The remnants of the Trial of Truth still clung to the damp air of the cavern. The runes lining the walls pulsed faintly, their glow dimming like the last flicker of a dying flame. Kael and his companions gathered, catching their breath after the harrowing visions each had faced.
Ayra nocked an arrow, her keen eyes scanning the dim shadows around them. Her bow was steady in her hands, but her usual calm was tempered with unease. "The illusions... they revealed much. What we might become, or what we could lose."
Sylvi shifted her weight, glancing nervously toward the cave entrance. "I feel like something watches us — waiting."
Fenric's jaw clenched. "This place is unnatural. It claws at the mind. We should leave."
Graveth, silent and brooding, kept his gaze fixed on the runes etched on the cavern walls, fingers twitching near his weapon.
Saerion stood still, his blindfold in place. Slowly, deliberately, he drew his rapier from its sheath with a fluid motion. The blade gleamed faintly in the cavern's gloom. "We can't afford to hesitate," he said quietly, voice edged with resolve.
Suddenly, the runes flared with renewed intensity, casting jagged shadows that danced wildly. The air thickened — time itself seemed to slow, compressing around them like a vice.
A tremor rippled through the group.
Fenric's breath caught; Ayra's arrow stayed poised but her grip tightened; Sylvi's heart pounded in sudden alarm. A strange chill settled over their spines, heavier than fear, yet colder than awe.
From the deepest shadows stepped a figure whose presence bent the very fabric of the cavern.
He was tall and cloaked in darkness that swallowed light whole, his eyes glowing faintly like distant stars trapped in a void.
The weight of his power pressed down on them, making the stone beneath feel fragile, as if reality might shatter under his gaze.
Each of them trembled, not from fear, but from something deeper—an overwhelming recognition that they stood in the presence of a power that dwarfed even legends. Graveth inhaled sharply, his hands shaking despite himself. Fenric felt his knees weaken. Ayra bit the inside of her cheek to steady her breath.
"I am Zephan," the voice echoed, deep and resonant, like the slow toll of a cosmic bell. "The Hollow Crown. One who bears the power of Voidcraft. One of the Archefracta."
His gaze landed on Kael, a crack of recognition — or something deeper — passing through his expression.
"Kael," Zephan spoke slowly, each word heavy with meaning, "I know all that exists. But why... do you not?"
Time collapsed in an instant.
The others froze in place. Ayra still as stone, Sylvi locked mid-turn, Fenric mid-blink, Saerion's blade halted in air, and Graveth suspended in a breath. All noise vanished, all sensation dulled—everything except Zephan and Kael.
Zephan took a step forward. "Only you were meant to know. Only you."
Kael's throat tightened. The weight in the air was unbearable. And yet… not hostile. It was truth, unrefined. Intolerable. Infinite.
It knows me, Kael thought.
The void deepened, then pulsed. Zephan's form began to dissolve—not vanish, but become undefined, like shadow scattering through cracks in the world.
Then, light—blinding, white, and impossibly still.
The cavern shuddered as if torn from its roots. Zephan's form scattered like smoke, and the runes exploded into silence.
In the next blink, they were elsewhere. The ground was solid beneath them, the air different. The trial… gone. Not ended. Erased.
The cavern breathed silence. No words were shared as the group stepped through the stone-framed exit. A soft wind met them first—warm, dry, and wide, as though it carried the sighs of a buried world exhaling for the first time in centuries.
Sunlight split through the high ravine, fractured in golden shards over sand-dusted stone. The sky had shifted—deeper now, tinged violet at the edges as though twilight had crept forward despite no change in time. Nothing made sense. And yet, they walked forward.
Behind them, there was no cavern. Only sheer rock where the entrance had once been. No fissure. No arch. As if it had never existed.
Kael stepped first, eyes unreadable, jaw tightened. Behind him, Ayra unslung her bow from her shoulder, checking its tension instinctively. Sylvi brushed grit from her silver hair, gaze tilted downward—not in weakness, but in calculation. Fenric looked back at the dark mouth of the cavern that no longer was, his normally detached composure disturbed by a shiver he couldn't explain.
Graveth was pale, breath shallow. "Velmira terrifies me," he muttered to himself, loud enough for no one and yet hoping someone heard. "But that… that would unmake me."
Saerion walked last, his blindfold still wrapped, his grip around his sheathed rapier tight. His head was slightly turned, like he could still hear something lingering from that moment—something only he could feel dancing at the edges of sound. "We were not meant to see him," he said quietly.
No one replied.
They found the outside landscape foreign—a desert of broken towers and cracked temples, buried halfway in sand. Old ruins extended in the distance like a drowned city trying to rise again. There were no signs, no clear direction. Only the rune-marked map still pulsing faintly at Kael's side.
"Is this… where the map leads?" Sylvi asked after a while.
Kael didn't respond immediately. His hand brushed the surface of the map again, the symbols subtly shifting. "No. It leads further east. This place… was never on the path."
Ayra crouched and ran her fingers along the ground. "It made us stop here."
"Not a trial," Fenric said. "A warning."
Graveth turned to Kael. "He looked at you like you were more than yourself."
Kael met his gaze, then looked away. "I felt it too."
Silence returned. The sky above swirled with clouds that hadn't been there before. One of them shifted with unnatural symmetry—as if something enormous had turned beneath the surface of the sky.
They continued walking, sand shifting beneath their feet, and none dared look back at the vanished cavern.
Whatever Zephan was—whatever The Hollow Crown had seen in Kael—it had changed something.
And though no one said it, they each felt the same truth pressing against their chest: The trials were not behind them.
The world had just started to notice.