The Echo stood silently behind Yeo, its mirrored mask reflecting a fractured world. The faint static of broken time hummed around them, distorting the very air. The Nobals remained motionless, frozen in the web of inverted time.
Yeo turned his back on them, walking away from the fallen warriors and toward the rift that had opened in the Vale.
"Why?" he asked, his voice carrying the weight of someone who had lost everything but still sought answers. "Why did you help me?"
The Echo did not answer immediately. The air crackled with a soft hum as the creature's voice echoed in his mind rather than in the world around them.
"You seek the truth, and truth has a price. The gods are not gods, and they never were. This world is not their creation, nor their domain. It is yours—and that is why they fear you."
Yeo paused, digesting the words.
"You've been guiding me," Yeo murmured. "But you're not human. Are you even real?"
The Echo raised its arms, and the ground beneath them rippled like liquid. The world warped. A new vision unfolded before Yeo's eyes.
They were no longer in the Ashen Vale.
They stood on the Field of Broken Dawn—a vast, barren plain filled with the remnants of once-mighty citadels and shattered temples. The sky overhead was black, with cracks that glowed like veins of molten fire. The Starforged King stood at the center of it all, his figure towering and draped in armor that pulsed with dark light. Around him lay the bodies of gods, their forms broken and twisted.
"Do you see?" the Echo's voice came again. "This is the past. This is what the gods did to themselves."
Yeo's eyes widened. The sight of the fallen gods, their bodies shattered like fragile glass, was overwhelming. It was as though the very fabric of the world had been rent in two.
"Who are they?" Yeo whispered, his heart heavy with grief.
"These are the ones who were once revered," the Echo responded, its voice layered with sorrow. "The Divine Sovereigns—gods who claimed dominion over the universe. But they were not creators. They were conquerors. They tore the threads of time and space, manipulating them to suit their designs. Their war with each other devastated everything."
The scene shifted again, this time showing the Starforged King standing alone, holding a shattered weapon. The remnants of gods lay at his feet, their power dissipating into the air.
"The Starforged King was not a god. He was one who remembered." The Echo's voice trembled as it spoke. "He remembered a time when there was no divine war. A time before the gods sought to claim dominion over the worlds. He saw their destruction and chose to end it—to free the world from their tyranny."
The vision dissolved as quickly as it had come, leaving Yeo standing once more in the Ashen Vale, his breath ragged.
"You…" Yeo whispered, taking a step back. "You want me to do what he did. Don't you?"
The Echo did not respond. Instead, it faded back into the ether, leaving Yeo standing alone once more.
But the path ahead was clear. Yeo had seen the truth. The gods, the very beings that had once been revered as omnipotent, were not creators—they were destroyers. They had torn apart the fabric of existence for their own selfish desires.
Yeo clenched his fists, feeling the fire of the Starforged King coursing through him. The gods were not gods—they were simply beings who had lost their way.
Yeo wasn't just a survivor anymore. He was a herald of change.
And he would stop at nothing to tear down the gods who had ruined the world.