The sky over the Greyfold cracked open like glass under pressure. Lightning coiled in slow motion across the heavens, not of light, but of soulstuff—ashen threads tugging at the marrow of the world. Raikuro stood at the edge of the ruined plateau, Hellsteel humming on his back, Ogrhul silent beside him, jaw clenched against some unseen pain.

The soulstorm had arrived.

They’d tracked its birth across dying villages and spectral wastelands, following tales of dreams twisted and loved ones returned from death with empty eyes. Raikuro had felt the pull long before the first vision—a hand in the dark, familiar and cold, touching the edges of his thoughts.

Lysia.

The name no longer brought peace, only longing shaped like a blade.

The storm churned before them—a vortex of souls, screaming in silence. At its heart, a floating monolith of obsidian, cracked and bleeding silver light. It pulsed like a heartbeat, irregular and alive.

Raikuro advanced.

Ogrhul reached out. “This place is wrong. She’s not here. Not really.”

“I know,” Raikuro said. “But something of her is.”

The moment his foot touched the storm’s boundary, reality warped. The world shrank. No sky, no wind—only the sound of breathing. Not his. A woman’s breath, soft and frightened.

He opened his eyes to a memory made flesh.

A home. Their home. Charred, rebuilt, stained with time but whole again. The door creaked open on its own.

Inside, Lysia stood at the hearth, tending a fire that didn’t burn. Her eyes were blindfolded with veil-thread, her hands steady despite the rot that curled at her fingers. She turned to face him, lips parting in recognition—or warning.

“Raikuro?” Her voice was thin, hollow. “Is that... you?”

He stepped closer. “You’re not her. You can’t be.”

“I was,” she whispered, and the room began to bleed shadow. “Parts of me still remember.”

From behind her, a shape emerged—skeletal, cloaked in stitched faces, its fingers wrapped around a halberd made of weeping bone. The Soul-Eater.

Raikuro didn’t hesitate. He drew Hellsteel, the blade roaring to life with a howl. But as he charged, time fractured. The room broke into a thousand shards, each showing a different memory: Lysia on their wedding day, Lysia dying in his arms, Lysia screaming his name as he turned away from the flames that consumed their village.

The Soul-Eater moved through those shards like water. Raikuro swung, the Hellsteel cleaving through illusions, but the demon fed on memory, growing stronger with every echo. Each strike he made tore away another layer of who he was.

“She loved you,” it said, voice like a chorus of ghosts. “And you let her die.”

“I tried to save her!”

“You chose the blade. You chose vengeance.”

The Soul-Eater struck. A glancing blow, but enough to send Raikuro crashing through a pillar of fractured time. He landed in the bedroom they once shared. Lysia sat on the edge of the bed, singing a lullaby meant for a child they never had.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. The Hellsteel trembled in his hand.

Ogrhul’s voice crackled across the void. “Fight it, Raikuro! That thing’s crawling into your soul—”

Too late.

The Soul-Eater pinned him to the ground. Its face loomed inches away, a shifting mosaic of everyone he’d failed.

“Give in. Let me take the pain. I’ll wear her face, and you can pretend forever.”

And for one terrible second, he considered it.

But then—

A flame.

Small. Fragile. Real.

It burned at the edge of his mind, a spark born of something older than hate.

Hope.

Raikuro screamed. The Hellsteel erupted, not in fire, but in light—the kind that burned memory into truth. The illusions shattered. The Soul-Eater shrieked as Raikuro drove the blade into its heart, channeling not rage, but grief.

“I loved her,” he said, “but I won't lose myself to what’s left of her.”

The creature convulsed, then collapsed into dust.

The storm calmed.

In its center, a figure remained.

Lysia—her true form. No blindfold, no rot. Just her. Eyes closed. Floating in a crystal sarcophagus half-consumed by soulstone.

Ogrhul arrived, bloodied and panting. “Is she…”

“She’s alive,” Raikuro said, voice raw. “But not whole. She’s been… split. Bound here by something stronger than death.”

“What do we do?”

Raikuro placed a hand on the sarcophagus.

He saw flashes—Lysia resisting the soul harvesters, sacrificing herself to delay Dreadvorr’s ascension. She’d chosen this prison.

“She knew I’d come,” he murmured.

A decision weighed on him: break the seal and free her fragment—risking her mind, her soul… or leave her here, untouched, protected, waiting for a day that may never come.

He looked to Ogrhul. “If I take her now, she might become something worse than the Soul-Eater.”

“But if you leave her—?”

“She fades.”

He closed his eyes.

And withdrew.

Not yet.

He carved a mark into the stone: a binding sigil, a promise.

“I’ll come back. When I can save all of you.”

The storm dissipated.

Raikuro turned his back to the wake of Lysia’s memory, each step heavier than the last—but his resolve was steel.

And in the silence behind him, a single word echoed from within the crystal.

“Raikuro…”