Steel shrieked against violet mana as Nick’s blade cut through the lattice shielding an Ascendent vanguard.
The mana field did not fracture—it parted so smoothly, it almost felt like it was welcoming the strike.
Seren’s interference pattern detonated a heartbeat later, collapsing three anchor nodes in a cascading arc that rolled across the valley floor like thunder.
Torvald charged into the opening with a laugh that sounded almost boyish, his shield catching a corrupted halberd and snapping it at the haft before the wielder understood what had happened.
“Left flank breaking!” he roared.
Aurelia’s radiance followed him, her blazing light reinforcing bone and muscle. She sealed a cut along Nick’s ribs before he could even register it, her light pressing through him like a reprimand and a promise at once.
Shinhwa moved last.
And everything shifted around him.
The lieutenants who had once required all five of them to bring down now recoiled at his presence alone. His blade traced a horizontal arc that carved through two Ascendent captains and forced the third back a full dozen strides.
For a moment—just a moment—the valley felt theirs.
Seren didn’t look up from her weaving, but her voice carried fierce satisfaction.
“They’re overcompensating on the eastern node.”
“Good,” Nick replied, parrying a thrust meant for her blind side. “Let them.”
Seren’s fingers flicked through the air in tight, economical patterns. Threads of gold and white laced outward from her palm, cutting into the eastern anchor node with surgical precision. The lattice there trembled under her interference, its violet geometry distorting as the load redistributed across its structure.
She adjusted mid-weave.
Something resisted.
Her brow furrowed.
“That’s strange.”
Nick deflected another strike and shifted closer to her without thinking. “Strange how?”
“I collapsed the eastern node’s secondary support,” she said, eyes fixed on the shimmering arc ahead. “It should have buckled inward.”
But it didn’t.
The distorted mana field surrounding them didn’t shatter.
It thinned and stretched, then smoothed itself into a new alignment, the energy flowing sideways instead of collapsing.
Torvald barreled through an opening that should not have existed anymore and knocked an Ascendent soldier off his feet. “Looks buckled from here!”
“It isn’t,” Seren replied sharply.
She drove a second interference spike into the structure, deeper this time. The impact reverberated through the valley in a low, resonant hum that rattled loose gravel down the slope.
For a heartbeat, the eastern arc wavered.
Then the western arc brightened.
Nick felt the air shift against his skin.
The pressure behind them intensified.
Seren’s hands slowed.
“That’s not compensatory feedback,” she murmured.
Shinhwa cut down an advancing lieutenant and stepped back into formation without breaking rhythm.
“Report.”
“The load isn’t dispersing randomly,” Seren said. Her voice had gone quieter, more focused. “It’s redistributing with an intent behind it.”
Another node ahead of them dimmed as her interference took hold.
Behind them, something flared.
Nick risked a glance over his shoulder.
A faint, violet arc had ignited across the ground they had already cleared.
He felt a prickly crawl up his spine.
“We already broke that one,” he said.
“Yes,” Seren replied.
Her fingers moved faster now, adjusting the pattern. “Which means it shouldn’t exist.”
Aurelia’s light flared brighter as a wave of Ascendent infantry surged toward their center. “Seren, can you collapse it?”
“I am collapsing it.”
She drove the interference pattern down again, forcing the arc to buckle.
For a split second, the field rippled inward.
Nick felt the structure tremble.
But the tremor didn’t cascade as it should have.
It rotated.
The distortion ahead of them angled slightly to the left. The western node brightened in direct proportion to the eastern node’s weakening.
Seren’s breath caught.
“That’s… not possible.”
Torvald smashed his shield into an Ascendent captain’s chest and forced the enemy back two strides. “Everything’s possible when they’re trying to kill us!”
“No,” Seren said, something different in her tone now.
It was something Nick had never heard from her before.
Not irritation or focus.
Concern.
“This isn’t a simple reinforcement.”
Another lieutenant lunged toward her blind side.
Nick intercepted the strike and drove the attacker back.
“Talk to me,” he said.
Seren’s eyes moved rapidly across the field, tracing invisible lines only she could see.
“The nodes aren’t independent,” she said. “They’re bound into a unified lattice. When I collapse one sector, the load shifts across the circumference.”
“Circumference of what?” Aurelia demanded.
Seren didn’t answer.
She extended her perception outward, pushing through the distortion until sweat beaded at her temples.
The hum in the valley deepened.
Nick felt in his bones.
Seren’s lips parted slightly.
“…it’s not just a cage like we thought.”
Another node ahead of them flickered and realigned.
“It’s not meant to contain us.”
A distant violet arc flared at the northern edge of the valley.
Then another to the south.
They weren’t activating in response to collapse.
They were activating in sequence.
Seren’s hands stilled.
“It’s a rotational system,” she whispered.
Shinhwa’s blade carved a clean diagonal through an advancing Ascendent captain. The captain fell, but the formation behind him did not waver.
“Clarify,” Shinhwa said.
Seren swallowed.
“The energy isn’t dissipating when I disrupt it. It’s cycling.”
The hum intensified again.
Nick felt a subtle pull on the space around them. The distortion seemed to align in faint arcs that curved toward their center.
Seren’s gaze snapped to Shinhwa.
Her face had gone pale.
“…it’s anchored.”
Another wave of distorted mana slid across the valley floor in a slow, deliberate adjustment that repositioned the heaviest interference directly opposite Shinhwa’s stance.
Nick’s stomach tightened.
“Anchored to what?” Torvald asked.
Seren’s voice was barely audible over the clash of steel.
She looked at Shinhwa.
“To the Hero.”
The air shifted again.
The scene in front of them tilted.
The valley floor dipped half an inch toward Shinhwa as though gravity had leaned in to watch.
A shadow peeled itself up from the stone between corpses.
It rose slowly, stretching into the suggestion of a man. Limbs elongated. A head formed last, slightly misaligned with the body beneath it. Where his face should have been, there was only an indentation in the dark.
“Phineas…” Nick breathed in shock.
The Lord of Madness flexed his fingers.
The sound of distant screaming followed the motion.
“Ah,” he said softly. “There you are.”
Nick moved first.
He crossed the distance in three strides and drove his blade straight through the silhouette’s chest.
It slid through like cutting wet silk.
Phineas’ torso split clean down the middle—
—and snapped shut around the blade.
Nick felt cold inside his lungs.
Phineas leaned closer.
“You shouldn’t breathe so confidently,” he whispered.
Torvald hit him like a battering ram.
The shield strike detonated with a concussive crack, collapsing the shadow into a splash of black vapor that smeared across the stone.
Aurelia stepped forward and swept both arms outward.
Twelve spears of incandescent gold tore out of the air behind her and slammed downward in a tight circle, pinning the vapor to the ground.
Light flared, and the shadow writhed beneath it.
Shinhwa’s blade descended in a vertical arc of white-gold brilliance that split the pinned darkness straight through.
Phineas screamed.
The barrier surrounding them faltered.
The hum dropped.
Seren reacted instantly. Three compressed lances shot from her palm and struck the northern node in perfect sequence.
The violet arc shattered.
The barrier trembled.
“We can break it!” Torvald roared.
The shadow on the ground convulsed.
Then folded sideways.
It poured along a curved line of violet light and reassembled thirty strides away.
The northern node reignited.
Seren’s eyes widened. “That’s—”
A cathedral arch of gold erupted from the earth in front of Phineas.
“Alice!” Aurelia cursed.
Alice stepped through the arch.
Her expression was calm.
She raised her right hand.
A blade formed in her grip, a solid, razor-edged sword of compressed golden light. Scripture crawled along its length in burning script.
Aurelia clenched her teeth.
Alice moved.
Her first strike came down toward Shinhwa’s shoulder with the precision of a guillotine.
Shinhwa met it, steel colliding with condensed divinity.
The impact cracked the air like thunder.
Nick rushed in from her flank.
He drove his blade low toward her ribs.
Alice pivoted, and six golden rings snapped into existence around Shinhwa’s torso, contracting inward like a divine vise.
Torvald saw it and slammed his shield between two rings, forcing a gap open with a roar.
Aurelia thrust both palms forward, sending a wall of concentrated sunlight outward. The wall smashed into Alice, driving her back three strides.
Seren flicked her wrist.
A crescent-shaped wedge of compressed force tore across the ground and detonated beneath Alice’s feet.
The stone erupted upward.
Alice vanished.
She reappeared behind Nick mid-swing.
Her blade cut.
Gold light sliced across his back.
Aurelia’s hand struck his shoulder and sealed the wound before blood could spill.
Phineas reformed at Torvald’s flank and drove a hand of shadow straight through his shield.
The metal screamed.
Torvald bellowed and headbutted the silhouette, shattering it again into vapor.
Seren thrust both hands downward.
The ground beneath Phineas liquified into molten mana and swallowed the shadow whole.
For one perfect second—
The barrier surrounding them destabilized.
Shinhwa surged forward and cut Alice across the collarbone.
Golden blood sprayed.
It struck the stone and hissed.
The barrier convulsed violently.
“Push!” Nick shouted.
Aurelia launched a volley of spinning halos that sliced through infantry and ricocheted toward Alice’s flank.
Torvald charged.
Nick followed.
Seren threw five white lances that tore outward in a spiral, striking separate nodes in rapid succession.
The barrier fractured.
The entire valley dipped.
They were breaking it.
At the far edge of the battlefield, a watching figure finally moved.
He did not step forward, nor did he speak.
He simply lifted two fingers.
The barrier—the Wheel—rotated.
The shift was no longer subtle.
Nick felt the ground beneath him shear sideways as if the valley itself had slipped along a hidden axis. His lunge toward Alice carried him through empty space; by the time his blade completed its arc, she was no longer there.
Phineas stood in her place.
The Lord of Madness did not swing.
He simply reached.
Shadow expanded from his palm like spilled ink and struck Nick square in the chest. The impact hollowed. Air fled his lungs as he was flung backward across fractured stone, tumbling end over end before crashing into the dirt.
Torvald’s charge met the same betrayal. He barreled toward where Alice had been, his shield lowered with committed momentum, only to slam into nothing but displaced air. The ground under his boots shifted again, forcing him to skid sideways. He barely kept his balance as he stumbled.
Above them, Aurelia’s spinning halos curved mid-flight, their trajectories bending unnaturally as the geometry of the Wheel reassigned their vectors. The radiant discs embedded themselves into the earth, flaring uselessly against empty stone.
Seren staggered.
“It’s Nocturne,” she shouted urgently, her hands already moving against despite the blood trickling from one nostril. “He’s re-indexing us along the circumference!” Threads of white and gold shot from her palms, stabbing toward three newly brightened nodes in rapid succession.
“What does that even mean?” Aurelia shouted.
“It means he controls this entire space,” Seren replied.
At the center of everything, Shinhwa did not retreat.
Alice advanced toward him with the measured pace of someone entering sacred ground. The golden blade in her hand elongated slightly as she stepped forward, the scripture along its edge burning brighter with each word that completed itself in living flame.
Phineas reformed beside her, his shadow knitting together from scraps of darkness drawn along the Wheel’s curve.
They did not rush.
There was no reason to.
Nick forced himself up, his breath dragging painfully back into his chest. The air felt wrong, heavier toward the center, thinner at the edges.
Aurelia moved to Shinhwa’s right, raising her mace high. She struck the earth.
Light erupted outward from the point of impact in a circular blast, a shockwave of incandescent force that hurled Ascendent infantry backward and tore a gouge through the advancing line. At the same time, she snapped her free hand upward, summoning a cluster of radiant spears that rained down toward Alice in a precise, converging pattern meant to limit escape.
Alice lifted her palm, and a vaulted shield of golden light rose before her, shaped like the arch of a cathedral ceiling. The spears struck it and detonated in bursts of blinding brilliance, but the arch held long enough for her to step through its fading remnants.
Shinhwa met her blade again.
Steel and condensed faith collided with a resonance that vibrated through bone. Shinhwa pressed forward, driving Alice back step-by-step, his strikes relentless. When he cut across her shoulder, golden blood spilled once more and splashed against the turning stone.
The Wheel shuddered.
Seren seized the opening.
She thrust both arms outward, shooting twelve tightly compressed lances in a widening spiral, each one striking a different anchor point in rapid succession. The violet arcs flickered, and the Wheel distorted as stress redistributed too quickly for seamless correction.
Torvald rejoined the fray, crashing into Phineas with enough force to scatter shadow in all directions. He did not wait for the silhouette to reform—he slammed his shield down repeatedly, dispersing darkness faster than it could gather.
Nick pushed inward again, adjusting his angle this time to account for the rotational drift. He aimed not for Alice, but for the space just beyond her, predicting the next shift rather than reacting to it.
For a breathless second, it worked.
His blade cut through her guard and bit into her side.
The Wheel convulsed violently.
Cracks spidered through the air itself, thin fractures visible like stress lines in glass. The hum deepened into a grinding roar that shook loose debris from the valley walls.
“We have it!” Aurelia shouted.
But at the edge of the battlefield, Nocturne’s fingers tightened.
The correction was not dramatic.
It was surgical.
The fractured geometry smoothed itself in a single, fluid motion. The golden blood on the ground dimmed, its energy siphoned along invisible lines toward the center. The distortion intensified around Shinhwa’s position, tightening by degrees.
Seren’s hands faltered.
“It’s not dissipating,” she said, her voice trembling despite her effort to steady it. “Every strike we land… somehow, it’s redirecting the output.”
Nick felt it then.
The Wheel was not simply rotating to reposition them.
It was feeding.
Each clash, each detonation, each burst of divine energy.
All of it was being drawn inward.
Toward the axis.
Shinhwa.
Alice stepped back this time. Phineas withdrew alongside her. They were no longer pressing the attack.
They were observing.
The hum of the Wheel intensified.
The valley floor began to tilt more noticeably toward the center, loose stones skittering inward before being caught and flung outward again as the rotation increased.
Seren’s eyes widened as understanding dawned fully.
“It’s accelerating,” she breathed. “The rotational velocity is increasing in proportion to the stress on the axis.”
Nocturne’s hand remained steady.
At the center of the valley, Shinhwa stood with his blade raised—and for the first time since the battle began, he was alone.
Not because they had abandoned him.
Because the Wheel had drawn a clean circle around him and widened it.
Alice and Phineas stood just beyond that shifting boundary, untouched by the distortion they had engineered.
Nick’s heart sank as the truth settled in.
They were fighting three Ascendents.
All three of them had joined together to spring a trap.
Even though it had taken everything they had to barely defeat one.
The valley tilted further as loose gravel skittered toward the center, only to arc violently outward once caught in the rotation. Violet seams split the air in widening spirals, thin at first, then jagged, tearing across the sky like cracks in a mirror.
Nick lunged again.
He refused the space the Wheel tried to assign him.
He drove his blade into the boundary surrounding Shinhwa.
It resisted, like striking the inside of a spinning bell.
His arms shook as he forced forward, his boots grinding against stone that no longer felt stationary beneath him.
“Seren!” he shouted.
“I see it!” she snapped, her voice hoarse.
Her hands moved in wide, desperate arcs. Bands of white-gold mana erupted from her palms in overlapping crescents that slammed into the rotating circumference.
The Wheel stuttered for half a breath.
Torvald seized it.
He charged into the faltering seam, his shield raised and his shoulder lowered. His impact split the distortion open just enough for Aurelia to thrust both hands into the gap and anchor it with twin pillars of condensed light that drove downward like stakes.
Shinhwa turned toward them.
“Move,” he ordered.
Nick ignored him.
He slipped through the opening they had carved, one boot crossing the threshold—
The Wheel corrected.
The seam rotated thirty degrees around the axis.
Nick’s body followed the curve whether he wanted to or not. The distortion dragged him sideways along the circumference like a bead on a wire, hurling him outward before he could brace himself.
He hit hard and rolled.
Behind him, Torvald roared in fury as the seam vanished entirely.
Alice and Phineas did not interfere.
They simply circled.
Watching.
Nocturne’s fingers twitched, and the Wheel resumed its acceleration.
“Again!” Aurelia shouted.
And they did.
They broke it once more.
Seren targeted a different quadrant, collapsing three nodes in rapid succession. Aurelia summoned spears and hammered them into the barrier like pitons. Torvald struck with brute force until cracks spidered outward.
Nick changed tactics, aiming not at the barrier but at the Ascendents. If he could wound one deeply enough—
He cut Alice across the thigh.
Golden blood spilled.
The Wheel trembled.
Phineas lunged and raked shadow across Nick’s shoulder, forcing him back.
“That won’t work,” Seren called out. “Their blood strengthens the barrier.”
The Wheel flared brighter.
“Shit…” Nick cursed.
***
The sky changed.
At some point, Nick realized it was no longer the same light as when they had entered the valley. The sun had shifted behind clouds, and the shadows were longer now.
Torvald’s laughter had long gone silent.
His shield bore a web of fractures.
Aurelia’s radiance no longer flared in broad waves; it pulsed in tighter, controlled bursts, conserving what she had left.
Seren’s hands trembled between casts.
Shinhwa remained at the center.
He did not falter.
He did not slow.
But he was no longer advancing.
He was holding.
Every time the Wheel widened enough for them to attempt entry, they rushed it.
Every time, it reassigned.
Every time, they were flung back along the spinning circumference.
Alice and Phineas attacked only when necessary—just enough to prevent momentum from building too far in one direction.
They were not trying to win quickly.
They were trying to endure.
***
Night fell.
It came gradually, unnoticed until the violet arcs became the brightest thing in the valley.
The Wheel did not dim with the loss of sunlight.
If anything, it glowed clearer.
Nick’s arms felt heavy.
His breathing burned.
He had lost track of how many times he had struck the boundary.
He had stopped counting how many times he’d been thrown.
[ At some point, Aurelia began praying under her breath between strikes.
At some point, Torvald stopped roaring and began growling instead.
At some point, Seren vomited blood onto the stone and then wiped her mouth and kept casting spells.
Shinhwa still stood.
He turned the Ascendents away every time they tested the center.
Time blurred.
The stars shifted overhead.
At dawn, frost rimed the shattered edges of stone.
By the next dusk, Nick’s grip trembled even before impact.
The Wheel remained.
***
“Shinhwa!” Aurelia shouted, her voice breaking.
Her mace struck the boundary again, sending a flare of divine light rippling outward.
Shinhwa glanced at them.
Just once.
Nick saw it then.
His friend had made a decision.
The Wheel’s rotation changed again. It was no longer widening in increments, but rather compressing inward between expansions.
The stress on the axis was building in pulses.
Seren’s voice was raw.
“It’s reaching a threshold,” she said.
“For what?” Torvald demanded.
“For collapse.”
Nick felt it too.
The distortion around Shinhwa no longer merely spun.
It screamed.
Reality tore visibly now. Violet lightning arced from the rotating bands into the sky. Chunks of stone lifted and spiraled upward before being flung outward in widening debris storms.
If the axis failed, it would not explode outwardly.
It would implode.
Shinhwa drove his blade into the stone.
He planted it to the hilt.
The divine steel pierced deep.
White-gold light erupted upward around him in a vertical column that split the spinning arcs in two.
The Wheel shrieked.
Nick stumbled as the rotational velocity doubled.
The outer circumference widened violently.
“Get back!” Shinhwa’s voice carried through the distortion, clear and calm.
“No!” Nick shouted.
He ran toward the center.
The ground tilted sharply.
He was dragged sideways, his boots losing purchase as the Wheel seized him like a hand gripping a wheel spoke.
Torvald grabbed his arm and nearly lost his own footing.
Aurelia anchored herself with twin pillars of light driven into the earth.
Seren screamed as backlash tore through her mana channels, striking directly into her core.
The Wheel accelerated again.
Stone lifted.
The sky fractured.
Shinhwa stood unmoving at the axis with both hands on the hilt of his blade.
He looked at them.
Not at the Ascendents.
At them.
And for the first time since the battle began—
He smiled.
The rotation became catastrophic.
The outer ring expanded.
The force became unbearable.
Nick’s grip on Torvald slipped.
The Wheel flung them outward in a violent arc of debris and light.
The valley tore open behind them.
At the center—
Shinhwa remained.
Alone.
Holding the world together.
The Wheel screamed.
The sound tore through bone and thought alike, a grinding shriek of collapsing reality as violet arcs thickened and twisted around the axis. Lightning leapt from band to band in violent chains, striking the sky and rebounding into the spinning structure. Stone lifted from the valley floor in spiraling columns, dragged upward by rotational force before being shredded into dust.
Nick hit the ground hard, skidding across fractured rock until his shoulder struck something solid enough to stop him. He tried to rise immediately.
The air shoved him back down.
Centrifugal force dragged at his limbs, trying to peel him away from the center as if he were nothing more than debris caught in a storm.
“SHINHWA!” he screamed.
At the heart of the maelstrom, Shinhwa stood with both hands wrapped around the hilt of his blade, the weapon driven deep into the earth. White-gold radiance surged upward from the steel in a pillar that pierced the spiraling arcs, holding them apart by force alone.
The Ascendents no longer pressed the attack.
Alice and Phineas stood beyond the widening circumference, appearing as silhouettes sharpened by violet light. Nocturne remained at the outer seam, his fingers still raised, but even his expression had shifted, the faintest narrowing of his eyes betraying the strain of what he was maintaining.
The Wheel tightened inward.
Nick felt the change in the pit of his stomach.
The rotation compressed. The arcs drew closer to Shinhwa’s position, layering over one another in tightening spirals. The air around him warped visibly, bending light and shadow alike.
“Seren—!” Aurelia gasped.
Seren’s voice came thin and ragged. “It’s reached the threshold.”
“If it implodes,” Torvald said, hauling himself upright despite the blood running down his temple, “it’ll take half the valley with it.”
Shinhwa heard them.
He looked toward them one last time.
There was no fear on his face.
No desperation.
Just clarity.
He shifted his stance.
The white-gold pillar narrowed, condensing along the blade. The arcs around him shrieked in protest as the stabilizing force altered, no longer resisting the inward crush but redirecting it.
The Wheel convulsed.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, Nick saw Shinhwa’s silhouette framed against spiraling ruin, his cloaking snapping in wind that had no source.
Then Shinhwa ripped the blade free.
The pillar of light snapped upward into the sky.
The Wheel collapsed inward.
Everything rushed toward the axis at once—stone, light, shadow, sound. The valley folded in on itself with a deafening roar as violet arcs imploded, shredding the air into ribbons. Lightning struck the center and vanished. The spiraling debris converged into a single, blinding detonation.
Nick threw an arm over his face as the shockwave tore through him.
The world went white.
Then black.
Then silent.
***
When sound returned, it did so cautiously.
A faint ringing in his ears.
The ragged breathing of someone who had not realized they were still alive.
Nick pushed himself up on trembling arms.
The valley was gone.
Where the Wheel had stood, there was now a crater so deep it swallowed the horizon. The stone had been carved smooth at its center, glassed and fractured by forces no mortal structure had been meant to endure.
There was no sign of Shinhwa.
No Ascendents.
No violet arcs.
Only ruin.
Nick staggered toward the edge of the crater.
“Shinhwa…?” His voice broke on the name.
There was no answer.
Aurelia limped into view behind him, one arm hanging uselessly at her side. Torvald leaned heavily on his cracked shield. Seren knelt in the dirt, staring at the empty center with unfocused eyes.
Nick took another step forward—
The sky split.
A streak of white-gold tore downward through the clouds like a comet forced from heaven. It descended point-first with deliberate, murderous velocity.
Nick’s eyes widened.
The blade struck.
The impact detonated the earth in front of him.
Stone erupted outward in a ring of shattered rock and dust.
The shockwave hurled Nick backward, knocking him flat as debris rained down around them. The ground cracked in jagged lines radiating from the point of impact.
When the dust settled, the sword stood upright, buried to the hilt in fractured stone.
White-gold light pulsed along its length, dimmer now, but steady.
Nick stared at it.
He did not move at first.
He knew that blade.
The edge that had split gods.
The steel that had never once faltered.
Shinhwa’s weapon.
The blade blessed and bestowed by the gods to their chosen warrior.
Thrown.
Not lost.
Thrown.
Nick forced himself to his knees and crawled toward it, ignoring the tremor in his hands. The heat radiating from the blade was intense, but not enough to burn. It hummed faintly beneath his fingers as he wrapped his hand around the grip.
For a moment—
The world fell away.
He felt weight.
Presence.
A calm, immovable will that had never doubted, even when the sky itself tore apart.
It lasted less than a heartbeat.
Then it was gone.
The blade resisted him when he tried to pull it free.
Nick gritted his teeth and wrenched it upward.
Stone split with a sharp crack as the weapon tore loose.
The light along its edge flared once, then settled into a low, steady glow.
Behind him, Torvald exhaled shakily.
Aurelia covered her mouth.
Seren closed her eyes.
Nick stared down at the sword in his hands.
The crater yawned behind him like an open grave.
Shinhwa was gone.
The Ascendents had withdrawn.
The Wheel had served its purpose.
He tightened his grip on the hilt.
The metal felt heavier than it should have.
Like it knew.
Like it remembered.
He did not feel chosen.
He felt condemned.
And somewhere deep inside him, beneath the shock and the grief and the hollow ache spreading through his chest, reality warped.
‘Heroes aren’t supposed to die…’
But what was the truth?
Heroes die.
And then they leave the rest of you to live with it.
Nick lifted the blade.
The light along its edge did not waver.
But he did.
And the war was not over.
Project Knightfall 