The wind in Aetherion did not howl.
It hummed — like turning pages.
Yūma stumbled through streets paved with parchment, ink bleeding between the cracks. Towering buildings stood like titans made of tomes, their windows glowing faintly with moving words. The sky above still bore its twin moons — one pure and pearlescent, the other sketched in charcoal strokes, incomplete and shifting.
And somewhere deep inside him, Vael'Ryn stirred.
"You feel it, don't you?"
The voice wasn't his own. It was deeper. Wiser. Tired.
"The weight of every unwritten truth... calling."
Yūma fell to his knees again, clutching his chest. The mark — the ink-eye pierced by a quill — pulsed with every heartbeat.
Suddenly, footsteps. Light. Precise.
A girl stepped forward, cloaked in wind-woven cloth. Her hair was silver, like unwritten stardust, and her eyes shimmered with mirrored reflections — hundreds of lives danced within them.
"You fell from the Echo Tower," she said. "You're either cursed… or chosen."
Yūma tried to speak, but the weight of questions chained his throat.
"Name's Isha Merel. Keeper of the Fifth Fold. You've awakened an Eidolon, haven't you?"
"I… think so. Vael'Ryn," Yūma replied weakly. "Who is he?"
She flinched. That name had weight — like a sword drawn in a silent church.
"You shouldn't speak it aloud," she whispered. "Not here."
Behind them, the spire groaned — the Echo Tower, cracked and weeping ink from its peak. Every fallen stands who could not master their Eidolon ends up there... a monument of minds unraveled.
"Follow me," she said, turning swiftly. "If your Eidolon's truly Vael'Ryn… the world is already shifting."
hey walked past sigil-marked alleyways and floating runes that murmured old names. Everywhere, the Oathborn watched — people bound to promises so potent they etched themselves into reality.
Yūma passed a man whose shadow screamed every time he stepped, and a girl who held conversations with the wind itself, repeating truths no one dared say aloud.
"What is this place?"
"Aetherion," Isha said. "Where souls go to rewrite themselves."
"I didn't choose to come here."
"No one chooses. But some are summoned. And you… were called."
She led him to a sanctum — walls lined with mirrors, each one cracked slightly different. In the center was a pedestal, and on it, rested a blade shaped like a pen. A quill. Its tip dripped a radiant ink that never dried.
"Your Eidolon's weapon," Isha said. "The Inkblade. It's waiting for your hand."
Yūma stepped forward. His reflection in the cracked mirrors shifted — in one, he was armored and regal. In another, bloodied and laughing. One showed him burning Tokyo down with a smile.
The blade hummed as he gripped it.
And then—
a pulse.
Aetherion breathed.
The runes beneath his skin ignited. His voice returned — deeper, layered with Vael'Ryn speaking through him.
"I do not fight to win. I write so the story does not forget."
Lightning rippled from the blade, carving a symbol in the ground:
Oath Initiated: The Story Must Continue.
From high above, a cloaked figure watched the sanctum.
"The Inkblade awakens…""So the war begins again."
Another whispered voice replied beside them.
"What chapter are we on now?""The final one," the cloaked figure said. "Or so he'll believe."