The moment they stepped through the Threshold, sound vanished.
Not silence.
The absence of sound—so complete it ached.
The world they entered defied shape. Skies spun with ribbons of reversed light, and the ground beneath them wasn't solid but suggestion. Orion felt each footstep echo through a thousand unrealities, as if the very act of walking here unmade something elsewhere.
Kael grunted. "This place isn't right."
Lyra steadied herself beside him. "It's more than that. It's… unraveling."
"I feel it too," Orion said. "The Nameless Presence is near."
They moved through the echo-realm slowly. Time didn't pass normally here. Minutes stretched like years, and moments collapsed into nothing. Every breath brought with it memories that didn't belong to them—other versions of themselves, choices never made.
A shadow stirred in the distance.
At first, it seemed like another vision—one of countless illusions the realm conjured—but then it moved against the current. Intentional. A presence.
Orion raised his hand, symbiont flaring to life along his skin.
Figures stepped forward from the shimmer.
Five of them. Clad in fractured armor made from memories and broken stars. Their eyes held no pupils—only swirling pits of Hollow-dark.
Kael froze. "Those are…"
"Forsaken," Orion said. "Versions of us who… lost."
The first one spoke with a voice like splintered glass. "We reached the end. You won't be different."
Another stepped forward, her face a mirror of Lyra's but scarred, cold, unrecognizable. "You'll make the same mistake. You'll choose the Nameless, even if you don't mean to."
Kael drew his blade. "We won't."
"You already have."
The Forsaken rushed them.
Orion met his own doppelgänger with a clash of will and power. The echo moved like him, knew his moves before he made them—but it lacked something: hope. That was the difference. That was his strength.
Lyra met her counterpart in a blur of light and fury. Two versions of the same warrior, both desperate to prove something neither could name.
Kael fought with a wild intensity, channeling the Veil's remaining light into crystalline fire. His opponent—twisted, hollow-eyed—screamed as his blade shattered false time.
Each battle was personal.
Each victory earned in blood and memory.
When the last Forsaken fell, the world began to fold inward. Their defeat was not the end—but a signal.
Orion stood over the shattered form of his alternate self, breathing hard. "This is what I could become. What I still might."
Lyra wiped blood from her cheek, trembling. "Then we don't let that happen."
Kael looked toward the horizon. "We're close. I can feel the edge."
Orion turned.
In the distance, beyond the fracturing light and memory, a tower rose.
Black. Silent. Unmoving.
It pulsed with the same energy he'd felt in the Hollow.
"The Seat of the Nameless," he whispered.
A place that wasn't built—but forgotten into existence.
Their path led there now.
And the final choice loomed.