The bridge shimmered beneath their feet, its every step echoing not as sound, but as thought. Each footfall stirred memories not their own. Voices whispered across invisible lines of time and shadow, speaking in tongues the mind did not recognize, yet instinctively understood.
Lucian led the way, firelight curling in his clenched fists. Behind him came Selia, her gauntlet softly glowing with threads of encoded memory. Laila was next, bow at the ready, eyes sharp, though the world around them shifted too fluidly to aim at anything that lasted more than a moment. Tista brought up the rear, hammer resting across her back, her broad shoulders squared for whatever lay ahead.
At the end of the bridge stood the door.
It was vast—ten men high, arched like a cathedral spire, etched with thousands of glyphs in spiraling bands. The sigil of the Sovereign pulsed at its center, not carved, but alive. It beat like a heart. Lucian reached out, and the door answered not to his touch, but to his resolve.
It opened without sound, peeling away like mist parting for wind.
Beyond lay the Hall of Echoes.
It was not a room, nor a place in any physical sense. It was a collapse of time and self, a corridor through was, is, and might yet be. As they crossed the threshold, the Dawnbound found themselves alone—not physically, but existentially separated.
Each walked their own path through the Maker's past.
Lucian stepped into a field of stars. The ground beneath him was the black of space, but solid, glimmering with ghost-light. Before him stood a boy. Not the Maker. Just a boy. Eyes wide with curiosity, skin golden and pale, wrapped in a robe of radiant fiber.
The boy knelt beside a dying tree whose leaves shimmered like glass.
"Do you know why things die?" he asked without looking up.
Lucian didn't answer.
"Because permanence is crueler than death. Change is mercy. But the First Ones… they chained the world to constancy. And so, it rotted."
The boy looked up—and now he was the Maker. Older. Taller. His eyes were fire.
Lucian blinked—and they stood in a library the size of a mountain. A thousand thousand orbs floated through the air, each containing memories. The Maker walked among them, taking them, consuming them.
One sphere cracked open, spilling light.
Lucian saw a world ending. Fire raining from twin suns. Oceans boiled. A city of gold and shadow collapsed as the sky split to reveal an eye—a cosmic maw ringed with teeth made of time.
"The Sovereign was not born," the Maker said softly beside him. "It was buried. A sentience too vast to contain. It leaked into thought. Into story. Into faith. I did not create it."
He turned to Lucian.
"I remembered it."
The scene shifted again.
This time, Lucian stood in the Sanctum of Eld. He recognized the geometry from their earlier vision—impossible shapes built from silence and sound. The Maker stood before the Council of Pale Lords. Their forms shimmered—sometimes solid, sometimes waveforms, sometimes suggestion.
"We must unlock the seal," the Maker said. "Not to release it—but to know it. To learn its name. To shape it."
One of the Pale Lords replied, its voice a hurricane in reverse.
To name it is to become it.
The Maker smiled then—a cold, brittle smile.
"Then let me become."
Lucian staggered.
Elsewhere in the Hall, Selia moved through shadow. The past curled around her like smoke—memories bleeding from broken timelines. She saw the Maker as a scholar, long before he was the unmaker. She saw him love. She saw him grieve.
She saw him betrayed.
The Eld had known the Sovereign's name. They had buried it beneath layers of false memory, a collective amnesia encoded in the stars themselves. They had hidden the truth not from enemies—but from themselves.
Because they feared that simply knowing the Sovereign's true form would awaken it.
Selia watched the Maker scream as the last echo of his world burned—its fire not from destruction, but from revelation. Knowledge had devoured it.
And the Maker had sworn: never again.
Not to protect the world.
But to remake it into something that could withstand the truth.
Laila's path took her through battles—countless, beautiful, meaningless battles. The Maker had walked through time, watching the fall of empires, the rise of tyrants, the endless repetition of mortal folly. Again and again, he offered wisdom. Again and again, he was ignored.
Until one day, he stopped offering.
Laila stood in a field of dead kings, all laid bare by knowledge too heavy to carry. The Maker knelt beside them, whispering into their ears a single word.
Their minds shattered.
Their hearts stopped.
Laila saw that word—but she could not remember it.
Even thinking about it hurt.
Even forgetting it felt like guilt.
Tista's path was the shortest, but the loudest.
She faced the Maker not as a scholar, or a god—but as a warrior.
"You want to fight the Sovereign?" the Maker asked her.
Tista raised her hammer. "If it wants my world, it has to go through me."
The Maker laughed—not cruelly, but sadly.
"I tried. I forged blades made of starfire. Built legions of flame. Bound the names of the dead into armor. It all crumbled. The Sovereign isn't an enemy."
He stepped forward.
"It's an answer."
"To what?" she snarled.
"To the question that no one dares ask: What if we were never meant to be?"
Tista swung her hammer at him.
It passed through smoke.
And then she was falling—back into the Hall, back toward the others.
They all reconvened in the central chamber.
They were different now—touched not by power, but perspective. Each had seen the Maker's path. Not to justify him—but to understand.
Lucian was the first to speak.
"He didn't set out to become a god. He just… stopped believing anyone else should decide what truth is."
Selia nodded. "He thinks he can contain the Sovereign by becoming it."
"But he's wrong," said Laila. "You don't contain a storm by stepping into its eye. You vanish."
Tista grunted. "So what's the plan? Hit him with reason?"
"No," said Lucian. "We give him what he's never had."
They looked at him.
Lucian raised his hands.
"Choice."
The chamber rippled. The Hall of Echoes was ending. The truths they'd seen couldn't be unseen—but the future had yet to be chosen.
And the Maker still stood at the Threshold of Naming, ready to awaken what slept beneath the Veil of First Fire.
Now, the Dawnbound had seen the storm from within.
Next, they had to stop it from consuming everything.