The snow was falling sideways.
Not from wind—there was none—but from some unseen pressure spiraling outward from the mountain's heart. Cael and Mireth stood atop an ancient plateau, where the sky cracked with subtle glyph-lightning and gravity shifted by degrees.
They had reached Pale Crown, a ruined observatory once used by astronomer-magi to chart rifts in the stars.
But Cael wasn't here for starmaps.
He was here for a Relic.
Not just any artifact—one of the Seven Anchors. Objects left behind by the higher beings who first manipulated Essentia during the Age of Binding.
The observatory was long-abandoned. But its center chamber still pulsed with quiet breath. As they entered, the silence pressed down like velvet soaked in ink.
The walls bore celestial glyphs—maps not of stars, but of concepts. Fate. Gravity. Memory.
The Relic sat atop a pedestal of obsidian glass: a fractured sphere of layered glass and silver threads, endlessly refracting and distorting its own core.
Cael stepped forward.
It began to whisper.
"Seven stand where one once fell.
Memory sealed in scattered shell.
Know thy name, and lose thy skin.
Speak the glyph, and let it in."
Cael's hand hovered above it.
Mireth hissed. "Don't touch it."
"I think it knows me."
He reached out—
—and in a flash, the world inverted.
Suddenly, he stood in a hall of mirrors, suspended in a sky of void-light. Reflections of himself surrounded him—dozens of Caels, each etched with different glyphs. Some wore scholar's robes. Others armor. One had no face at all.
Then a voice—not from a reflection, but from inside the glass.
"Cael Adrios. Scholar. Seeker. Catalyst."
"You are not chosen. You are responsible."
"One fracture seals. One fracture spreads. One fracture… transcends."
He staggered back into his body.
The sphere rested quietly on its pedestal. The whispering stopped.
He turned to Mireth.
"We're not here to fix the world," he said. "We're here to choose how it ends."