The sky was burning.
Fractures of violet light spilled down like liquid fire, and the bones of the old world groaned beneath the weight of silence.
Not a natural silence.
The kind that only comes before a birth—or an ending.
Kael knelt alone on a stone platform—what once may have been a temple—now swallowed by shadow and time. His breath trembled. His torn cloak fluttered in the wind, stained with ash and the weight of what he'd lost.
Before him, the void began to shift.
Something took shape in the darkness. No face, only eyes—countless, watching.
And a voice with no mouth.
"So this is what your courage amounts to."
Kael didn't reply.
His left hand clenched a broken shard of crystal, glowing faintly. A fragment of something. A key, a curse—he couldn't remember. The wind howled louder now. The world shattered around him, stone rising into the air like dead leaves.
And yet... inside him, something refused to break.
"I didn't choose this," he whispered.
He stood, slowly.
"But if this is my end..."
He stepped forward.
"...then I'll die as a man."