The Warden turned and walked into the air.
Each step carried him downward, along a staircase of invisible force that curved into the abyss. His body glowed with golden fire, armour scorched black along the joints of its body, and within his chest, a small void of flame rotated slowly in chains.
Ryu followed, wordless.
He didn't look back.
Yan stood on the platform above, hand clenched near her blade, but she didn't stop him, no one did.
The descent was quiet, the pressure building with every step. The water didn't move. The light didn't bend. The further they dropped, the less it felt like descending into the sea and more like walking into a memory itself.
Eventually, the stairs ended.
They stood before a suspended sphere, forged of tempered fire-glass and layered with glyphs that shifted like living script. At its centre burned a slow, steady flame.
The Warden raised a hand and the sphere opened.
Ryu stepped through.
Sound fell away.
Inside the sphere time moved differently. The floor beneath him pulsed with old memory and around him stood nine thrones in a wide circle with one in the centre, each carved with a unique sigil. One of them matched the mark on Ryu's hand the one at the centre.
In the centre a flame flickered, quiet and warm.
This was no regular fire.
The Warden stood near the edge of the flame.
"This is where it began," he said.
The fire surged, casting moving images into the air.
Nine figures stood together as a seal of stars. Each one bore a different mark. Some tall, some robed, others armoured or cloaked in shadow. They raised their hands in unity, touching the seal.
The gate opened.
Then everything unravelled.
One fell to madness, tearing space around him into threads. Another burned from within. Two more were swallowed by something that reached back through the gate.
Five remained. Then Three.
Then only one.
She stood alone at the edge of the void, her mark rippled, the stars spinning around her.
Ryu's chest tightened.
"Who is that?" he whispered.
The Warden turned to him.
"She is the first. She survived longer than any of the others."
The vision faded.
"The Sea Gate was built to contain something which followed through one of the worlds."
Ryu looked at the empty thrones. "Then what am I?"
The Warden stepped forward.
"You are the thirteenth flame-bearer to carry this mark. Unlike the others, you did not chase power. You were chosen not because you reached for the flame, but because you carried its weight."
The Warden's voice echoed through the chamber.
"This, boy, is the First Oath. To carry the flame even when it burns. Especially when it burns."
The central flame pulsed and moved toward Ryu.
It entered him, worlds broken and reborn.
Voices speaking from beyond time.
A woman's eyes, not Lira's, but older, surrounded by light and loss.
A gate opening beneath a sky without stars, and something waiting on the other side.
Ryu dropped to one knee, gripping his chest as the memory settled in him.
His mark pulsed once, then steadied.
When he stood again, the chamber was quiet.
The flame had returned to the centre.
The Warden watched him.
"You are changed. But not finished."
"I'm ready," Ryu said.
The Warden nodded and turned away, walking into the light.
The sphere rose.
Ryu followed it back toward the surface, toward the drifting temple, and the world that had already begun to change around him.
The ascent through the crystal shaft was quiet.
No pulsing lights. No voices.
Only the echo of what Ryu had seen of thrones now empty, of bearers lost to time, of the oath he now carried in silence.
When he emerged from the depths, the others were waiting. Yan was the first to move, stepping forward with a look of quiet relief, though her hand hovered near her sword as if unsure what had come back up.
"You're alive," she said softly.
Ryu nodded.
Elyra's gaze narrowed, reading the shift in his Qi.
The Warden stood still near the edge of the platform, watching the gate below seal once more. The crystal petals closed around the abyss, locking the water away, and the glyphs resumed their slow orbit.
"The flame has been passed," the Warden said. "The next step will not be chosen by us."
"Then by who?" Kalavan asked.
But the Warden said nothing more.
He dissolved, slowly, into light and ash.
That night, the temple remained eerily still.
No storms raged outside. No waves slapped its sides. The mist hung low and dense across the water, as if the sea itself held its breath.
Ryu sat near the chamber where Lira slept, her breathing steady but shallow. Her mark, the reversed star-ring, had begun to glow faintly since his return, flaring with resonance whenever he came close.
"She's tethered to it," Elyra murmured. "The same presence but from a different angle. Like light bent around a second star."
Yan knelt by Lira's side, resting a hand gently on the girl's forehead. "What happens if it wakes inside her?"
Ryu looked down at his hand and the mark now calm.
"I don't think it'll be a matter of 'if.'"
Just before dawn, the first tremor hit.
The temple lurched slightly, not enough to shake them, but enough to scatter the Qi threads Elyra had laid down for stability.
The sea beyond the walls began to swirl.
Not violently, but rhythmically like a pulse, and Lira stirred.
Her breath hitched. Her fingers clenched the edge of her blanket. Then she gasped, eyes snapping open, silver and burning.
The mark on her ignited.
She sat upright, shaking.
"I saw it," she whispered.
"Saw what?" Yan asked.
Lira's voice was small.
"The world that burned. The last flame. And the thing that tried to hold it."
Lira's thoughts drifted to a buried memory, one not her own, yet echoing within her like a forgotten song.
She remembered the collapse of countless worlds, the gathering of the Nine beneath the veiled stars of the secluded void. Each had once ruled or defended a realm, paragons of power whose strength defied understanding. Their mission had been clear: seal their worlds from the horrors of the Created Void, an abyss that birthed creatures capable of consuming entire realities.
Only one among them held the authority and mastery to anchor such seals: the one who had shaped the laws of space and time through centuries of cultivation, the man history would come to call the Void Emperor.
Together they worked, sealing away one realm after another. Yet the monsters of the abyss did not sleep. World-eaters clawed at the veils, hungry for collapse. Amid this battle, the Void Emperor vanished. No warning. No trace.
Without him, the balance fractured. The Nine began to fall. As their realms burned, they scattered, some to hide, others to protect what little remained.
But one memory stood sharper than the rest.
A creature crawled through one of the broken voids white as bone, its body skeletal and spindled like a malformed god. Its eyes were pits of nothingness, swirling voids that devoured light and will alike. Dark Qi poured from it in waves, toxic and oppressive, far beyond the reach of mortal comprehension. It was no mere beast. It was a calamity given form.
The Queen - Liryetta - stood against it. Alone.
Though her cultivation soared, even she could not match the creature's power. The clash shattered skies and fractured realms, the force of their battle threatening to erase her world entirely.
With time slipping away, she scattered her people into the far reaches of the multiverse, hiding fragments of her lineage, her legacy, in whatever safe havens she could reach.
And then she created Lira.
A vessel of Qi and flesh, woven with precision and care. A clone in appearance, but not in purpose. Into this form she sealed slivers of her own soul, her cultivation, and memories too dangerous to bear whole. Lira was her hope, her gamble. A way to reach another world. One still tethered to the Void Emperor's fading legacy.
As the monster approached, the Queen opened a gate. With one final surge of power, she hurled Lira through it. No time for farewells. No time for fear.
And then she turned back.
In a final act of defiance, Queen Liryetta unleashed all that remained of her strength. She battled the creature once more, not to win, but to trap it to seal the broken void from which it came. Yet without mastery of the Dao of Space, her efforts fell short. The seal was partial. Cracked.
But it was enough.
The creature was slowed. The void, dimmed. And the Queen… gone.
She looked straight at Ryu holding back tears as the memories flooded through her, now knowing what she is, and what she was meant to do.
The mist outside twisted.
The water beyond the temple surface began to part.
And from the east, something moved across the sea. A ripple, fast and wide, approaching with unnatural speed.
Kalavan stepped to the edge of the outer walkway, blades half-drawn.
"That's not a current."
Ryu stood slowly, the mark on his hand flaring again.
"No. It's not."