The Sanctum's stone walls had long forgotten sunlight. A thousand years of dust hung in the air like the weight of history, and the torches Nyssa and Marek carried were pale flickers in the yawning dark. The mural of the Tree—its roots cradling the hollow world—lingered behind them like an unanswered prayer.
But Nyssa's mind was elsewhere.
She couldn't stop hearing the Herald's voice. "The heir has awakened. The seal is thinning. He calls to you, Hollow Key."
Jack was calling to her. Through the veil. Through time. Through the breach.
And that terrified her more than anything.
"Do you ever think," Marek said after a long silence, "that maybe we're all just pieces on someone else's board? Just little carved lies, moved by gods who've long since gone mad?"
Nyssa's steps slowed. "You believe in gods?"
"I believe in the mess they left behind."
She didn't laugh. Couldn't. Not when the ache in her chest felt like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Not when every step forward threatened to unravel her.
At the bottom of the spiral, the Sanctum widened into a chamber shaped like an eight-pointed star. Ancient runes glowed faintly on the walls—red and gold and violet—marking the cardinal seals of the original realmwalkers. Once, this place had been used to bind rifts. To close holes in reality. To seal gods away.
Now it felt like a tomb.
Marek raised an eyebrow. "You sure this place hasn't already been looted?"
Nyssa didn't answer. Her eyes were locked on the pedestal in the center of the room. It stood untouched—untouched not because no one had found it, but because no one dared.
Floating above the pedestal was a compass, or what looked like one—though its dial spun not with direction, but with threads of light. Dozens of arcs looped from its center, each one pulsing softly. Realms. Realms bleeding into each other.
The Ashen Compass.
Nyssa stepped forward slowly. Her fingertips brushed the pedestal—and the moment they did, the entire chamber shuddered.
Runes flared.
Flames roared to life.
And from every point of the star, shadows peeled themselves from the walls—twisted guardians long dormant, now awakened by her presence.
Marek swore under his breath. "You couldn't just steal a normal map, could you?"
Nyssa's blade was in her hand before the first creature lunged.
They were forged of ash and ember, with eyes like molten glass and claws of obsidian. One slashed at her, and she ducked, letting it crash against the stone behind her. Marek flung a dagger at another, but it passed through, useless.
"Only magic works on them!" Nyssa shouted.
"Then we're doomed!" Marek yelled. "I am magic-deficient!"
Nyssa drew from within. Not the magic of order or structure—those schools had shattered with the Sundering—but something older. Wilder. Auren had called it unwritten magic. The kind that lived in grief and longing.
Her hand burned with violet fire. She flung it forward, and one of the ash-beasts exploded in a cloud of screams and smoke.
She turned, spun, moved like memory. One by one the shadows fell—but slower than they came.
"Compass!" Marek shouted. "Whatever you're doing—do it now!"
Nyssa reached for the Ashen Compass—and pain lanced through her skull. Not physical pain, but something deeper. Her mind was yanked backward through time, through places she didn't recognize. She saw flashes of Jack—standing at the edge of a chasm. Jack kneeling before a boy with Kael's face. Jack, screaming, as a void opened behind him.
"You are the Key," the voice whispered again.
And then, silence.
The shadows stopped.
Frozen in place, like statues awaiting judgment.
Nyssa collapsed to her knees, clutching the Compass.
The room was still. The danger gone. Marek knelt beside her.
"You okay?"
She didn't speak at first. Just stared at the compass, now glowing with eerie blue light.
"I saw him," she whispered. "He's still there. Jack. In the Hollow World."
Marek was quiet.
"And the boy… Kael… He's not Kael. Not anymore."
"That's what we call disturbing," Marek muttered. "But you said you had a plan."
She nodded slowly, her voice steadier now. "The Compass shows the realm threads. If I can use it to find the Hollow World's entry point, maybe I can reach Jack. Maybe I can break the cycle."
"And if you can't?"
She looked him dead in the eye. "Then I'll burn the gods who set it in motion."
He gave her a low, impressed whistle. "Remind me never to get on your bad side."
They returned to the surface beneath a sky still fractured with spectral light. But the Compass worked—already, its dial was twitching, pointing toward the east. Toward the Black Verge Mountains, where the first Sundering had begun.
Marek led the way through the ruins, whistling a quiet tune. "So what's our plan, exactly?"
"We find the breach," Nyssa said. "We enter the Hollow World. We find Jack."
"That's the good part of the plan, right? The part before everything goes wrong?"
Nyssa allowed herself the ghost of a smile. "We'll improvise the rest."
But something gnawed at her. Not fear—she'd long since mastered that—but dread. Because the Compass's dial wasn't just twitching. It was trembling.
And deep inside her, something whispered: He's not alone in the Hollow.
That night, she dreamt of a tree without roots, bleeding shadow. And a boy—Jack—reaching out to her through black glass.
When she woke, the Compass pointed north.
And the runes on its surface now read a single phrase:
"The Gate of the End is opening."