The void spat the heir out like a curse, hurling them onto the broken flagstones of Mount Scripture's ruins with bone-jarring force. For several agonizing moments, they simply lay there, gasping, their lungs burning as they inhaled air thick with the scent of rust and decaying parchment. The impact had split their lip, they could taste blood, metallic and warm, mingling with the ozone tang of unraveled divinity that permeated this place.
Their silver-threaded hand pulsed with a rhythm not their own, the broken quill now fused to their flesh up to the elbow. The artifact glowed faintly, like a dying ember, its light revealing the intricate network of veins beneath their skin that had turned the same mercurial shade. When they flexed their fingers, the quill responded like a living thing, its fractured tip twitching with barely restrained energy.
Above them, the ruins of Mount Scripture clawed at a bruised sky, its shattered towers standing like broken teeth against the horizon. The once-great fortress of celestial scholarship was now little more than a skeleton of its former self, its melted archives and collapsed spires testifying to the Pantheon's wrath. The air hummed with the remnants of dead laws, each breath carrying not just the metallic tang of unraveled divinity, but whispers, faint, fragmented echoes of the scribes who had died here, their final moments etched into the very stones.
And then, clear as a bell amidst the whispers a voice,
"You were always meant to find me."
The heir rolled onto their side, wincing as shards of broken masonry bit into their palms. Their vision swam for a moment before focusing on the impossible sight before them.
The prison hung in the air above the ruins, suspended in defiance of gravity. What had once been a perfect sphere of shimmering silver threads now resembled a dying star in its final moments, its luminous filaments frayed and translucent, pulsing erratically like a failing heartbeat. The Hollow Crown's roots, once buried deep within the prison's structure, were now visibly rotting, their sickly glow dimming as black veins spread through them like corruption.
Inside the failing barrier, the captive entity moved with restless energy. Its form shifted ceaselessly, one moment a many-winged shadow, the next a vortex of staring eyes, then simply a void darker than the absence of stars. With each transformation, it pressed against the weakening barriers, testing them, probing for weakness.
At the prison's base stood a figure that made the heir's breath catch.
Kaelion's sister.
Her form flickered between solid and spectral, as if she couldn't quite decide whether she belonged to this world or the next. The broken quill in her hand, a perfect match to the one now fused to the heir's arm glowed with the same eerie light. When she spoke, her voice came not from her lips but from the air itself, as if the ruins were breathing her words.
"The Pantheon didn't create the prison," she said, her violet eyes, so like Kaelion's, so like the heir's own, fixed on the trembling sphere above her. "They found it. And when they realized what it held, they built the Arcanthus line to maintain it."
The heir pushed themselves to their knees, their muscles protesting. "Why us?" they rasped, their throat raw from screaming in the void.
Her ghost smiled, bitter and knowing. "Because we're the only ones who can rewrite the bars."
As if in response to her words, the prison shuddered violently. Another thread snapped with a sound like a spine breaking, its severed end whipping through the air before dissolving into silver mist. The sister's form wavered, her edges bleeding into the surrounding air like ink in water.
With sudden urgency, she pressed her palm against the sphere's surface. Where her fingers made contact, three lines of text seared themselves into the heir's vision, burning brighter than the noonday sun,
Repair the Cage, Sacrifice your name, your memories, your voice. Become the new Warden.
Shatter the Bars, Unleash what's inside. Let the world burn.
Rewrite the Lock, Do what Kaelion couldn't.
The heir's silver hand spasmed violently, the muscles contracting against their will. Before they could react, the quill's tip moved on its own, carving a fourth option into their forearm. The letters burned like frostbite as they formed:
Break the Cycle.
The sister's eyes widened in something akin to alarm. "That's not-"
Her words were cut off as the prison screamed.
A jagged fissure split the sphere down the middle, vomiting forth a light so profoundly black it burned the heir's eyes. From the wound poured something that wasn't quite smoke, wasn't quite shadow, a substance that defied comprehension as it coiled through the air like a living thing.
More alarming still was their shadow's reaction. The silhouette at their feet, now more silver than darkness, wrenched free of their body with terrifying force. It elongated as it lunged for the fissure, its form stretching into something with too many joints, too many teeth, its movements fluid and wrong in ways that made the heir's stomach turn.
The sister moved faster than thought, her cold fingers closing around the heir's wrist with surprising strength. "Choose," she demanded, her voice cutting through the chaos. "Now."
The heir stared at their options, their mind racing. Repairing the cage meant eternal servitude. Shattering it meant unleashing untold destruction. Rewriting it... that was Kaelion's path, and look where it had led him.
But the fourth option...
The heir stepped forward, their quill-hand rising almost of its own accord. They didn't choose repair. They didn't choose destruction.
With a cry that tore at their throat, they drove the broken quill into the fissure, not to seal it, not to widen it, but to write into it.
The prison's scream became a chorus of unraveling laws, a cacophony of dying edicts as the heir carved a single word into the fabric of the cage:
"Remember."
The effect was instantaneous. The Hollow Crown's roots blackened and shriveled, their rot accelerating visibly as they crumbled to dust. The entity inside recoiled as if struck, its form collapsing inward momentarily before surging forward again with renewed fury.
Most startling of all was the sister's reaction. Her gasp was audible even over the chaos, her form solidifying perceptibly as the quill's glow intensified to near-blinding levels. The heir could see details now that had been blurred before, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the freckles dusting her nose, the way her silver hair caught the dying light of the prison's threads.
Their voice, when it came, was raw with power: "You wanted an Arcanthus? Then face what we really are."
The prison didn't heal. It awakened.
Threads rewove themselves with terrifying speed, but not into their original pattern. New geometries emerged, impossible angles, shapes that hurt to look at, configurations that defied the laws of reality itself. The sphere wasn't a cage anymore. It was a crucible.
The Hollow Crown shattered with a sound like breaking glass, its fragments dissolving into the heir's skin like ink into parchment. The entity inside howled, not in rage, as the heir had expected, but in something that sounded disturbingly like recognition.
And the sister?
She smiled, genuine and bright despite the chaos surrounding them. "Oh," she said, her voice rich with approval. "You're clever."
Then the world exploded.