When he strikes, reality rings like a bell.
Alaric, Kael, and Thorne work around us, fighting beside us.
For a while, we hold.
We always do.
Until we don’t.
I feel the moment it changes.
The ground shakes under my boots—not the steady drumbeat of war, but something ragged. Wrong.
A tear opens in the sky above the far ridge. Black, slick, gleaming, like a wound in the firmament itself.
SoulTakers pour from it in numbers that make my stomach clench.
And from the center of that rip steps a figure draped in shadow and bone, carrying no weapon but a staff and a smile that curdles the air.
I do not know this figure.
He looks sick with madness. Dark cloaks billow around him. His eyes are voids. His mouth twisted in a sneer.
Now the magic that coils around him is not Nightfall’s—it is something twisted, cannibalized, devouring itself as it feeds.
“Stop!” I snarl.
He doesn’t look at me.
He looks at the Prime.
“It’s time, old man,” the stranger calls, his voice echoing in ways sound should not be able to. “Step down.”
The Prime lifts his chin. “You first.”
They clash.
Not with swords, not with claws—but with power.
The air splits around them. Storm, flame, ocean, stone—it all roars, all shatters, all bends under the strain of two titans tearing at the same fabric.
I dive into the fray, wings snapping, claws slicing through SoulTaker ranks as I fight my way toward them.
Every step feels heavier. Every breath tastes of iron and ash.
The earth is afraid.
I have never felt that before.
“Prime!” I roar as a bolt of black lightning slams into his chest, driving him to one knee.
He snarls and shoves back, and for a heartbeat he is everything he’s always been—unyielding, incandescent, inevitable.
Then the cloaked man’s staff finds its mark.
It drives through air and ward and armor.
Buries itself in the Prime’s chest.
