The ground was still shaking when Kael and Selene fled the ruins.
Behind them, the Skyfane crumbled under the weight of unleashed forces. Shattered stone and light twisted together in impossible angles as reality convulsed from the Crown's awakening. The world was coming apart at the seams—and Kael had been the one to rip the first thread loose.
Dust stung his eyes, but he kept running. Not because he wanted to. Not because he feared death.
Because something inside him told him that staying would be worse.
Beside him, Selene moved like a blade through shadow, leading him through half-buried corridors and winding crevices of the collapsed temple. The echo of steel and void-fire behind them told him the Hollow Order and Harbingers were still fighting, but their attention had turned inward.
For now.
Kael gritted his teeth and pushed forward.
Every breath burned. Every step jolted the shards in his chest.
They weren't quiet anymore.
---
The Mark of Power
It wasn't just the second shard. Something deeper had changed.
Kael could feel threads of reality tugging at him as if the world around him was constantly shifting—reacting, bending, testing. Once, he might've flinched at every flicker of movement. Now, he felt where the danger would be before it arrived. Like echoes coming backward through time.
They broke into open air just as the temple collapsed entirely behind them. The once-great Skyfane, cradle of forgotten gods and stolen relics, was now a black crater smoldering under a dying sky.
Kael dropped to one knee, breathing hard. He could feel his own heartbeat—except it wasn't alone. The shards pulsed inside him, like twin hearts beating out of sync, struggling to become one.
Selene stood over him, her expression unreadable behind the cracked mask.
"Kael," she said. "We have to move. The factions—"
"I know," he rasped.
She crouched beside him. "Then you also know they'll come after you first."
He looked up at her. "Because I said no?"
"No," she said, rising. "Because you're the first one who's ever lived after saying it."
---
The Forsaken and the Fragmented
They walked through the outer Wastes in silence. The land was cracked and dead, broken from battles that had happened long before Kael's lifetime. The wind carried ash, and every direction looked the same—until Selene veered east.
Kael followed. Not because he trusted her completely, but because she was the only one who hadn't tried to use him or kill him.
He broke the silence. "Where are we going?"
"There's a hidden path," Selene said. "A fracture the factions don't know about. It's where we plan our next move."
Kael raised a brow. "We?"
Selene hesitated. "There were others. Once."
Kael caught the weight in her voice. Past tense. He didn't ask further.
But something nagged at him.
The shards inside him weren't just sources of power. They were... conscious. They whispered now—not words, but concepts. Pulls. Paths. Moments that hadn't happened yet, bleeding into the present.
It was as if he'd stepped outside the normal flow of time. Not fully. Just enough to feel the cracks forming.
And they were spreading.
---
The World Reacts
Across the continent, the factions stirred.
In the Ashen Blight's subterranean spires, war-chants echoed for the first time in centuries. Their bone-clad heralds declared Kael the "Crownbreaker"—not in reverence, but as a threat. To them, he was a flame that must be smothered before it became a wildfire.
In the Hollow Order's sanctums, Vaelcor stood in silence, watching the last flickers of the Skyfane's fall. His lieutenants whispered about betrayal. About Kael's instability. About the inevitable hunt.
But Vaelcor said only one thing:
"He has taken the first step."
Even in the far reaches of the war-torn lands, in places Kael had never heard of, the tremors of awakening rippled outward.
One by one, the sleeping legends—those who had sworn oaths to forgotten crowns, those who had given up on the old wars—felt the change.
And they began to rise.
---
A Plan in the Ash
As the sun bled into the horizon, Kael and Selene reached a ridge overlooking a crater filled with pale violet light. It shimmered like a pool of starlight frozen in time.
"A collapsed boundary," Selene said. "It's where a fracture once merged with a null-space pocket. The world bends differently here. Factions don't patrol it because they can't survive long exposure."
Kael blinked. "And we can?"
"Not for long," she admitted. "But there's a way through. A door, of sorts."
She stepped into the edge of the light. Her silhouette flickered. Kael followed, and the moment he crossed the threshold, everything changed.
Sound vanished. Color became memory. Time folded inward.
And the shards… quieted.
He could think again.
Selene stood at the edge of a spiraling stairway carved into a floating mass of fractured stone.
"This is the Between," she said. "It's one of the few places left where the Crown's power doesn't reach. Yet."
Kael exhaled slowly.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
Selene turned to him, her eyes gleaming behind the mask. "Now we plan for war."