The path was not a road. It was a wound.
Torn into the fabric of what could be, stitched with silence, lined with the bones of failed incarnations.
Kael followed it.
He passed statues of himself—sculpted not in marble, but in collapsed timelines. One wept black ichor. One screamed. One knelt.
All broken.
All unfinished.
But Kael did not pause.
He reached a door.
A gate carved not with symbols, but with questions—each etched in mirrored script that rearranged itself every time he blinked.
And upon that door, written in language unspoken since before the first Dao breathed:
> "Enter, and your truths will mourn."
Kael placed his hand against the vault.
It opened with regret.
---
⟢ Inside the Hollow Vault
No treasure lay within.
No golden light. No divine inheritance.
Only a chair in a chamber shaped like a throat swallowing its last name. And across from it, seated already—
Kael.
No twin. No echo.
This Kael was real.
A paradox.
He wore no weapons. No crown. No seal.
Only a robe of coarse thread, soaked in memories of a life never lived.
> "You're late," said the seated Kael.
> "You're dead," said the Kael who entered.
> "Not yet," said the one in the chair. "But you will be."
---
⟢ The Conversation
They spoke for hours.
No words were heard, but truths were felt.
The seated Kael spoke of a life abandoned before it began.
Of the woman Kael once spared in a shattered forest.
Of the child born from that moment, who now ruled nothing and yet healed everything.
Kael stood silent.
The air grew heavier.
The seated Kael raised one final question—not with voice, but gaze.
> "If you sit in my place, what will you lose?"
Kael reached for the chair.
The chamber cracked.
A scream echoed—not from him, but from the future recoiling.
And then the seated Kael faded—not in defiance, but in permission.
The chair remained.
Untouched.
Kael turned from it.
He would not replace his lesser self.
He would bury him with reverence.
---
⟢ The Offering
Where the chair once sat, a shard of shadowed starlight remained.
Kael reached for it.
It burned his soul.
Not in pain.
In reminder.
He saw the first time he killed.
The first time he lied.
The first time he wished to die and couldn't.
And the shard whispered:
> "Now… forge."
Kael raised both hands—the gauntlet of voidsteel thrumming, the flesh hand trembling—and shaped the shard into a seal.
A symbol never before etched into the sky.
A glyph of pure intent:
> "Do Not Forget Me."
He pressed it to his chest.
And the Vault collapsed behind him.
Not destroyed.
Fulfilled.
---
Kael stepped back into the Veil's edge.
Stronger.
Not because he gained power.
But because he left nothing of himself behind.
Above, the real heavens shuddered.
And for the first time…
The Primordial Ones stirred.