The moon hovered like an unblinking eye over the ruined skyline.
Malik stood on the highest point of the Citadel, cloaked in dusk, the weight of thousands resting behind him. They knelt in rows—an army not of men, but of memory. Bone and ash. Spirit and shadow. Warriors who had died a thousand deaths, only to rise again at his call.
He looked over them, his expression unreadable. Not pride. Not sorrow. Something older. Something earned.
This was not the end.
But it was close.
"Rise," he said.
At once, the valley shifted with soundless power. Skeletal soldiers surged to their feet, their sockets lit with violet fire. Phantoms coalesced from mist, blades humming with spectral fury. Monstrous summons, too vast for memory to hold still, lurked just beyond the veil of vision.
And at the center of it all—him.
Malik Graves. Firstborn of the Hollow Flame. Echo-Walker. Necrosage.
The boy from West Atlanta who once couldn't afford a bus ticket now stood as a sovereign of death, commander of the dead and the deathless, his word law across shattered continents and unclaimed realms.
He wasn't a god. Not quite.
But he could see the threshold now.
Still, power always came with echoes. And those echoes always remembered.
His cloak stirred in the breeze, torn at the hem, laced with sigil threads from over twenty fallen guilds. The hood had long since fallen back, revealing his twisted locs and the burn-mark crest between his brows—the brand of the Gatebound. A mark no mortal could fake, and no immortal could ignore.
Before him, the army of the Hollow Citadel stood in absolute silence.
Over ten thousand summons.
Each one a soul he had claimed, broken, rebuilt, and bound with scripture older than the Guild archives. Behemoths crawled among them, stitched together from the remains of gods and forgotten titans. Cloaked reapers stood at the flanks, their scythes forged from collapsed dimensions. There were even echoes of extinct creatures—Bone Leviathans, Dust Drakes, Sandhounds—that hadn't walked the world in eons.
And they waited on him. All of them. Because his word… was the law of unlife.
Still, he hesitated.
Not out of doubt. Malik no longer doubted. Not after what he had endured. But memory has weight, and tonight, his shoulders remembered it.
He stared at the valley where the last war had ended.
It wasn't even a valley when it began. It had been a city—metropolitan, hypermodern, wrapped in protective Echo fields and guild domes. One of the Seven Sanctified Zones. Untouchable.
Until he touched it.
It took him twenty-three minutes to reduce it to dust.
But it had taken years to become the man who could.
The path to this moment hadn't been lit with prophecy. There were no foretold scrolls, no divine interventions. Only anger. Loss. And a silence so sharp, it cut deeper than betrayal.
He'd walked the roads the Guilds refused to admit existed. Hunted relics forbidden by every civilized zone. Studied under spirits who had watched empires rise and fall. He had paid for every inch of his rise in blood, sometimes his, more often not.
He'd faced eldritch beasts in the Hollow Spine. Buried three of his own team under collapsing dimensions. Outwitted the Void Archivist in a duel of memory. Walked backward through time in the Seraph Pit just to speak with his younger self—and said nothing.
And worst of all… he had knelt. Once. To something beneath the world.
He remembered the voice it used. Yuh spirit already know mi. Yuh bones remember. It had worn the face of his grandfather, but the eyes belonged to something else. Something that didn't blink.
That thing had given him the final piece.
Not power.
Permission.
Footsteps approached from behind, slow, deliberate. He didn't turn.
"You're thinking too loud again," Naomi said, her voice soft but cutting as ever.
He smiled faintly. "I didn't expect you to climb all the way up here."
"Didn't want you to be alone."
"I haven't been alone in a long time," he murmured, glancing toward the army. "They don't let me forget."
Naomi stood beside him. Her armor bore the sigil of their pact—five points, one flame, a single crimson thread connecting them. The last five. Grave Pact.
They had started as nothing. Guild rejects. Misfits. A healer who refused to register. A data-caster with illegal implants. An illusionist with bloodline contamination. And Malik.
And yet here they stood, commanders of an empire of ash and whisper.
"You know what tomorrow is," he said.
"The convergence," Naomi said. "The Guilds will come. The Unknowns will breach. It's the final collapse."
Malik nodded. "And I'll finally get to ask the question no one has dared to answer."
"You think they'll give it to you?"
"I think they'll try to kill me before I finish asking."
She didn't argue.
The sky cracked overhead—silver lightning again, a horizontal tear like stitched light unraveling.
"The veil is thinning," she said.
Malik didn't respond. He was staring at a lone figure hovering at the army's edge—a woman in white robes, face veiled, arms crossed in front of her. She hadn't moved in hours.
"She's still watching me," he said.
"Lumael?" Naomi asked.
"No. The other one. The one that doesn't belong."
Naomi followed his gaze. "You sure it's not another projection?"
"She's not casting. She is. That's the difference."
Naomi shivered, despite herself.
Malik exhaled, his breath curling like incense in the cold.
"I'll give the command soon," he said. "Then it's done. No more running. No more hiding."
"No more restraint," she corrected.
He nodded once.
Then, he raised his left hand—the one with the soulmark burned into the palm. Threads of energy slithered from his fingertips, invisible to mortal eyes, but blazing across the battlefield like a second sun to those attuned to Echo.
Ten thousand dead snapped to perfect attention.
And Malik's voice dropped to a whisper that shook the stars.
"Begin the requiem."
The army moved as one.
And then the world snapped.
It wasn't sound. It wasn't pressure. It was presence—collapsing in on itself.
Suddenly—
He was falling.
He landed hard.
The world spun, the sky shifted, and the Citadel was gone.
Instead: a cracked sidewalk. Flickering streetlights. The stench of burnt oil and fast food. Concrete soaked in last night's rain. Sirens in the distance. Atlanta, again.
His chest heaved.
Malik jerked upright, sweat pouring down his face, breath ragged.
A dream.
No… not a dream.
A memory.
He looked down at his hands—brown skin, calloused palms, knuckles still bruised from a fight last week. He was nineteen. Broke. Unknown. Alone.
The power was still sleeping inside him.
The world hadn't heard his name yet.
But it would.
Soon.
He didn't know how.
But he remembered where it ended.
And now, finally… he knew where it had begun.
He stood slowly, the ache of coming awakenings already clawing at his spine. Somewhere, deep in the silence between heartbeats, something stirred.
Something old.
Something his.
And this time, he wouldn't ignore it.