ASHES BORN OF SILENCE
EMBERS IN THE WAKE
RIVEN
The wind did not howl—it screamed.
It carried ash and memory, flayed hope and molten fear. Riven staggered as the shockwave hit him square in the chest. Though distant from the epicenter of the Vault's eruption, the force twisted his senses. His lungs burned. His vision splintered into fractured streaks of black and red.
For a moment, he thought he had died.
Not because of the pain. No... because the world was silent.
No birds. No wind. No cracking earth. Just an unbearable, sacred quiet.
Then came the storm.
The sky above the Shatterdeep was no longer sky. It had become a swirling, endless breach—a rift not into another realm, but into a scream buried so deep in the world's spine that it had forgotten it ever had a mouth. Color drained from the horizon as if the heavens themselves had recoiled in horror. Lightning without thunder coiled inside the vortex, striking downward in reverse, pulled toward the bleeding earth instead of falling from it.
Riven's knees finally buckled. He braced himself on the shattered edge of a once-sacred obelisk now half-buried in ash. Around him, the soldiers of the Pale Synod had dropped to their knees, hands over ears, though no sound reached them.
Only truth did.
The Vault's seal hadn't just broken, it had shattered something ancient and unspoken. Something older than factions or bloodlines.
Something that had been waiting.
"Where's Elara?" he rasped. "Where—where the fuck is Elara?"
He forced himself up. Pain lanced through his chest. He felt bones grind where they should not. His skin itched with raw heat—Faeblood heat... and that terrified him more than the storm.
He had always feared what was inside him. Feared becoming like his father. But now… now the fear shifted.
He was afraid he might need to become it.
AERON VALE
He had seen many apocalypses.
Some wore fire like armor. Others whispered from the mouths of possessed children. But this… this was a funeral dressed as a storm. And Aeron Vale understood funerals. He had been to his own more times than he cared to count.
The eruption had knocked him across a crag of obsidian, jagged black slicing his Revenant flesh open. His ichor steamed in the dust, too cold to burn, too stubborn to fade. He pushed up slowly, bones clicking back into place. Each movement was an agony of memory.
His head turned. Slow, calculated.
Serah Vael lay sprawled, blood-streaked, her armor half-melted. She was breathing, but barely.
He didn't move to her yet.
Instead, his eyes fixed on the Vault's remains. Or rather, what had replaced them.
A fissure—voidblack, ringed with runes that bled light, now stood where the world had once been sealed. And above it… a shadow.
Not a form. Not yet.
But an impression. A breath held in reverse. A thing that loomed backward from time.
Aeron had felt the Hollowed stir before. He had chased echoes, slain oracles, defied gods.
But this… this was different.
Aamon Bloodbane no longer whispered through avatars or crumbling minds.
He had touched the edge of his old self again.
Aeron's Revenant instincts roared—DESTROY IT.
But something deeper held him still. Not fear.
Recognition.
SERAH VAEL
Pain sang lullabies through her marrow.
She remembered falling. Not just from the eruption—but from something deeper. A rift in her very design. As if her divine core had cracked open like a broken reliquary and spilled its sacred circuitry into the dust.
She coughed and turned her head, watching the ash rain fall sideways.
It reminded her of the night she first saw the Hollow Glyph in her own blood. The mark that had branded her a heretic. The moment she stopped being human. Or even a paladin.
"I'm not supposed to survive this," she whispered.
But survival had never been her function.
Containment was.
Serah felt the trembling rhythm of the world under her skin—the surge of voidlight threading the veins of the soil. And deeper than that…
She felt Him.
Aamon.
Not just his power. His memory.
Her lips parted as names whispered through her bones. Names of deities long-dead. Of concepts long-buried. Of laws older than time, breaking apart inside her like shattered glass.
"I have to find Elara," she murmured.
But her limbs would not obey. Not yet.
Instead, she stared at the void above the ruins and realized something truly, unbearably holy:
The Hollow God… had begun to breathe.
ELARA
She screamed, but there was no air.
The world she had been taken into was not made of matter or time. It was an echo. A silence so vast and complete it had shape. Had structure. She floated in it like an unspoken thought, unable to tell if she had lungs or eyes or even blood anymore.
Then Aamon's presence returned—warm, vast, terrible. He was not near her, yet his gaze coiled through every fold of this not-world.
"This is the place between," he whispered from nowhere.
"What did you do?" she gasped. "What did you do to the Vault?"
"I reminded it that it was never a prison," Aamon said. "Only a wound. Waiting to reopen."
Elara tried to move, to scream again, but the silence stole everything. Her Nyxis blood burned in rebellion, flaring stars across her ethereal veins. A deep psychic shield formed around her heart.
She expected pain. He gave her truth instead.
"You are not just a thread in a prophecy," Aamon said. "You are the knot. The point where all broken oaths tangle."
And suddenly. He was before her.
Not as a god. Not as a shadow.
But as a man.
His eyes were twin eclipses. His skin obsidian cracked with crimson glow. His voice now low, no longer echoing.
"Elara. I told you we are bound. You, through blood. Me, through ruin. Let me show you what that means."
And he reached into her memory.
Elara screamed again, not in pain, but in recognition.
She saw visions. Threads unraveling. Dreams that had never belonged to her—yet lived inside her bloodline.
She saw a Nyxis witch. Long ago. Pale eyes filled with impossible love... for him.
A woman who tampered with seals and sigils. Who cried as she tethered fate to bloodline.
Who loved the Reaper.
And who, even in death, left a path for Elara to follow.