The moment they stepped beyond the garden's edge, the air grew wrong.
Not heavier. Not colder.
Just… wrong.
Reality itself wavered, as though questioning whether it had been written correctly.
Orion slowed, hand tightening around the shard of starlight now bound to his wrist. Kael unsheathed his blade—its surface humming with silent alarm. Lyra held her flame close to her chest, not for battle, but as an anchor.
The child paused. "It's starting."
"What is?" Orion asked.
"The Veil is remembering that it was once a prison."
And prisons, when broken, remember their captors—and what they held back.
Across the fractured plains, rifts had begun to open—rips in the fabric of space and story. From them poured not armies or beasts, but concepts. Forgotten laws. Failed timelines. Beings that were never meant to be born. All clawing their way into the known.
Kael's jaw tightened. "This doesn't feel like an invasion. It feels like a correction."
Caldrein stepped out from a fracture behind them, his eyes wild with new revelations. "The Nameless was the sentinel, yes—but not the source. The source was never a who. It was a what. The Veil itself. It was alive. It is alive. And now… it's waking."
Lyra reached out and touched a nearby tree. Its bark unraveled into song, revealing whispers from every version of her that ever lived—or died.
"It's rewriting us," she said softly. "Not to erase… but to prepare. For something worse."
They reached a plateau where the sky split above them like glass, revealing a vision:
A colossal figure, still slumbering, chained in countless dimensions at once.
No face.
Only a crown of hollow stars.
"The Nameless King," Caldrein whispered.
"The one the Veil was built to hold."
The child didn't speak. It only stared upward, its expression unreadable.
Orion turned to them. "How do we stop a god that predates purpose?"
The child finally answered, quiet but certain. "You don't stop it. You survive it. And in surviving it, you change its nature."
Kael stared into the sky. "And if we fail?"
Caldrein answered, voice grim. "Then reality becomes memory. And memory becomes ash."
Silence fell as the winds picked up—carrying fragments of old worlds, burned futures, songs from timelines that had already died.
And in the center of it all, the four of them stood at the edge of becoming.
Not as saviors.
But as seeds.