The gates did not open with sound.
They parted like dying stars.
The wind beyond them was cold—but not in temperature. It was the chill of forgotten things breathing again.
Kael stepped through.
The world changed.
---
The Harrowed Realm was not a place.
It was a scar stitched across existence.
The sky had no top—it looped in spirals, spinning with shattered moons and dead suns. The ground rippled like stretched skin. Trees bled stardust. Rivers ran backwards.
It was here the Wyrm Synod had fled.
After Kael had broken their seats, fractured their thrones, and scattered their worlds like sand.
They had survived.
Barely.
And now… they remembered.
---
Far above, at the edge of a hollow sky, the Seven Sovereigns of the Synod gathered.
Clad in exoshells of memory, cloaked in entropy.
Not alive.
Not dead.
Just waiting.
> "He has returned," rasped Vaeruth the Pale, sovereign of Decay.
> "He walks the path again," hissed Sheth'Atur, keeper of forgotten tongues.
> "He must not reach the Throne Core," snarled Kaer Vorn, once Warden of the Void Rivers.
Their leader, cloaked in tattered starlight, did not speak.
His face was masked by iron etched with dying prayers.
But his eyes…
They were the only thing left unchanged by time.
Eyes that had once looked upon Kael—and blinked.
---
> "Send them," he said.
And the first legion of Harrowborn began to rise.
---
⟢ The First Resistance
Kael walked through a valley of bone.
He did not draw a weapon.
His aura did not swell.
But his steps left marks in the air—like scars across silk.
The Harrowborn came in silence.
They were not men.
Not beasts.
Fragments of former gods, merged with memory and hatred.
Ten of them.
Then a hundred.
Then more.
Each with faces melted by uncreation.
Each with names written on their ribs in divine script.
They rushed.
And Kael, at last, breathed out.
---
The ground tore.
Not from spell.
Not from blade.
From will.
His body ignited—not in flame, but in reality inversion.
His footsteps became commands.
His silence became decree.
Each Harrowborn that struck him vanished—not shattered, not burned.
Undone.
As if the universe itself revised its history with each swing of his arm.
By the time he stood at the edge of the red cliffs, the air had gone still.
And the first gate to the Synod's fortress loomed in the distance.
> "They fear me," he whispered.
> "Good."
---
But far above, one of the Seven watched him through divining flame.
> "He is stronger," said Vaeruth.
> "No," the masked one replied.
> "He is complete."
---
The Harrowed Realm quivered.
And something began to wake in its deepest depth.
Not a god.
Not a monster.
But a memory they had sealed long ago.
And Kael… was walking straight toward it.