Night fell like a wound reopening—slow, deliberate, and soaked in crimson.
It had only been hours since the Blood Moon Accord was sealed, but the world already felt older. Worn. The sky itself bore the bruise of compromise, its once silvery stars drowned beneath rust-colored clouds that moved with intent.
Kael had never seen the sky like this. The stars were still there, but they no longer twinkled. They burned—steady and baleful—like watchful eyes. The moon had vanished, replaced by a rent in the heavens: a bleeding seam of red light stretching from horizon to horizon.
They had departed from Hollow Spire at first light—though what passed for light beneath a wounded sky felt more like the breath of a dying sun. With Nyra and Thalen at his side, Kael led the surviving delegates through the ruin-scored Path of Dusk. Their destination: the Plains of Silence, where a remnant obelisk had begun pulsing just as the accord was struck.
Nothing grew in the Plains of Silence. Not even shadow. The land was cursed by silence so pure it gnawed at memory. And now, something old stirred beneath it.
Nyra walked ahead, her hand glowing faintly with Hollow glyphs that flickered as if unsure they belonged in this realm. Thalen lagged behind, sword sheathed but eyes sharp. He could sense what the others could not: that something was following them. Not a beast. Not a man.
An absence.
"It's hunting," he muttered, fingers twitching near his hilt. "But not us. Not yet."
Kael didn't respond. His flame had changed. It danced without firelight now—cold and flickering like candlelight underwater. It reacted to the plain. To the wounds in the sky.
As they neared the center of the plains, they found it—a crater, impossibly deep, surrounded by statues that had once been people. Frozen mid-run, mid-scream. Glassed over by something that had no name.
In the center of the crater was a black obelisk. No markings. No origin. It simply existed, humming softly like a memory trying to be forgotten.
"We shouldn't be here," Nyra whispered. "This place… remembers endings."
Kael stepped forward regardless. The obelisk called to him—not with voice or sound, but with silence. A silence so complete it threatened to erase his thoughts.
When he touched it, the world bent.
For a moment, he saw everything—every curse, every war, every choice that led the Spiral to its current unraveling. He saw himself as a child, before the curse. He saw his mother's face. He saw the Maw when it was still human.
And he saw the end.
A great unraveling, a devouring light that wasn't light at all—but pure forgetting.
He pulled back, gasping, eyes bloodshot.
"There's no saving it," he said. "Only delaying it."
Nyra placed a hand on his shoulder. "Then we delay it together."
The sky cracked above them.
And something began to fall.
The air twisted. Clouds peeled away like old skin, revealing a descending mass—part flesh, part ruin, part memory. The Forgotten Architect.
A being from before the Spiral's shaping.
Its body was stitched from lost cities, from prayers never answered, from languages no longer spoken. It hovered silently, limbs splayed like broken towers, head bowed in mockery of reverence.
The obelisk pulsed.
Kael raised his hand, his flame lashing upward. Nyra began to chant—not the Hollow Tongue, but a deeper song, something not meant to be remembered. Thalen drew steel and planted his feet in the salt-choked earth.
The Architect opened its eye. Singular. Vast. A window into the time before memory.
They did not fight. They endured.
And in enduring, something awakened beneath the Plains. Something older than the Architect. Something Kael had always feared: himself.
His curse burned, not with pain, but with clarity. A knowing that terrified him.
He was not chosen to save the Spiral.
He was chosen to end it mercifully.
The obelisk cracked.
The Architect screamed.
And Kael, for the first time, understood what the Spiral truly was.
A dream.
And all dreams end.