The night the Blood Moon rose over the Shadelands, the sky cracked.
It was not thunder that Kael heard—but a slow, grinding scream of the firmament itself, like stone dragged against bone. The crimson light that spilled across the shattered plains made every shadow crawl, every tree seem like it was hunched in pain. The stars blinked out one by one, smothered by an unseen presence above the clouds.
In the heart of the ruin where old gods were chained beneath iron trees, Kael, Nyra, and the others stood before the Last Gate of the Accord, a door forged from blood-oaths and sealed by forgotten names. It pulsed with veined light, reacting to the moon's ascent.
"This is it," whispered Thalen, the Whisperblind. "This is where the Spiral was torn. This is where they made the first curse."
The Blood Moon Accord—once a pact between mortals and divinities to bind the Spiral's scream into silence—had long since rotted. What Kael now sought was not its salvation, but its unraveling.
He had to become the scream.
"Is this what you want, Kael?" Nyra asked, her Hollow Tongue vibrating like a coiled serpent in her throat. "To open a door that cannot be closed?"
Kael didn't answer. Instead, he stepped forward and placed his flame-scarred palm against the gate.
It recognized him.
With a groan that echoed through the bones of the world, the gate opened inward, revealing a corridor of glass and bone marrow, walls pulsing with ancestral memory. As they passed through, their reflections showed not themselves, but the lives they could have led—the lives cursed by the choices they'd made.
Kael saw himself as a father, holding a child with silver eyes. As a traitor, soaked in the blood of those he now fought beside. As a corpse, nailed to the Tower of Lirathil, hollow and grinning.
The corridor led them to a chamber without floor or sky—just a void of starlight held together by memory. Floating within it was the heart of the Accord: a crystalized blood-tear the size of a cathedral, suspended by spectral chains.
"This is where the gods swore," Nyra whispered, awe-struck. "And where they lied."
The Accord was not just a binding spell—it was a betrayal. The gods had sacrificed their own kin to silence the Spiral's voice, cursing the world with its echo. Every curse since had been a fragment of that forgotten scream.
Kael stepped toward the crystal.
"Wait," said Thalen, eyes wide. "If you touch it—"
"I know," Kael said. "I have to."
The moment his hand grazed the surface, a thousand voices shrieked into his skull. His vision fractured. He saw every cursed soul he had ever met—saw them being born, suffering, dying, and returning again. He saw Nyra's real name, buried beneath ten layers of song. He saw the Maw's origin, a lie born of mercy. He saw himself—older, colder, standing on the brink of the world, with fire that no longer wept.
And then… silence.
The Accord pulsed once. Then broke.
The shattering was not sound. It was sensation. Every being across the continent felt the rupture. Curses that had lingered for generations dissipated into ash. Others awakened, feral and hungry. The balance was destroyed.
Kael fell to his knees, blood pouring from his ears, eyes, and mouth.
And then the Spiral spoke.
Not in words—but in memory. It opened its mind to him.
He saw the First Curse: a god's scream against death, raw and unformed, seeking to remake existence in its image.
He saw the Last Curse: the end of all narrative, when memory itself unravels and time forgets how to move.
Kael stood between them.
From the shattered Accord emerged a figure—neither god nor mortal—composed of forgotten truths and broken names. Its face was always Kael's. And never his.
"You opened the wound," it said. "Now you must become the bandage… or the blade."
Kael looked back to Nyra, who stood ready to sing him whole or apart.
To Thalen, who had already begun recording this moment into skin.
And to the world beyond the gate, which now trembled with possibility and dread.
"I will not be bound by fate," Kael said.
The Spiral screamed again.
And this time, he screamed back.
---
The world did not return to normal.
Instead, it reshaped around the void Kael had opened.
The Shadelands fractured into mirror-fragments, each one holding echoes of a different past. Villages woke to skies they had never seen, languages they did not speak. Forests forgot how to grow. Rivers flowed upward in defiance of time. A new sickness bloomed—the Curse of Remembrance—which caused the infected to relive every choice they'd never made until they ceased to exist.
And in the heart of it all, Kael wandered the scar.
He no longer burned with fire. Now he burned with memory.
Every step he took, the Spiral responded. It began to take shape—a serpent made of timelines, coiling through ruins and minds alike. Prophets dreamed of Kael standing at the center of an ever-screaming sun. Kings tore out their tongues to silence the voice of doubt the Spiral had planted.
Nyra, changed by the release of the Accord, now sang in a language that could make stones cry and gods sleep. Her voice was a weapon. A comfort. A curse.
Thalen had disappeared, taking the new script of the Spiral with him. Rumors said he was rewriting the world from beneath the dead capital of Veyruin, binding souls into scrolls.
Kael's journey had become myth—and yet he lived, walking the line between salvation and apocalypse. Every cursed being now sought him. Some for hope. Some for vengeance. Some because they believed he was the Spiral made flesh.
The Blood Moon never set.
And Kael? Kael looked up into the sky, saw his own reflection in the crimson orb above, and whispered:
"Not yet."