A Dead Zone
Cael and Mireth venture into the Whispershade, a once-lush forest now gray, still, and eerily quiet. Birds avoid it. Mana refuses to flow here naturally.
They're following rumors of "ghostlight"—a flickering azure flame that sometimes walks between trees. Locals say it's cursed.
As they approach the heart of the forest, Cael's shard pulls toward something. He feels it resonating.
Mireth: "That's not a seal. It's something unfinished."
The First Roar
A sound shatters the silence—a roar that doesn't echo. Instead, the world seems to pause and listen.
From behind a curtain of corrupted trees emerges the Shardhowl.
It's quadrupedal—like a massive lupine beast—but broken along three axes. Its spine phases in and out of visibility. Its mouth opens sideways, lined with glyph-teeth. And embedded in its chest—
—is a fragment of a Void shard, still pulsing.
Cael gasps. "It's alive because of the seal."
Battle Against the Unfinished
Mireth goes in fast—slashes through its knee. But the wound reverses: it heals backward, stitching itself with time-scraps.
Cael tries to cast a gravity-bind spell. The shard in his chest interferes, and the spell misfires, inverting local pressure.
The ground folds. A tree crushes itself into a single point. The Shardhowl leaps forward—howling a riddle.
"Who sealed the sky when stars began to speak?"
"It talks?" Cael shouts.
"No." Mireth replies. "It remembers."
The Void Answer
Cornered, Cael focuses inward—tuning his shard to harmonize instead of resist. The Void answers with a pattern.
He replicates the recursive glyph he saw in Chapter 18. Not a spell—an invitation.
"Return to origin."
The glyph explodes outward. The Shardhowl stumbles.
And then… it sits.
Just for a moment.
Before it collapses—and fades into a dust storm of fractal light.
Aftermath and Revelation
Inside the ashes, Cael finds the fragment.
It's cracked and unstable, a splinter from a failed seal. Likely from another Sealbearer… or a forgotten experiment.
Mireth: "We're not just sealing Void. We're leaving behind pieces of it."
Cael: "And those pieces remember us."
He pockets the shard. The forest remains dead, but something new has bloomed at its center:
A single black flower with silver veins.