The ruins of the old capital rose like a wound from the land—towers bent with time, streets cracked by roots, banners faded to ghostly scraps fluttering in wind that smelled of iron and old magic.
Liora stood at its edge, boots on the shattered road where a thousand ancestors had walked. Her blood knew this place. It stirred under her skin like something waking up.
Behind her, only four remained: Iskar, Vex, Thalia, and Ryn. All scarred. All changed. And yet still with her. Still alive.
"Here," she whispered. "It ends here."
Iskar stepped up beside her. "What's here, exactly?"
"My family's shame," she said. "And maybe… the truth."
They moved in silence.
Every stone of the capital felt sentient—watching them, judging them. At the center of the ruins stood a temple carved from bone-white stone, with spires shaped like reaching hands.
At its door, a single word was etched:
SEVARIN.
Liora's real surname. The one her mother buried long ago.
Her fingers brushed the symbol. It pulsed. Then the door shuddered open.
No one spoke as they descended the spiral stairs beneath the temple. The air grew colder. The walls closer.
And then, at the bottom, they found it:
A crypt filled with glowing sarcophagi. Not dust. Not decay. But preserved—faces behind glass lids, locked in time.
There were dozens.
Some wore robes of the Veil Order. Others armor of long-dead kingdoms.
But one stood at the center—an obsidian tomb with silver veins pulsing like a heartbeat.
Liora approached.
The name etched across it read:
ALARIN SEVARIN.
"My grandfather," she breathed. "The first to open the Veil."
And suddenly, memory wasn't just hers.
It flooded in—visions of Alarin sacrificing hundreds to fuel a spell that shattered the planes. Creating rifts between life and death. Becoming something else.
And at his side?
The Warden of Bone.
"She's not just part of the White Circle," Liora whispered. "She was one of us. A Sevarin."
Behind them, the crypt trembled.
A roar echoed through the halls—not from any living throat, but from the walls themselves.
They turned too late.
From the shadow of a sarcophagus stepped a monstrous shape. A humanoid… but wrong. Half-corpse, half-light, eyes like melted gold.
It was a Guardian Shade—a bound ancestor, awoken to test bloodlines.
The test?
Kill your kin, or die as one.
Liora didn't hesitate.
She surged forward, Veil energy flaring, her body half-pulled between realms. The Shade was fast—brutally so—but she wasn't human anymore. Not fully.
She screamed Alarin's name.
The Shade paused. Just enough.
She drove her blade through its heart.
But it laughed.
Its body exploded in a spiral of spirit magic, hurling everyone backward.
When the dust cleared, Ryn was impaled against a pillar—dead. Thalia knelt beside him, trembling.
"No," she whispered. "Not him too…"
But the Shade was gone. Its job done.
Liora knelt by its remains. Beneath the shattered armor lay a scroll—sealed in flesh.
She tore it open.
It was a blood-rite. A map of inheritance. A record of the Sevarin bloodline stretching back millennia.
And at the end?
A name.
Her mother's name—crossed out in red.
Below it?
Liora's name… and another, barely legible but unmistakable.
Mavrek.
She stared.
"No," she said. "No, it's not possible."
Iskar stepped closer, reading it with her.
"Your brother," he said softly.
"Or half-brother," she whispered.
"And he's leading them now."
Everything shifted in that moment.
Mavrek hadn't just attacked them out of strategy or hate.
He was claiming a legacy—one he believed Liora had stolen.
He was waging a blood war.
And she had just declared hers.
That night, they burned Ryn's body beside the Sevarin tombs. Thalia didn't speak. She didn't cry either.
Just sat there, blade across her knees, face blank.
Liora knelt by her, offering silence instead of comfort.
They both understood something now:
This wasn't a battle between light and dark.
It was blood against blood. Kin against kin. Ancient sins crawling back into the present to demand vengeance.
And in ten days' time, the Veil would thin again.
The final battle of the arc was coming.
And no one would walk away unchanged.