The Unmaking Vault dissolved behind Jairen like a dream he could not any longer be certain he'd experienced. His first breath beyond was not air but smoke choking, thick, and having a metallic taste that came from burning steel.
Sky above Hollow Horizon was shattered. Continents drifted like fractured ice on a dark sea, colliding into each other, splintering, and pouring rivers of lava into the chasm below. War was already raging.
And he was late.
The Shardlight Spire
The Spiral Court's jewel—once a monolith of polished crystal singing in the sunlight—now hung broken, its lower tiers collapsing into the abyss. Above, the Mirrorborn banners flapped in a wind that stank of void magic. A new sigil had been burned into its surface: a hollow crown, split down the center.
Elkaris the Hollow-Graced was making his claim.
It was a pandemonium of combat below. Spiral Court loyalists who were armored in mirrorsteel battled against the fluid, changing shape of Mirrorborn soldiers. It was like breaking a reflection to strike a blow, but every shard took shape again as a new soldier. It was an unwinnable fight in the traditional manner.
Jairen touched down amidst the wreckage of a former sacred balcony, his impact breaking stone. He navigated through theflammable air, his sights fixed upon the peak of the Spire.
It was then that she emerged.
The Return of Serephine Hollow
Out of the smoke, her song came again.
Not gentle this time. Not mournful. A war-song.
Her voice was the sound of steel drawn in the dark, of ships tearing through storm-tides, of the first scream before the charge. Around her, warriors who had been seconds from death found themselves rising again, wounds sealing with strands of woven melody.
"Crownless," she shouted, her voice blending into the commotion, "you have beheld the throne. Now produce me the monarch."
Jairen stepped forward, ground about his boots swirling with void-light.
"Take ahold of me," he grunted.
She smiled. "I have always been with you."
Into the Spire
The ascent was madness. Mirrorborn forces swarmed the crystalline stairways, their bodies shifting to form spears, walls, and even beasts of glass-edged hunger. Serephine's song tore through them, breaking their cohesion, leaving them vulnerable for Jairen's void-strikes—fists that unraveled their forms into black dust.
The higher they ascended, reality warped further. Rooms flipped upside down. Gravity unwove. Reflections gave way to halls without a corresponding physical reality. The Spire was no longer a location; it was a weapon.
They met Northwyn at the penultimate level.
But not the echo that was actually the treacherous Spiral Court.
Northwyn's Choice
Her armor was cracked. Blood leaked from her spiraled tattoos. Yet her eyes still carried the defiance of the Spiral Court's First Betrayer.
You arrived too late," she declared. "Elkaris is already at the peak."
"Then step aside," Jairen advised her.
Northwyn's hand went to her sword but did not draw. Her voice dropped low.
"I saw you in the Vault. I know what you carry. If you take the Spire now… the war will not cease. It will only rename itself."
"I'm not out for the throne," Jairen stated. "I'm here to thwart him."
She gazed at him a long silent moment. Then she stepped to one side.
"Do it fast. Glassheart is waking."
The Glassheart
At the Spire's summit, Elkaris knelt before a massive shard of living crystal—the Glassheart, a relic said to be carved from the first mirror that ever reflected light. It pulsed with inner fire, each beat sending tremors through the Spire and ripples through the war below.
"I see you, Crownless," Elkaris stated without turning. He spoke smoothly, like a knife cutting free from silk. "You've beheld the throne. You've put your hand upon it. You know it was never yours."
Jairen stepped forward, his hands sizzling with void-light.
"And it's yours to keep?"
Elkaris's face lit up. "I don't have to dominate the Void. I need only be owner of it."
With a motion, he immersed his hands in the Glassheart.
The Shattering
The world screamed.
Light streamed out of the Glassheart in splintered beams, breaking the sky into a thousand reflected fragments. And every fragment reflected a disparate world--some Jairen knew, some that were alien and inconceivable. Armies streamed out of them: things of obsidian fire, serpents of fluid glass, titans constructed out of naked absence.
Serephine's melody grew frantic. Her music was a barrier about Jairen, preventing the encroaching armies from devouring him completely.
"Elkaris!" Jairen roared, leaping forward.
It was not a physical confrontation. It was a clash of verities.
Elkaris utilized the Glassheart's reflection-magic and attacked Jairen with possibilities of who he could have been or might have become: cowardly tyrants and martyrs. Jairen retaliated with the Pale Memory, burning illusions out with truth about the Unnamed God's exile.
There was a groan in the Spire. It cracked. Glassheart's illumination faltered.
The Last Word
Serephine stood in the midst of the turmoil and shouted out one final time.
It was not a war song now but a song of ending. Her song slipped into the Glassheart, unwinding its power note by note. Elkaris shouted as the reflections broke inwards, drawing his armies back into non-existence.
By the time the light eventually extinguished, Spire was still.
It was gone—burned or perhaps simply redistributed, Jairen could not say. The war beyond was stilled. Both Mirrorborn and Spiral Court forces stood frozen in uncomfortable silence, gazing up at the broken Spire.
Serephine's speech was a whisper alone.
"The heart is broken. But the war is not over."