Kael stood still.
Not in fear. Not in awe.
He simply listened—to the strange, eerie quiet of the place beyond the sky. Behind him, the Hollow Vault had collapsed into nothingness. Before him, a strange, endless space stretched out like a canvas smeared with shadow.
There was no light here. No gravity. No rules.
Yet Kael kept moving.
With each step, reality struggled to keep up. His feet didn't press against earth. They floated across uncertainty. It was as if the world hadn't finished shaping this place… or had abandoned it halfway.
Then, the pressure changed.
Something unseen shifted.
The cold grew colder—not in temperature, but in presence. The silence twisted into something aware.
Kael knew what it was.
Not a god. Not a beast.
Something older.
Something that existed before the heavens, before the daos, before even the concept of creation itself.
The Primordial Ones had noticed him.
And they were waking.
---
The space around him pulsed.
A soundless beat echoed across the void.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Kael's left arm ached. The voidsteel gauntlet, gifted by the Hollow Vault, began to glow faintly.
Then a shape appeared.
Not a man. Not even a thing. Just a scar in space—a jagged tear moving with purpose. Where it passed, the world cracked like thin ice. Behind it came whispers, like dying stars trying to speak one last time.
> "You… are early."
The voice was low. Dry. Like a thought that had aged too long and turned to dust.
Another form followed. A lightless flame, flickering in reverse. It looked at Kael, and Kael felt something inside him shift. As if his birth had just been… rewritten.
He clenched his jaw. Tightened his grip on the Oathblade slung across his back.
> "You climb high," the second voice said. "But you forget where you began."
> "I forget nothing," Kael replied. "I remember enough to burn this world."
There was no reply.
Just a pause.
And then—laughter.
It wasn't cruel. It wasn't kind either.
It was understanding.
---
Kael took another step forward.
The Primordials didn't stop him.
Instead, the air around him shifted. Like pages turning in an invisible book.
Suddenly he was falling—yet not downward. He was being pulled through time, through history, through versions of the world that had never been allowed to exist.
He saw a sea made of broken futures.
A sky filled with names that no one dared speak.
And then—he saw himself.
Not in the mirror.
But standing.
Facing him.
This Kael was different. Tired. Wounded. But peaceful.
> "If you take another step," the other Kael said, "you'll never come back."
> "I was never planning to," Kael answered.
---
He stepped through his reflection.
Everything shattered.
The world bent back into shape.
Kael stood alone again.
And in his palm—right where the gauntlet ended and his bare skin began—a mark burned itself into his flesh.
It wasn't pain. Not exactly.
It was recognition.
A brand given not by gods… but by something that remembered before remembering was real.
The Primordials had marked him.
Not as enemy.
Not as friend.
But as one of their own.
---
And far, far above, in a place no sky could reach, something older than existence began to stir.
Something that remembered Kael's name… even before it was ever spoken.