Night had no meaning here.
Not in the skies beyond stars, not in the lands where silence bled from stone.
Orion ran.
Behind him, the Archive of the End burned—not with fire, but with memory unbound. Echoes peeled from its spires like skin from bone, chasing him in the form of shrieking silhouettes, distorted into jagged forms of all they'd ever forgotten.
They were not hallucinations.
They were Echo-Hunters—fragments of discarded fates given shape, now weaponized.
Kael spun mid-air, his blade dragging a crescent arc of obsidian light as it collided with the first Echo.
It dissolved, not in death, but in shame.
"It remembers how I died," Kael spat, landing beside Orion. "And it's trying to make it happen again."
Lyra called flame from her throat, a blossom of violet that melted through an entire column of chasing forms. "They're not just memories. They're loops."
"Loops?" Orion shouted.
"They want us to relive ourselves—over and over—until we choose the wrong path again."
Above, the sky fractured further.
The Nameless had not followed.
It had sent pieces of their past instead.
And some were worse than the Hollow Ones.
One came from the fog—taller than any living thing, wrapped in Orion's own voice, speaking back at him:
"You could've saved her. You chose the seed instead."
Orion froze.
Lyra turned sharply. "Don't listen—"
But the Echo stepped closer, and its face was Lyra's, dead and decaying, eyes full of betrayal.
"Let me go," it whispered.
Orion faltered.
Kael struck it down—but not before it had touched Orion's chest with one finger.
A cold pulse spread through him.
Not injury. Doubt.
The landscape shifted in reaction.
They had entered a psychic zone—reality shaped not by rules, but by what they feared the most.
"We need to anchor!" Lyra shouted, drawing a rune midair. "Something stable. Something true."
"What do we have that's still real?" Kael demanded.
"The seed," Orion said, and from within his cloak, he pulled it free.
Still alive.
Still unplanted.
The Echo-Hunters recoiled.
Then screamed.
The land around them cracked—revealing veins of silver-green light. A heartbeat began to pulse from the earth. Something ancient. Something that had not been written into the Nameless's book.
Orion dropped to one knee, pressing the seed into the ground.
"Grow," he whispered.
But the seed did not obey.
Instead, it pulsed once—and revealed something hidden.
A gateway.
Circular, woven of roots and voidlight, suspended between seconds.
Beyond it… a new land.
Not forgotten.
Not remembered.
Just possible.
"Run!" Kael shouted.
They dove through the gateway as the Echo-Hunters lunged.
And just as the threshold closed, one whisper slipped through the veil behind them.
"The Garden dreams of blood."
---
On the other side, light returned—but not in a form they recognized.
They had entered a world without time.
A realm still forming its first question.
And something was waiting.
Breathing.
Watching.
Rooted.