The world was broken.
Where there had once been a sky, there now hung a thousand fractured mirrors of light, thin and trembling. They shimmered like glass holding back the sea — and through each crack, something vast and wrong glowed faintly, like a dying god's heartbeat.
Beneath that cracked firmament, the ruins of the capital smoldered. Buildings bent in impossible shapes. Time itself shivered. Birds hung mid-flight, their wings frozen in the air. A clocktower rang without sound.
And at the center of it all lay Sid.
His body was half-buried under blackened rubble, his hand twitching in ash. For a long time, there was no breath. Then—
a gasp. A broken, raw sound dragged from his throat.
He opened his eyes.
The world flickered. The smoke before him twisted into shadows of his own past — a battlefield, a night of fire, and a girl standing before him, smiling beneath blood-streaked rain.
"...Elira...?"
Her name escaped him like prayer.
The world shifted again — the rubble became a meadow, gold grass swaying beneath a blue sky that shouldn't exist. Elira stood there, barefoot, her hair white as dawnlight, her eyes a deep, gentle amber that always made him forget the war. She turned toward him, smiling softly as if time had never moved.
"You're late again," she said. Her voice was the same — melodic, patient, teasing.
Just like it had been before she died.
Sid's breath trembled. "This isn't real."
"Does it matter?" she asked, taking a step forward. "You always said dreams were kinder than the waking world."
He couldn't move. The air itself resisted motion. Each time he blinked, he saw her differently — one moment alive, the next bleeding out in his arms on the night of the Great Fall.
Her final words still burned in his chest: 'Don't let it end with hate, Sid… promise me.'
He had promised.
And then he had broken it.
The ground cracked beneath him. Flames whispered from nowhere, and a deep, distant laughter echoed across the sky.
Ravh'Zereth.
"So this is what binds you, Vessel? A memory of a girl too fragile to survive the world you were meant to rule?"
Sid clenched his fists, but the voice slithered deeper — through the fissures in his mind, through the silence between heartbeats.
"You keep trying to crawl toward the light, but everything you love burns. Every time, every life, every promise... ash. That is your truth."
Elira stepped closer, her form flickering, parts of her body dissolving into motes of white flame. "Don't listen to it," she whispered. "You're stronger than that."
"Are you even real?" he whispered.
She smiled sadly. "Does that change what I mean to you?"
The fissures in the sky pulsed. Time rippled. Suddenly, the meadow shattered again — replaced by ruins and blood, by the cold world he had left behind. Around him, echoes of his past selves replayed — hundreds of them, fragments of memory:
Sid training beneath moonlight. Sid holding Elira's hand under the shattered cathedral. Sid screaming her name as the First Flame consumed the sky.
Each one looped endlessly.
Sid fell to his knees. "Why are you showing me this?"
Ravh'Zereth's laughter rolled like thunder.
"Because you cannot move forward while dragging ghosts. You deny what you are... but she, oh she saw it even before you did."
The image of Elira turned, her face melting into ash and smoke, forming the demon's shifting grin.
"She saw the monster in your flame. And still, she loved you. Pathetic, isn't it?"
Sid's rage broke the silence. His aura burst out — black fire laced with gold threads. The fractured zone trembled, the looping memories distorting.
"Don't speak her name."
"Then burn me for it."
The world convulsed. Flames rose from beneath him, spiraling into wings that weren't wings, forming a cage of fire and void. Elira's shadow stood at its center, half her face divine light, half demonic corruption — like the reflection of his soul.
"Sid…" she whispered. "You don't have to fight everything alone."
"I already lost you," he said, voice cracking. "And I'm losing everything else."
She reached out a trembling hand. "Then stop chasing gods and demons. Remember who you were before the flames."
Her fingers brushed his cheek — and the illusion rippled. Her body disintegrated into embers that drifted into the wind. For a heartbeat, he saw her smiling again, peaceful.
Then she was gone.
The world snapped back — rubble, ash, firelight.
Sid stood alone, trembling, his hands shaking as tears carved lines through the soot on his face. His voice came out hoarse:
"Even if the world burns again… I'll find a way to keep my promise."
The air answered with silence.
Then — a voice, faint, familiar — Nox, crackling through the collapsing reality.
"Sid… can you hear me? You're in a fractured zone... a time loop! Reality's breaking apart... Velgrin's already advancing Ascension!"
The fissures widened. The sky screamed without sound.
Sid looked up, eyes glinting with a faint reflection of black and gold flame.
"Then I'll burn the loops before they consume me."
He stepped forward — the ground bending beneath his feet as the shattered memories around him caught fire, consumed by the resolve blazing in his chest.
Behind him, the echo of Elira's voice lingered — soft, almost warm.
"Don't let it end with hate."
He closed his eyes for one last second, breathing in the ash of what remained of his world.
Then Sid walked through the flames, toward whatever waited beyond the cracks in the sky.