Inariel's construct endured.

Amrit had weathered the opening assault without retreating, its crystalline body trembling beneath the violent chorus of sound but refusing to break. The half-flower, half-fox construct shifted as the pressure mounted, petals and crystalline features folding inward ...

He was bound.

Not restrained in the desperate manner of someone trying to hold down a raging beast, but shackled with deliberate precision. His wrists were tightly knit together by the chains, leaving his hands bound in a position that restricted the specific forms of Ava he could perform. The same ...

Zeik felt as though he had failed himself. Failed Vescrutia. Failed everyone who had placed their faith in him. If he had not failed them yet, he knew he would. The thought had become impossible to escape. He was losing control of the cursed flame, a thing he had tended for more than six millennium ...

The road through Jukainah cut across black volcanic gravel and dying grass, empty except for the man convulsing in its center. Zeik Hellgate hit the ground hard enough to crack stone, rolled twice, and came up on one knee before collapsing again. Dust clung to the sweat on his skin. His breathing ...

Zeik felt it.

Not the pull of the orb—that was obvious, violent, unavoidable.

No.

He felt the answer

Buried beneath the screaming pull of the well, beneath the Herald’s suffocating aura, beneath the unraveling edges of his own form… there it was. A path. A narrow, brutal certainty.

He could ...

The nine tails came down like judgment.

They did not strike all at once, but in a relentless cadence—crash, recoil, crash again—each impact folding space, each miss gouging the obsidian plane into splintered shards of reflective night. Zeik moved through them on instinct alone, his Ava flaring and ...

The laughter faded, but its shape remained.

Zeik felt it linger in the space between moments—a residue that clung to the obsidian flat like cold ash. When the crimson orbs began to rise, he tracked them without lifting his head, counting by instinct rather than sight. One became two. Two became ...

He felt tense—disarmed and, above all, afraid.

The instinct was immediate and visceral: run. Open his eyes. Tell Fenri to do the same. Abort the crossing before whatever waited here could finish noticing them. His mind flooded with regret, with the certainty that he had miscalculated—that this was ...

Zeik and Fenri settled onto the Traversing Mirror as if it were nothing more than a frozen lake at the end of the world.

The surface did not creak. It did not complain beneath their weight. Frost and ash lay unmoving, a perfect stillness that invited the mind to follow suit. Breath slowed. Muscles ...

Zeik did not answer at once.

When Aerys spoke the words “you’ve already seen the end,” something in Zeik shifted—sharply, involuntarily. The calm he had worn like a second skin fractured, and what lay beneath it surged forward.

His face twisted but not in anger. His posture stiffened as though a ...