The void didn't wait.
The moment the Cosmarch vanished, the Backside of Reality lurched, like something ancient had just woken up beneath Kael's feet.
The walls—if they could even be called walls—folded inward, outward, through themselves.
Equations spilled like blood.
Timelines dripped from the ceiling.
And every door began whispering.
Not words.
Syllables.
His syllables.
Vor—
—rath—
Kael slapped his hands over his ears, but the sound vibrated through bone, bypassing everything physical.
"Not listening—!" he hissed.
The Crown pulsed again.
Once.
Twice.
Then it dropped lower, hovering at eye level.
It examined him.
Not like a weapon.
Like a judge.
Kael glared.
"Stop that. I'm not becoming who I used to be."
The Crown tilted, as if amused.
The void-labyrinth cracked at the sound of its hum.
"Don't you dare," Kael growled. "Don't you even think about—"
The labyrinth collapsed.
Space folded— time inverted— reality blinked—
And Kael was yanked through a door that wasn't a door.
---
He fell.
Through universes.
Through empty timelines.
Through scraps of his past that weren't his—
but belonged to the version of him that broke the First Silence.
A throne shattering.
A star turning inside out.
A Sovereign screaming as their form was devoured.
A voice whispering a name that erased a world.
His world.
Kael thrashed. "GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"
The visions shattered like glass.
Darkness.
Then—
He hit ground.
---
A place that should never exist.
A field of broken halos.
Fragments of universes buried like bones.
Skies that bled sideways.
And at the center—
A monolith.
Black.
Silent.
Beating like a heart.
Kael's pulse froze.
He knew this place.
Even though he shouldn't.
Even though no one alive should.
"…No way," he whispered.
The Crown's light dimmed in acknowledgment.
Kael forced the words out:
"This is the… Prime Remnant."
The graveyard of dead realities.
The place erased beings were sent to fade.
The place where his past self was supposedly destroyed.
But the monolith…
It wasn't dead.
It breathed.
Thin cracks glowed with the same color as the Crown.
Silver.
Alive. Waiting. Awake.
Kael's chest tightened.
He stumbled backward.
"No. No no no. This can't be the Third Seal. This place is a tomb. It's supposed to be empty."
A cold voice answered behind him.
"It was."
Kael spun.
His heart stopped.
A figure stepped out of the smoke.
Tall.
Wrapped in crystallized void.
Eyes burning with star-eating hunger.
A mirror of Kael.
But older.
Sharper.
Wrong.
The Echo That Survived.
The last scrap of the name Vor—
the one that refused to die
when everything else was erased.
It smiled.
"You took long enough."
Kael staggered back.
"You—you're… me?"
"Not anymore."
The Echo stepped closer.
"I am what you left behind. And I am the key to your third syllable."
Kael's blood ran cold.
"Stay away."
The Echo laughed—softly, cruelly.
"Kael… you can't break the Third Seal."
Its grin widened.
"You are the Third Seal."
The monolith cracked open like an eye.
Silver light exploded outward.
Kael screamed as the Crown fused to him—
not physically,
but through memory,
through identity,
through the forgotten syllable clawing to the surface.
And the Echo whispered the truth:
"Once the Third Seal breaks, the name finishes."
It leaned closer.
"And the multiverse kneels."
---