For one breath, the world hung still.
Then the sky tore open.

A scream of wind devoured everything—sound, shape, sense. The Skybridge shuddered like a dying beast. Its runes, once gold and steady, flared white, cracked, and went dark. Stone discs spun in slow spirals before dropping into the abyss, swallowed by the storm below.

Rael’s first thought was not of the fall—it was of her.
“Sira!”

He ran through fragments of a world that no longer obeyed gravity. Chains snapped around him like whips of molten silver. Every stride sent him leaping from one breaking platform to another. Lightning licked at his heels. His sword was gone—torn from his hand—but his aura blazed with the same golden light that had forged Solara’s armies.

Ahead, he saw her—half-conscious, suspended in the air by vines of green fire that twisted out of the storm. They pulsed as though alive, wrapping her in an almost protective cage.

Lakvenor’s shout cut through the gale.
“Brother! She’s falling!”

Rael didn’t think. He leapt.

The Descent

He caught her as the vines unraveled. They plummeted together, tumbling through thunder. For a moment she was weightless in his arms, hair streaming like a banner of green silk. Her eyes flickered open.

“Rael?” she whispered. “It’s... awake.”

The storm answered her with a roar.

Below them, an ocean of cloud split apart to reveal a void of rolling darkness—the Abyssal Sea, the bottomless storm beneath Ayara. And within it, shapes moved: enormous, luminous, shifting like cities made of shadow.

The Ashborn.
Thousands—no, millions—stirred from slumber, their ember eyes igniting one by one.

Lakvenor’s Defiance

Above, Lakvenor wrestled with the winds. His twin-bladed staff whirled in a storm of sparks, carving paths through the air. The blades hummed with the voices of thunder spirits bound within.

“Veyrahan!” he roared over the tempest. “Do something, damn you!”

The simian warrior stood on a fragment of the collapsing bridge, fur bristling with storm-light, his eyes twin whirlpools of calm. He bowed his head once.

“The trial is ended,” he said softly, and struck his staff upon the stone.

A wave of compressed air burst outward—ancient sky-craft, older than Ayara’s thrones. It caught Lakvenor mid-fall, hurled him across the gulf toward his brother. Rael looked up just in time to see the flash of lightning that carried Lakvenor’s outstretched hand.

They collided, grappling midair, the three of them now bound by a single desperate instinct: survive.

The Skybridge Collapses

The remainder of the bridge came apart like burning parchment. Whole chains snapped and twisted into the storm. Runes broke loose, drifting as fireflies across the gloom. Veyrahan stood upon the final fragment as it began to crumble.

He turned once, gazing at the vast shape stirring beneath the storm—an ancient coil of light and darkness writhing below the clouds. Something that had not been seen since the Collapse.

“The Seal of the Deep,” he murmured. “So it truly sleeps no more.”

He stepped off the stone—and the winds caught him. Feathers of air and light wrapped around him, turning his fall into flight.

Impact

Rael, Lakvenor, and Sira slammed through a curtain of rain, crashing into a mass of vines and branches that broke their descent. For a long while there was only the hiss of stormwater and the crackle of fading lightning.

When Rael stirred, the world smelled of earth and ozone. They lay in a vast jungle—canopy stretching upward into the mist. Lightning danced along the treetops, illuminating the enormous roots of the world that rose like pillars into infinity.

He rolled toward Sira. She was breathing, but faintly. Her skin shimmered with faint runes that pulsed in rhythm with the storm.

Lakvenor limped over, staff bent, armor scorched. “Well,” he rasped, “that could have gone better.”

Rael barely heard him. He touched Sira’s cheek; her skin was fevered, her pulse erratic.

“She’s burning from the inside,” Lakvenor muttered. “Like the Core’s still inside her, fighting to get out.”

Rael looked up at the sky—a roiling whirlpool of clouds—and the faint glimmer of the Skybridge now nothing more than shattered lights.

“She unleashed it,” he said quietly. “And now something answered.”

The Awakening Below

A low hum rose from the jungle floor—distant but growing. The ground itself began to tremble. Rael turned, swordless but ready, as shadows rippled between the trees.

Shapes emerged: tall figures of glassy obsidian, bodies cracked with glowing embers—Ashborn, awakened and wandering. Their eyes fixed on Sira.

“She called them,” Lakvenor breathed. “Or they called to her.”

Rael’s jaw set. “Then we hold them off.”

Before Lakvenor could reply, Veyrahan descended through the mist, his wings of stormlight folding as he landed. He regarded the Ashborn with unreadable calm, then looked to Sira.

“She has passed the trial,” he said. “But the storm has named her its heir.”

Rael rose slowly. “What does that mean?”

Veyrahan met his eyes, the wind whispering through the vines.
“It means the world will soon remember what sleeps beneath its roots.”

The earth shuddered again—stronger, deeper, a pulse that echoed through their bones. In the distance, a colossal shape unfurled in the fog: a titan of root and flame, eyes like molten suns.

The awakened guardian of the Abyssal Seal.

Rael drew breath, raised what remained of his light, and whispered to Sira’s unconscious form:

“Stay with me, Sira. We started this together... and we’ll finish it.”

The titan roared—an ancient sound that turned the air itself to fire—

—and the chapter ends there, on the edge of a battle none of them are ready for.