Location: Talon Daan Island – Skies Above the Ruins
The air hung heavy, as if even the atmosphere held its breath. Isaiah hovered high above the jungle clearing, his boots crackling with condensed arcs of lightning. His muscles tensed as he stared down at the silver-haired girl kneeling below.
She had a name now.
Velkyr.
Not just a girl. Not just a frightened Shardbearer.
A judge of stasis. One of the Void Court.
He should have seen it coming.
Everything about her was too still, too precise, as though time itself dared not offend her with chaos. Her presence dulled the world. Birds no longer chirped. Leaves didn't rustle. The sky, which moments ago had been thick with wind and thunderclouds, was silent and static—trapped in her will.
Isaiah tried to breathe.
It felt like pushing against stone.
Then came the voice.
> "Run," Anpu said. "She will not miss again."
Isaiah's jaw clenched.
"Not this time."
---
Memory Sparks
His mind reeled—memories not his own colliding with the present.
The name Velkyr dredged up images of another battlefield. A divine hall of obsidian and moonlight. He stood—as someone else—a man cloaked in thunder, arguing with a woman carved of ice. She had spoken of laws, of symmetry, of ending all variance.
He had raged at her. Called her doctrine poison. She'd called him reckless.
Then she'd tried to freeze his soul.
He had shattered her sanctum instead.
That was thousands of years ago—or yesterday. With Mythborne memory, time was a web, not a line.
Now, the past stood before him again—taller, colder, more dangerous than he remembered.
And she was waking up.
---
Judgment Unleashed
Velkyr lifted her head. The silver streaks in her hair brightened into pale flame, more frost than heat. Her pupils glowed white, like distant stars.
She rose without using her limbs, lifted by invisible force.
> "I remember the Storm," she whispered.
The jungle around them began to crystallize. Branches stilled in midair. Grass stiffened like blades of frozen glass.
"I remember the screams," she continued, tone void of emotion. "You shattered the Axis Gate. You defied equilibrium. You mocked the Court."
Isaiah's fingers curled, lightning dancing between them. "I was fighting for freedom. You wanted to freeze the world in chains."
Velkyr blinked slowly. "Freedom is chaos. Chaos is collapse."
She raised her hand.
Reality bent.
---
A Battle of Forces
A horizontal wall of translucent force exploded outward. It was like space itself had been weaponized. Trees splintered into shards without touching the barrier. Animals simply vanished—wiped clean.
Isaiah snapped his arms together, summoning a barrier of his own—pure lightning shaped into a cyclone dome. The force clashed with his storm wall, and a shriek like a thousand crying mirrors pierced the air.
He gritted his teeth, absorbing the backlash. Electricity surged down his spine, pushing him to his physical limit. But he held.
He always held.
With a roar, he dove straight at her.
---
Contact
Velkyr's body flickered between states—solid and intangible, like light moving through ice. Isaiah landed a punch to her side that should've thrown her across the island. Instead, she absorbed the kinetic energy and redirected it—back into his chest.
He was hurled backward through a ruined stone column.
His ribs cracked.
He hit the ground, coughed blood, and growled.
"Okay," he muttered. "No more holding back."
He stood, letting the storm pour from him. Dark clouds circled the clearing. Lightning danced through the air like writhing serpents. His eyes glowed a deep violet, the sign of a full conduit link.
Velkyr observed him with eerie detachment.
"You are becoming Kairon again," she said. "That is dangerous."
He smirked. "Good."
---
Awakening the Sky
He summoned the storm fully now—not just a weapon, but as identity. The world responded.
Wind twisted in columns. Thunder boomed with his heartbeat. The earth around him vibrated with the hum of divine memory.
Velkyr tried to freeze the wind.
But the wind was him.
He blinked from her vision, teleporting through storm-bursts. He reappeared beside her, swinging a blade made entirely of hardened lightning.
She caught it—barehanded.
But this time, he expected it.
The blade detonated in her grip, releasing a contained thunder bomb point-blank.
She screamed—her first real sound of pain—shoved back by the concussive blast. Her dress ripped, crystalline fragments cracking off her shoulder. One eye flickered. She was not invincible.
Isaiah approached slowly.
"Still think I'm chaos?"
Velkyr trembled. "Still think you're innocent?"
She opened both palms.
> "Silence, Storm."
---
The Seal of Stillness
From her hands came not a blast—but stillness.
Not a metaphor.
A real, terrifying, unnatural silence that tore sound, movement, even light into nonexistence.
Isaiah staggered as his lightning flickered and died.
He could still breathe, but even his breath made no sound. The world turned grayscale.
Velkyr hovered toward him, each footstep erasing the air beneath.
> "You must sleep," she whispered.
And then—
A ripple cut through the stillness.
---
The Flame Returns
Fire split the silence in two.
A pillar of golden flame struck the battlefield from above, carving a molten trench between Isaiah and Velkyr. From within it emerged a figure—cloaked in ash, eyes burning with gold and grief.
Suri.
She stepped between them, flames coiling around her limbs like wings.
"You don't get to erase him," she said, voice trembling with fury.
Velkyr tilted her head. "Another Shardbearer."
Suri didn't wait.
She exploded.
A wave of phoenix fire engulfed the clearing, consuming the frozen air and unraveling Velkyr's stillness. Isaiah gasped as sensation returned. Sound rushed back in a single crashing roar.
Velkyr staggered, frost steaming off her arms.
"You awakened," she murmured.
Suri bared her teeth. "He's not alone."
---
Two vs One
Isaiah recovered fast. Suri's arrival renewed his strength like a spark to dry tinder.
He glanced at her. "You followed me?"
She nodded. "Had a vision. Figured you'd need saving."
He grinned, wiping blood from his mouth. "Timing's perfect."
They stood side by side—storm and fire.
Velkyr floated above them, her body cracking with rifts of stillness.
"I am not your enemy," she said. "But you are obstacles to the Balance."
Suri's fists ignited. "Balance can go to hell."
Isaiah raised his arms.
"Let's show her what chaos really looks like."
---
The Clash of Titans
Velkyr unleashed a sphere of entropy, designed to erase matter.
Isaiah countered with a spiral of plasma-laced lightning.
Suri hurled phoenix lances, fire that remembered.
They moved like a dance—improvised but unified.
Velkyr split into afterimages, each one casting frozen sigils to bind their movement. But the flames melted them. The thunder scattered them.
Then Suri got close.
She touched Velkyr's chest.
> "You don't have to be what you were."
Velkyr hesitated.
Just for a second.
And in that breath of doubt, Isaiah struck.
He didn't kill her. He didn't want to.
But he wrapped her in a storm cocoon, bound by magnetism and divine current.
She collapsed—unconscious.
The battle was over.
---
Aftermath
Suri fell to one knee, breathing hard. "She's strong."
Isaiah nodded, panting. "Too strong. And that was her half-awake."
He looked down at Velkyr's still form.
"She wasn't lying. She really didn't hate us. She thought she was fixing things."
Suri's voice was quiet. "A lot of people do terrible things thinking they're right."
He reached into his coat, pulling a containment shard.
"We take her to Avalon."
---
A Storm Gathers
From the clouds above, Anpu watched.
He did not intervene.
Not this time.
His jackal eyes glinted with interest, not malice.
> "He remembers more quickly now," he whispered. "And she burns with purpose."
The figure beside him—the man in gray—asked, "Should we stop them?"
Anpu closed his eyes.
"No. Not yet. The Pantheon stirs. Let them gather. Let them remember."
---
Elsewhere: A Door Opens
In a monastery high in the Andes, a monk meditated beneath a red moon.
His eyes snapped open as a mark bloomed on his chest—a sun devoured by serpents.
He spoke a single word.
> "Typhon."