steel had seen too much.
Kael clapped him on the back. "You look like hell."
Dexter gave a dry, cracked laugh. "I think I brought it with me."
They stood in uneasy victory. The FORIS were dead. Thyatira, destroyed. The ritual, undone.
And yet…
Something was wrong.
Tulopia rose, her eyes not on Dexter, but on the horizon—where the sky flickered with strange fractures, thin and sharp as spiderweb cracks in glass.
"Did you feel that?" she asked.
Vael nodded slowly. "Something shifted. Like a lock… breaking."
The wind changed.
Not in speed or chill—but in song.
There was no sound, but every soul on the field felt it. A presence. Distant, but approaching. Vast. Hungry. Ancient.
Dexter stepped forward, frowning. "The rings are gone. She's gone. What else is there?"
Riven's voice was unusually quiet. "What if she wasn't the one who forged the end… just the key that held it back?"
The sky above them split—not with fire or lightning, but with silence. A rift tore open. Not a portal, not a crack—something else. A scar that bled darkness.
And from it, a sound rose—not one the ears could hear, but one the soul recoiled from.
The cry of something waking.
The air thinned. The earth curled in upon itself. Flames guttered and died.
Then came the voice.
"Flame has failed. Flesh has failed. The Hollow shall rise."
Dexter's knees buckled as a vision flooded his mind.
---
He stood at the edge of a void.
A throne of chains and shattered rings hovered in black space, and upon it sat a creature of flame and absence—a being with no face, no eyes, no name. Its body was stitched from broken oaths and ancient fire, bound in the shadows of forgotten time.
Behind it: a wall of glass, each pane showing a different world—burning, bending, breaking.
"The rings were never weapons," it said.
"They were seals."
Dexter tried to speak, but his mouth filled with ash.
"You wore them like armor. You wielded them like fire. But they were prisons. And now you are the gate."
It leaned forward.
And Dexter saw its face.
His own.
Twisted. Burned. Crowned.
"You are the last spark before the Hollow Flame returns."
---
He snapped back into his body with a scream, hands clutching his head.
Tulopia caught him, eyes wide. "What did you see?"
Dexter didn't answer. He couldn't.
The sky above was still ruptured. And through it, something enormous moved—its body veiled in dimensionless shadow. Its form made no sense. A being that should not exist, and yet always had.
The rift expanded.
And the temperature dropped.
Zyre cursed under his breath. "We sealed a monster… but broke the lock to a god."
"Not a god," Vael whispered. "A Flame Unnamed. One even the elders feared."
A second voice emerged—Nyshara's. Faint. Broken. Projected through a scrying crystal carried by Orin.
"Dexter… the Hollow Flame… it's waking. It's not in one realm—it's in all. Something's bleeding through. I need you to come back. I think I found where it all began—what the rings were guarding."
Dexter's blood turned to ice.
"We're past saving," Kael muttered. "We need to stop it before it enters the human world."
Tulopia turned to Dexter. "This isn't war anymore. This is containment. If that thing crosses the Veil…"
Dexter stood tall.
"No. If it crosses the Veil—we burn it from existence."
The Six stared.
"You want to fight that?" Orin asked.
"I want to end it. For good. No more gods. No more seals. No more heirs." He turned toward the remaining Flamebound. "Gather what remains. Send word to Nyshara. We're going back to Earth."
He looked to the sky, where the Hollow Flame pulsed behind the veil like a beating heart.
"And this time," he said, "we burn it all down."
---
Elsewhere.
A lone warlock knelt before a mirror made of sorrow.
He watched the battlefield through a shard of silver light, lips curled in reverence.
"The rings are gone," he murmured. "She is dead."
Behind him, a voice whispered.
"But the Hollow lives."
The warlock rose. "As planned. Dexter lit the spark."
The voice answered, a thousand voices folded into one.
"Then the world shall burn not in fire… but in silence."
---