The Emberwake Threshold screamed.
A seismic surge tore through the spire's core, a crimson shockwave collapsing inward like a dying star. Glyph circuits flared, sputtered—and shattered—leaving spirals of fractured light dancing in the air. Riven staggered, his body trembling under the weight of broken ley-lines and the wild magic unraveling around him.
Ahead stood Lira.
Silhouetted against the rift's howling maw, her form glowed with radiant defiance. Behind her loomed Elandir, the harbinger of ruin, his presence a gravity well of entropy. Magic warped around him, bending space, silence, and sense.
"You were never meant to reach this point," Elandir hissed, eyes blazing like twin black suns. "The glyphborn were accidents—tools. Not inheritors."
"No," Lira whispered, her voice sharp, raw with pain and conviction. "We're what you feared most. Proof that power can choose its bearer."
She raised her hand—trembling, bloodied—and her heartglyph ignited. But it wasn't just hers. Around her bloomed the echoes of every soul she had shielded, mourned, carried. Magic wove with memory, and grief became fuel.
"Lira—don't!" Riven cried, reaching—
But she'd already stepped forward.
Into the rift.
The Threshold convulsed. Glyphlines twisted like veins in agony. A beam of searing blue-white fire lanced into the heavens, splitting the sky. Lira's scream pierced the collapsing veil—and then silence.
The world halted.
Riven's soul fractured.
But not into pieces.
Into clarity.
His glyphmark blazed, not with pain—but with purpose. From the core of his being burst a corona of echoes: Caelion's depths, the Hollow Archive, Skyfall Ruin, every heartbeat, every bond, every scar—they surged outward.
Not as chaos.
As unity.
He stood alone in the stillborn storm left by the collapse. Around him, time trembled. Above, the heavens cracked, revealing a tapestry of living glyphscript—pulsing, aware.
The Fractureborne Halo ignited.
Seven rings of light spun around him, each etched with glyphs no mentor had taught—only life, loss, and love could inscribe. His soul had become the key. His grief, the gateway.
Elandir faltered.
"You…" the cultist muttered, stepping back for the first time. "What are you?"
Riven's voice rang out—layered with the voices of who he was, and who he could yet become.
"I'm what your chains couldn't break."
With a single step, the shattered earth reformed beneath him. Glyphs sang in the air, a harmonic resonance of truth and will. And with one final motion, Riven unleashed a soulstrike, drawn not from anger—but from everything he'd chosen to protect.
The blow struck Elandir's glyphframe like a divine reckoning. Light and sound folded into silence as the cultist's body disintegrated—symbol, ambition, and lies consumed by the veil.
Ash drifted like snow.
The Emberwake Spire was gone. No roar of victory followed. No celebration.
Only silence—and the unbearable weight of absence.
Riven stood among the ruins, the Halo dimming but never dying. In his hand rested Lira's pendant, still warm.
Behind him, a shimmer blinked into being.
Not a portal. Not glyph-wrought.
A door.
Infinite. Waiting.
From beyond came whispers—timeless, formless. A realm untouched by glyph or mortal law.
The Veiled Origin.
Riven turned toward it, grief and hope woven in equal measure, and stepped through.