The stairs wound around the Vault of Chains like a serpent clinging to its prey.
Haraza ascended in silence, each step reverberating with the weight of decisions he hadn't yet made. The glaive buzzed faintly, as if whispering warnings in a language lost to time. There was no sky above now—only the body of the spire itself, a solid wall of light and shadow, shifting between real and unreal with every breath.
At last, he came to the Gate of the Vault.
It was a simple door.
Wooden.
Old.
Out of place.
Haraza paused. He touched the surface—and it was warm, like flesh.
He pushed it open.
Inside was darkness.
But not absence.
Presence.
It swallowed sound. Smothered light. The moment he stepped in, the door vanished behind him.
And then something breathed.
("So this is the one the Rift marked.")
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It was not loud. It did not need to be.
Haraza raised his weapon.
("You must be the Echo Lord.")
The darkness coiled.
A figure emerged from the black, formed from broken memories and flickering truths. It wore his face—but older. Hardened. Eyes like stormglass, mouth a thin, merciless line. The Echo Lord moved like smoke, yet every footstep rang like iron on stone.
("I am what remains when your doubts are fed,") it said. ("I am the shape of your failure, worn until it fits.")
Haraza didn't flinch. ("I've faced worse than my own shadow.")
The Echo Lord smirked. ("Then fight me—and lose as you always do.")
The duel was not physical.
The first blow came as a thought—a memory twisted: his hands pushing someone into the Rift, a child's scream trailing behind.
Haraza staggered.
("Never happened—")
The second came as certainty—a voice in his mind whispering that every choice he'd made had cost lives, that every victory left someone behind.
He roared and swung the glaive. It met only smoke.
The Echo Lord laughed. ("You're not here to win. You're here to admit.")
Haraza dropped to a knee.
The weight of who he wasn't crushed his shoulders.
But something else stirred.
Not pride.
Not anger.
Will.
He remembered the rook-cloth.
Tarn's Hollow.
Lyssira's gaze.
Kaveth's silence.
And he stood.
("I'm not perfect,") he said. ("I've failed. I will again. But I'm still me. I make my own path.")
The glaive glowed white.
The Echo Lord screamed.
And shattered.
Silence returned.
And then—
A light bloomed from the core of the Vault.
Chains fell away.
And in the heart of the chamber, wrapped in crystal and memory, was a single object.
A sphere.
No bigger than his fist.
It pulsed with Riftlight.
Haraza stepped forward and touched it.
In that instant, he saw:
The Rift falling from the sky like lightning.
A world sundered and remade.
Beings of light and shadow bound in ancient prisons.
And a voice—clear, true, terrifying:
("You are the first. The Key. The Chainbreaker.")
Then—
Blackness