The Blade of Echoes broke not like steel but like a star imploding.
There was no sound—only absence.
No color—only the memory of fire.
No gravity—only the feeling of everything being pulled inward toward a point too small to exist.
Jack was that point.
The four shards became light, then sound, then nothing at all. And with them, something inside him—something ancient, buried, and waiting—was torn apart. Not destroyed, not erased. Released.
The Watcher screamed—not a sound, but a recoil. He staggered within the rift, the faceless helm shattering in slow motion. Beneath it: Jack's face, older, worn, crowned in ash. And for the first time since his arrival, he looked afraid.
The rift trembled.
The sky groaned.
And then, the Watcher—Jack's former self, the god of endings—fractured.
He did not die. He dissolved.
Piece by piece, he unraveled into streaks of memory and regret, pulled into the rift until only one thing remained:
A single, flickering eye.
It blinked once—and was gone.
Then—
Silence.
Jack collapsed. Smoke curled from his fingertips. His breath came shallow, uneven. But he was still himself. And not himself. He had severed something no mortal ever should have touched.
The chain between past and present.
The cycle was broken.
Nyssa ran to him first. She dropped to her knees, cradling his head. "Jack! Speak to me!"
He tried.
But when he opened his mouth—
Nothing came out.
Lola stepped forward, her glowing sigils now fading rapidly. "He's unanchored. He broke his tether to the Echoes."
"Is he dying?" Kael asked, his voice hoarse, worried.
"No," the First Flame said, stepping toward them. Her presence had dimmed slightly—less divine now, more real. "He's becoming."
They all turned to her.
"You said he had a choice," Nyssa said. "He chose to break the Blade. To save us. So what now?"
The First Flame looked down at Jack with something ancient and soft in her eyes.
"He severed himself from what he was. And from what waits for him. But there is no such thing as freedom without cost."
Jack's eyes fluttered open—but they weren't his anymore.
They were glowing.
Not gold. Not silver.
Both.
"You are no longer bound to a fate already written," the First Flame said. "But something else has noticed you."
Behind her, the rift began to shrink.
But before it did—a voice passed through.
Not the Watcher.
Not Jack.
Something deeper.
A whisper of chains. A laugh made of silence. A presence with no name.
"So it begins again."
The rift closed.
The Hollowed disintegrated, their purpose gone.
The Blade was no more.
And Jack—Jack sat upright, trembling, transformed.
Nyssa took his hand. "Are you still you?"
He looked at her.
And smiled.
"I think… I'm finally free."
But high above the scorched sky, unseen by any of them—
A shadow moved.
Not the Devourer.
Not the Watcher.
Something older.
Watching.
Waiting.
And smiling.