The sword slipped.
Metal rang against the stone, its flame sputtering out in a dying hiss. Kaelen's breath caught in his throat as the rift-born entity leaned closer, its many faces grinning in unison. Their whispers filled his skull until he couldn't tell which thoughts were his anymore.
"Yes… let go… become more than flesh, more than fear…"
The shard in his chest seared like molten glass. The pain was unbearable—yet beneath it was something worse. A pull. The sensation of yielding. His will dissolving into something vast and endless, like a drop vanishing into the sea.
For a heartbeat, Kaelen's head bowed. His own reflection—calm, perfect, whole—extended a hand from the Abyssal mass, eyes glowing like stars.
"Join me. Be free of weakness."
His fingers twitched toward it.
Then—snap.
A jolt of memory slammed through him: the faces of the fallen Keepers he'd sworn to outlast. The broken world waiting beyond these walls. The single vow he had repeated since the day he first touched the Abyss: I will not be a vessel. I will be the end of it.
Kaelen's eyes flared wide. The shard's light shifted—not the Abyss's endless black, but something sharper, rawer. A scream ripped from his chest as he seized the burning core, not letting it consume him, but dragging it into his grip.
The entity recoiled, its voices shattering into static. Kaelen rose to his feet, teeth bared, every muscle trembling. He tore his sword back from the ground, and this time the flame didn't sputter—it roared, black shot through with white fire, a defiance that made the air quake.
"Not yours," he snarled. "Not ever."
He swung. The strike cleaved through the nearest cluster of faces, scattering them into smoke. The entity shrieked, its form fracturing, its pull broken. The shard's light pulsed in time with Kaelen's heartbeat—still dangerous, still burning him alive—but his.
The whispers did not vanish. They never would. But they no longer drowned him.
For now, he was stronger than the abyss within.
The monster retreated, swirling into the widening rift, but Kaelen knew this victory was fragile. The line he had crossed could not be uncrossed. He had tasted surrender—and clawed back only by the thinnest thread of will.
And the Abyss would not forget.
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