He stood alone in the crater.
Smoke curled upward from the shattered concrete, glowing faint orange at the cracks. Buildings around him were half-sunk into the earth, tilted like forgotten tombstones. The sky had turned the color of dying embers.
Somewhere behind him, emergency sirens screamed. Distant. Useless.
Kael didn’t look back.
He couldn’t.
Not at the bodies.
Not at what was left of the squad they sent to stop him.
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Not at his friends—still breathing, but barely.
His chest rose slowly.
Not from exhaustion.
From control.
Beneath his feet, the ground pulsed once—soft, steady. Listening. Waiting.
He opened his eyes.
No longer just brown.
Not just orange.
A deep, earthen black, shot through with spirals of glowing fracture.
They were watching him now. The drones. The satellites. The eyes behind every curtain of glass. The Nexus. The High Tenra. The rest of the damn world.
Kael didn’t care.
He raised his hand.
The earth rose with it—quietly, reverently.
Stone and dust wrapped around his arm like armor carved from memory.
And somewhere in the static of his mind, Calderon’s voice whispered:
“You are the final vessel.”
“Make them remember why they buried us.”
Kael exhaled.
The spiral turned beneath him.
And the world began to crack.
Three months earlier…