The winds above the Ashrift Vale howled like the lament of extinct worlds.
Darius stood at the edge of the abyss—his cloak of woven script trailing behind him like severed fate-threads—gazing upon the Cathedral of Unmaking. It was not built, but breathed into being, older than the language of gods, rising like a tumor from unreconciled history.
Its doors were not doors, but frozen decisions.
And waiting at its entrance, barefoot on fractured stone, was Kaela—eyes burning with the same divine chaos she had seduced him with since the Rift.
"You feel it, don't you?" Her voice was a whisper torn from the end of time. "The pull of the Unwritten Flame. The essence before logic. Before purpose."
Darius stepped forward, each pace warping the earth beneath him.
"Why now?"
Kaela smiled. "Because only now do you belong here."
