The Sovereign's chest wound did not bleed flame alone.
It bled shadow.
Not the absence of light, but something alive—something that slithered and pulsed, as though the abyss itself had been caged inside his body. The Sovereign's halberd dissolved into ash as his form convulsed, splitting along cracks of fire and void.
Kael staggered back, Ashrend still embedded in the Sovereign's chest, the blade screaming in his grip as if resisting being swallowed by the corruption.
"What… is that?" Darric gasped from the cliffs, his voice shaking.
Isryn's face was pale, but her tone was grim. "It's not fire. It's older. A piece of the First Sovereign's hunger."
The shadow poured outward like a tidal wave, black tendrils lashing across the battlefield. Where they touched the ground, soldiers—friend and foe alike—crumbled into dust, their souls ripped away in shrieks no one could hear.
The Sovereign's voice twisted, layered now with something hollow and monstrous.
"I was never whole. I was never fire alone. I was the vessel. I was the cage. And now… the cage breaks."
His eyes, once burning like suns, became pits of endless void. The flame-wrought crown above his head shattered, replaced by a halo of black lightning entwined with crimson sparks—the very echo of Kael's mark.
Kael tightened his grip on Ashrend, crimson aura flaring hotter, his breathing ragged. The storm around him snarled as though it too sensed the ancient predator rising.
"Then I'll end both cage and beast," Kael said, voice cutting through the howling battlefield.
The Sovereign laughed—a sound that fractured the sky. "End me? You can't even comprehend me."
The world bent. Towers of fire became spears of void. The ground cracked into labyrinths of endless shadow. A battlefield became a nightmare.
And yet Kael charged.
Ashrend blazed, crimson and black lightning intertwining, the mark on his chest burning like a star tearing itself apart. He met the Sovereign's void-lashed fist head-on, sword against the abyss, crimson storm against eternal dark.
The clash was not sound. It was silence. Silence so vast it rang in every ear like the end of time.
When it broke, mountains fell.
And Kael was still standing.