The world was broken glass beneath their feet.
Shards of moonlight spilled across the scorched stone path as Kael led the way, boots silent but sure, eyes twin blades of steel. Behind him, Elyra moved like dusk incarnate, her breath slow, measured, as if even the air was something she had to fight to deserve. And Vespera—gods help them—was a whisper of smoke and venom at their heels, her presence like a thorn-laced ribbon trailing through shadow.
The heart of the Pale Flame's fortress had not been built by mortal hands.
It was carved from anguish. Forged in ancient betrayals. The stone here didn't breathe—it remembered. The walls wept runes older than blood, and every flicker of torchlight on their surfaces danced like the ghosts of those who had died here, waiting for revenge or resurrection.
Kael didn't speak. Not yet. Not when the walls could listen. Not when every step closer to the sanctum felt like a noose tightening around his neck.
He wasn't afraid.But fear didn't ask permission to exist.It coiled in the hollows of his chest like smoke, filling the cracks between heartbeat and breath.
Elyra's voice broke the silence first, low and tremulous. "Do you feel that?"
He nodded, eyes scanning the corridor ahead—arched and vast, a cathedral of death. "It's waiting."
"What is?" she asked, though she already knew.
Kael's mouth was a grim line. "Whatever comes after this."
Vespera let out a soft, derisive sound. A ghost of a laugh. "You mean the end."
Her words slithered like ice over the cracked floor. Elyra glanced back at her—sharp, fierce, silent. There was no point in arguing anymore. Not here. Not when the walls bled memories, and silence meant survival.
They passed murals that screamed without sound.
Scenes of the first war—gods falling like burning stars, mortals with eyes like eclipses. The paint had faded, but the agony had not. Kael could almost feel the echo of their screams vibrating through the soles of his boots.
They reached the Veil just before midnight.
It hung in the final chamber like a wound in the world—an obsidian curtain suspended in air, rippling with every breath, as if it were alive. No door. No lock. Just a tear in reality, pulsing with power that made Kael's skin crawl and his bones hum like war drums.
The Shatterglass Veil.
Not just a passage. A trial. A punishment. A reckoning.
Vespera stepped forward first. Her hand hovered inches from the Veil's edge, her expression unreadable.
"This is where souls break," she murmured. "Where the truth strips you bare."
Kael came beside her, his grip tight around the hilt of his blade. "And if we don't make it through?"
Vespera didn't look at him. Her lips barely moved. "Then we were never worthy of what waits beyond."
Elyra inhaled like she was breathing in stars and fire. "Let's finish what we started."
She reached out—and the Veil shivered like it had been expecting her.
It pulsed. Then split.
And the screaming began.
Not theirs. Not yet. But the echoes of others who had crossed before. Wails of agony and madness, a symphony of broken things. The kind of sound that cracked you open and made you question every good thing you'd ever done.
Kael went first.
Pain. Memory. Guilt.
The moment he stepped through, it felt like a thousand blades sinking into his spirit. Every lie he'd told himself shattered. His mother's last breath, his father's silence, the moment he turned away from the battlefield where they begged for him to fight—it all rushed in like a flood.
His knees buckled, but he didn't fall.
Because Elyra was behind him, and she needed him strong. Even if strength meant bleeding from the soul.
Elyra followed.
Her fire met the Veil like two storms colliding. Visions flooded her—her brother dying in her arms, her mother's scream, the bargain she made in that forest long ago when her heart broke in half and never quite healed.
She screamed—but it was silent. The kind of scream that left your throat raw and your eyes empty.
She stumbled out, tears streaming, flames curling along her fingertips like prayer.
Vespera walked through without a sound.
The Veil didn't fight her. It welcomed her. Because Vespera was no stranger to darkness. She had bathed in it. Breathed it. Bent it to her will. She emerged untouched, save for the flicker of something behind her eyes—something old. And waiting.
The chamber beyond the Veil was impossible.
No more stone. No more ruin. Just a throne room carved from starlight and shadow. The floor glistened like obsidian glass. Above, no ceiling—only endless dark, pierced by veins of fire like constellations bleeding light.
And at the center—
The Throne of Embers.
On it sat the Pale Flame.
Not man. Not beast. Not god.
Something older.
Its voice slid over their skin like oil and frost. "So the broken children of the old blood come to die."
Kael raised his blade. His voice was steady, carved from iron. "We didn't come to die. We came to end you."
The Pale Flame stood.
And the shadows knelt.
"Then bleed."
They passed murals that screamed without sound.
Scenes of the first war—gods falling like burning stars, mortals with eyes like eclipses. The paint had faded, but the agony had not. Kael could almost feel the echo of their screams vibrating through the soles of his boots. The deeper they walked, the more the air tasted of ash and memories no one had asked to remember.
It wasn't silence that followed them.
It was the weight of every soul who'd come before and failed.
Vespera's footsteps were too quiet. Elyra's were too even. Kael could hear his own heartbeat louder than all three. His gaze flicked to the blackened ceiling above—a dome etched in celestial maps twisted into foreign constellations. Some of the stars were still pulsing. Still burning. Or bleeding.
"You ever wonder what it's like to walk into your own death?" Elyra asked suddenly, softly.
"No," Kael said. "Because I already have. Twice."
That earned him the ghost of a smile. Small. Fractured. Real.
They reached the chamber at the center of it all, where the Veil swayed like a hanging sword above a field of bones. The stones here were no longer grey or black. They were crimson. Burned red from centuries of grief and flame.
Kael reached out and touched the wall.
It wasn't stone anymore.
It pulsed beneath his fingers like skin.
Vespera's voice was far away. "This place... it's alive."
"It's remembering," Elyra whispered. "And it's angry."
They stood before the Shatterglass Veil as if standing before a god's final judgment. The rippling obsidian curtain flickered now—fast, erratic, like a dying heartbeat. Kael's knuckles whitened on the hilt of his sword. His reflection in the glass wasn't his own anymore.
He saw his father.He saw the broken boy who left a battlefield of corpses just to survive.He saw the version of himself who let people die to save his own pride.
The Veil showed him all of it.
Elyra stepped forward next. Her fire dimmed, flickering in her palms like candlelight in the wind. She didn't resist the pain. She let it consume her, burn through her, shape her. Her screams were silent—but her magic lit the room like a rising sun made of vengeance.
Then Vespera walked forward.
And the Veil—welcomed her.
Kael flinched. "Why… why didn't it hurt her?"
Elyra's voice was barely a whisper. "Because she doesn't run from the darkness. She is it."
What waited beyond the Veil was a throne room not meant for mortals. Light bled from the air itself, but it didn't illuminate—it suffocated. And in the center of it all, slouched lazily on the Throne of Embers, was the Pale Flame.
He had no face. Just a mouth like a cracked furnace, spitting embers with every breath.
"You think yourselves warriors," the Pale Flame rasped, rising like a specter of dying suns. "But all I see are children. Grasping at legacy you do not deserve."
Kael stepped forward.
Sword drawn. Shoulders squared.
And every god watching.
"If you wanted to be feared," Kael said coldly, "you shouldn't have let us find you."
The Pale Flame smiled, a slash of fire and teeth.
"Then come, little prince," he said. "Show me your rage."
And the chamber exploded into fire and steel.