Arrival at Elaris
The once-great city of Elaris sat in eerie silence.
Not ruined. Not dead. Just… paused.
Cael and Mireth walked through still streets. People stood in shop stalls, unmoving—not statues, but frozen in time.
A bird hung midair. A child's laugh echoed on loop, then again, then again.
"They're alive," Cael whispered.
"But trapped inside recursive time loops."
The Bleeding Seal
At the heart of Elaris was an ancient vault—a pre-cataclysm structure with geometric patterns pulsing faintly in voidlight. The seal was cracked, leaking violet-black vapor.
The shard on Cael's wrist pulled toward it, threads of Void Essentia dancing.
Suddenly:
A flicker of Cael appeared, walking backward through the vault.
Then another—this one on fire.
Then one screaming.
None were real. Echoes from fractured timelines.
Mireth steadied him. "Don't let the seal show you yourself. Not fully."
The Devourer's Return
A figure stepped from the vault's shadow.
Tall. Ragged. Wearing a shard embedded in its chest. Not Cael. Not human anymore.
"You opened it," Mireth hissed.
"It's him. The one I told you about."
The Devourer's voice rippled through space:
"No more seals.
Only the Open Mouth.
Let the world end clean."
It attacked.
Combat in a Frozen CityTime fluctuated. Buildings rewound mid-collapse.
Cael used Voidshift to blink between layers of reality, striking echoes of the Devourer.
Mireth unleashed wind arcs to slice through corrupted air currents.
Cael tried to bind the bleeding seal, but the Devourer blocked the tether.
Just before defeat, Cael instinctively inverted his shard's frequency—aligning it with the city's rhythm.
The seal recoiled, momentarily stabilizing. The Devourer vanished—banished, but not destroyed.
The Aftermath
The city exhaled.
Some townsfolk collapsed, alive again. Others dissolved into memories, never having existed at all.
Mireth knelt beside the seal.
"That thing… was a Sealbearer too. And it wants them all broken."
Cael stared at his hand. His shard was dimmer now.
"And I just used up a year of my life fixing this one."
Mireth: "You're changing. Not just growing stronger. You're unraveling."
Cael didn't answer. He just looked north.