The wind howled like a living thing as they climbed the final ridge.
The fight from the night before hadn't ended with bruises — it ended with questions. Ones Kael didn't have the answers to. Not yet. But each step toward the summit felt like a step toward something. He didn't know if it was truth or ruin.
They'd crossed from the edge of the known world into something far older. The snow changed color. Pale lavender in places, veined with blue light. The air felt thinner. Heavier. Like it wasn't made for lungs.
Sera walked ahead in silence, still shaken. Not by the fight — by him.
"Do you believe him?" she asked without looking back.
"Which part?" Kael replied.
"The part where he said you'd become him."
Kael didn't answer immediately.
"I don't know," he said finally. "But it didn't feel like a lie."
They stopped at the crest.
Below them: a crater in the snow, perfectly circular. And at its center… a stone platform, half-buried, covered in twisting glyphs. The ice didn't touch it. Snow melted around it in a perfect radius.
The seal.
And standing alone beside it—
A woman.
She wore no armor. No cloak. Just ceremonial bindings of black silk, wrapped across her chest and arms in careful, ancient designs. Her long hair blew like ink in the wind. Eyes closed. One hand resting on the center of the platform.
Iris's breath caught in her throat.
"That's not possible," she whispered.
Kael stepped forward, eyes narrowing. "Who is she?"
Sera had her glaive in hand instantly. "She doesn't look like a survivor."
"She isn't," Iris said. "That's Lian of the Fifth Gate. She died over a hundred years ago."
Kael stared. "You're saying that is one of the Bound?"
"No," Iris said quietly. "I'm saying… she was."
As if hearing them, the woman opened her eyes.
And the world went still.
Kael's knees nearly buckled.The pressure wasn't magical. It wasn't physical. It was… authority.Like gravity obeyed her.
She spoke. Her voice was steady, but layered — like two voices speaking in perfect sync.
"You carry the fracture," she said, looking at Kael. "You should not be here."
"Neither should you," he shot back.
She smiled faintly. "I chose this. I remain as a warning."
Iris stepped forward, her voice reverent and afraid. "How are you still alive?"
"I'm not." Lian's gaze didn't leave Kael. "I am what remains when choice becomes permanence."
Sera held her stance. "What do you want?"
"Nothing," Lian said. "But he must choose. Before the final gate calls him."
Kael's Eye throbbed. Hard. Images flashed:
Lian kneeling before a burning city.
Blood on her hands.
The fifth seal fracturing beneath her feet.
"You can bind the gate," a voice whispered in his skull.
"Or you can become it."
Lian stepped back from the platform.
"If you step forward," she said softly, "you will carry more than memory. You will carry intent."
Kael stared at the glyphs. He couldn't read them — not with his eyes.But his soul understood.
And something deep inside answered.
He took one step forward.
The platform lit up.
Lian vanished.
And the fifth seal…opened.
The light surged upward like a scream made of fire.
Kael's feet were no longer on the ground. He couldn't feel his body—only the pulse, the unbearable hum of power pushing through him. The glyphs on the platform spun, overlapping, rearranging themselves around his very thoughts.
He wasn't alone in his mind anymore.
Fragments of something ancient clawed at the edges of his consciousness. Words in no language he'd learned. Visions that weren't his own.
A city suspended above clouds.
A blade that sang names as it killed.
A child born beneath a sky that wept red rain.
Kael gasped as the seal stopped spinning. The light collapsed inward and then—
Silence.
He hit the ground, knees buckling.
Sera was beside him in a flash, her hand on his shoulder, glaive in the other. "Kael. Talk to me."
He looked up. His Eye had changed again. No longer just a swirl of gold and blue.
Now it burned with veins of red.The same red as the masked one.
"I saw it," he said, voice hoarse. "The other side. Not the full gate—but what's behind it."
Sera's grip tightened. "What's there?"
"Them." Kael looked up at the sky. "Not gods. Not demons. Just… beings. Waiting. Dreaming us into existence."
Iris walked to the edge of the platform, arms crossed. Her expression was unreadable.
"Did you bond it?" she asked.
Kael stood slowly, unsure of how he was even moving. "I think it bonded me."
Then came the shift. A low rumble. The mountain groaned.
"No," Iris whispered. "No, that wasn't supposed to happen—"
The seal's platform cracked down the middle.
Snow melted in a perfect ring around it, revealing stairs that spiraled downward into the dark. A chamber hidden beneath the seal.
From deep inside, a hum echoed upward.
Kael moved to the edge and looked down.
Shapes moved far below. A soft glow pulsed from walls of obsidian stone etched with glyphs. This wasn't a tomb.
It was a prison.
And something inside it was waking up.
Sera looked at Iris. "We go down?"
"We don't have a choice now," Iris said grimly. "We opened a wound. We need to find out what's bleeding."
Kael didn't wait.
He descended the stairs first, the air getting warmer with every step. Not just heat—pressure. Like diving into the ocean.
Halfway down, the voice returned. Not his own.
"One throne unseated. Four remain. Will you end it, or begin again?"
He reached the bottom.
And there, floating above a black altar—
Was a fragment of a mask.
Shattered. Burned on one side. But unmistakably the same design as the one the doppelgänger wore.
Kael reached for it.
His fingers brushed the edge—
And his vision exploded into white.
Kael was floating.
No—falling.
But there was no wind. No ground. Just a void of shifting white, like standing inside a dream halfway erased.
Then the light rippled.
And a city unfolded around him.
It was the same one he'd seen in the vision before: towers like bones, walkways suspended in the air, all carved from some pale crystal that hummed like a heartbeat. The sky was a gray-violet swirl, and above it all, a throne sat atop a broken spire, unreachable—no stairs, no path.
He stood in the middle of a vast hall. Empty.
No. Not quite.
Someone else was there.
The masked figure stood at the far end of the chamber, arms behind its back, cloak fluttering despite no breeze. Its cracked mask revealed part of its face now—his face. Older, sharper, lined with something worse than time: regret.
"You saw the throne," it said.
Kael's voice was steady, despite the shiver crawling down his spine. "Whose is it?"
The mask tilted. "It was yours. Once. Before the chain was broken. Before they sealed the gates and buried what we were."
Kael stepped forward. "You're me. Or a version of me."
"I'm the one who chose early. The one who stopped asking questions."
"Then you're not me," Kael said.
The figure didn't flinch. "Not yet."
It turned, walking toward the edge of the hall. A jagged window opened out over the floating city.
"The seals were never prisons," it said. "They were bargains. Power for peace. Knowledge for silence. But the Sixth never agreed. It remembered."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "What did it remember?"
"That we were gods once. All of us. Not in name—but in choice."
The room trembled. Cracks spiderwebbed across the vision. The city began to collapse. Towers fell. Bridges snapped.
"You'll wake soon," the masked one said, stepping back into the fading light. "And when you do, you'll need to decide."
"Decide what?" Kael shouted over the roar of crumbling stone.
"Whether you wear the mask… or break it."
A flash of red.
A burst of cold.
Then—
Kael gasped awake, chest heaving. The altar was gone. So was the mask shard. He was lying on smooth stone in the hollow below the seal, lightless and alone.
But someone was at his side.
Sera.
She looked pale, bruised, but alive. "You've been out for an hour."
He sat up, head pounding.
"Where's Iris?"
"Gone ahead. Said the next gate isn't far."
Kael clenched his fists.
The lines along his Eye had spread. Now they reached across his temple, like a mark trying to bloom.
He didn't tell Sera about the throne.
Didn't tell her what he'd seen.
Because part of him… wanted it.
And that scared him more than anything else.
The path beyond the fifth seal was nothing like the world above.
Gone was the ice and snow. Here, the land was black stone, scorched and cracked, like something ancient had burned the ground and time itself had never recovered. A thick mist clung to everything, warm and heavy, like the breath of some sleeping creature just out of sight.
Kael, Sera, and Iris moved cautiously through the chasm, its walls towering so high above that the sky was just a thread of pale gray. The silence here was different—expectant. The kind that made every step feel like an interruption.
"It's warmer," Sera muttered, one hand on the hilt of her glaive.
"It's not heat," Iris said. "It's pressure. The sixth gate doesn't seal away power. It holds back presence."
Kael didn't ask what that meant. He felt it.
The weight behind his eyes had only grown. The Eye pulsed like it had a heartbeat of its own now—no longer syncing to his emotions, but dragging them, reshaping them. Anger came faster. Sadness stuck longer. And deep inside… a thrill.
A thrill every time he reached for his power.
They reached a ledge overlooking a deep fissure. At the bottom: ruins. Not of a city, but a fortress—black stone towers swallowed by vines that glowed faintly red, as though pulsing with veins beneath the surface.
"It's down there," Iris whispered. "The sixth gate."
Kael stared.
He knew it without being told.
It wasn't a guess.
It was a memory.
They descended the stone path carved into the cliff wall, stepping over collapsed pillars and fractured relics—sigils that no longer glowed, carvings that twisted the longer Kael stared at them.
"What happened here?" Sera asked.
"No one knows," Iris said. "The records were erased. Even the oldest archives in the Inner Sanctum don't mention this place. Not by name."
"And yet you knew to bring us here," Kael said.
Iris didn't answer.
They reached the central chamber.
It wasn't a door they found.
It was a mirror.
Massive. Towering. Framed in jagged obsidian. Its surface shimmered like liquid, reflecting not what was in front of it… but what was beneath.
Kael stepped closer—and saw himself.
But not him now.
A future version. His cloak darker. His Eye fully consumed by glyphs. His hands stained with something black that pulsed like oil.
His own reflection whispered to him—
"One more step, and you are mine."
Kael staggered back.
The mirror shimmered violently, the surface warping—
And then it shattered.
A pulse of energy exploded outward.
Kael was thrown to the ground. So was Sera.
Iris screamed.
When Kael looked up—
Someone stood where the mirror had been.
Not the masked figure.Not a reflection.
A man.
Wearing armor made from fractured seals. Veil-energy crawled across his skin like fire. His face was calm.
And his voice—
"Hello, Kael," he said.
"I've been waiting a long time for you to open this door."
Kael's mouth went dry.His hand went to the gauntlet.
The man raised one hand.
And without touching Kael—
Slammed him into the wall with enough force to crack the stone.
Sera screamed his name.
Kael couldn't breathe.
The man stepped forward.
"Let me show you what comes next."