The sky had sealed.
The star had dimmed.
But the world below had changed.
And Kael could feel it with every step down.
The wind was sharper now. Not colder—hungrier. Trees leaned inward, listening. The sky was clean again, but it carried a strange weight… as if every being beneath it remembered something they couldn't explain.
Kael walked along the ridge overlooking the Ashen Meridian, a once-lush lowland now marked by seared rings of obsidian and scorched stone.
It was here the sky had bled the brightest.
And it was here the first witnesses waited.
---
At the edge of the crater stood a procession.
Not warriors.
Not monks.
Eyes.
Dozens of them. Cultivators, seers, spiritbinders, even lone wanderers. Each had followed the same flame in their chest, the same call that whispered the sky's scream to their marrow.
None approached Kael.
They simply stepped aside.
And at the center of the clearing, atop a blackened pillar of glass, knelt the one who had called them.
Clad in grey and dusk-gold robes, with a blindfold wrapped tightly across her eyes, the woman bowed her head. Around her, runes glowed softly in spirals, anchoring something invisible.
A tether.
A lock.
A choice.
---
Kael stepped onto the glass platform.
The woman did not raise her head.
> "He has returned," she said softly.
> "I never left," Kael replied.
> "Not you," she whispered. "The Flame."
At that, Kael's expression sharpened.
> "You saw it fall?"
> "We felt it," she said. "In our bones. In our sect's foundations. The sky cracked open and showed us the question we'd forgotten."
> "And what question is that?"
She finally raised her face.
Beneath the blindfold, her eyes burned faintly—gold and coal, like twilight barely holding back night.
> "Will we kneel again… when the next god rises?"
---
Kael looked at the cultivators behind her. All silent. All watching.
They weren't here to stop him.
They were here to see what he became.
> "Tell me," the woman asked, voice quiet now. "What did you find in the light?"
Kael's voice was steady.
> "Myself."
> "And was it enough?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, he turned his palm.
The Primordial Brand burned like a second sun against the sky.
The light from it made the blindfolded woman recoil—but not in fear.
In confirmation.
> "Then we are already too late," she whispered. "The path has chosen you."
---
Kael stepped past her and raised his eyes toward the horizon.
Far beyond the crater, mountain spires trembled.
Not from quake.
But from movement.
As if something beneath the world had noticed the star's awakening.
And now… it too would rise.
> "You're not the only one watching, Kael Vanthelmir," the woman said. "There are thrones that remember. Eyes that were closed for eons."
> "Let them open," Kael replied.
> "You'll burn everything they built."
Kael's voice was low.
> "That's the idea."
---
He descended the glass pillar.
Behind him, the cultivators parted once more.
And the woman—High Seer of the Watchbound Sect—lowered her head in silence.
Because now, even the sky answered to him.