The path east was silent.
Not the natural silence of wilderness—but the haunting, pregnant hush of land that remembered blood.
Even the wind held its breath.
The boy—now riding lightly on the Traveler's back—had fallen asleep, worn out from fear and sand. His tiny fingers clutched a strip of the Traveler's coat like it was a lifeline.
The Traveler moved like a shadow between dunes and dead trees, guided by stars that flickered in strange patterns.
He paused as they crested a rise.
Before them, jagged and alien, rose a skeletal mountain.Its peak curved like a crooked finger pointing toward the heavens.And nestled at its base, half-swallowed by the desert, was a gate.
Not man-made.Not even ancient.
Primordial.
The frame was carved from obsidian vertebrae, each inscribed with letters that pulsed softly—letters not meant to be read by the living.Its doors were closed, but they did not seal anything.
They waited.
"Is this it?" the boy asked, now awake, voice small.
The Traveler nodded.
"Stay here," he said, lowering the boy behind a boulder. "No matter what you hear. Don't follow."
"…Will you come back?"
The Traveler didn't answer.
He approached the gate slowly. His boots stepped into old footprints—many, overlapping—some human, some not.
As he reached the threshold, the glyphs on the bones flared.
A whisper echoed from the air.
"Name your oath."
The Traveler exhaled.
"I am the one who walks without home. The one who carries what cannot be buried."
He placed his palm on the center of the gate.
The stone hissed.
The sigil on his sword blinked once, as if acknowledging the place.
The gate groaned open.
Darkness poured from the gap—not the absence of light, but the presence of something colder.
Inside.
The chamber was vast and hollow, as if someone had carved out the soul of the mountain.
The floor was a spiral of bones and mirrors.
Dozens of robed cultists stood in rings, swaying in perfect rhythm.
At the center, bound by red chains that shimmered like silk and flame, was the girl.
She looked peaceful. Sleeping.But her dreams were bleeding from her eyes.
Above her hovered a figure—not solid, not smoke.
The Veiled One.
A being with no shape. Its form shifted like an oil spill across broken glass.Dozens of mouths whispered from beneath a hood that had no head.Its voice wasn't sound.It was memory.
"Another bearer of the False Blade... how many of you will crawl back from the ashes?"
The Traveler gripped the sword.
It didn't hum.It didn't glow.
It wept.
The cultists turned as one.
A High Priest stepped forward. His body was riddled with nails—long, rusted, each driven into his skin like devotion. His mouth was sewn shut, but his voice echoed in every ear.
"You bear the Shardsword. That which was never forged. The echo of a broken future."
The Traveler said nothing.
"Why come here, O Broken One? Do you wish to save her? Or kill the god she's become?"
The Traveler's eyes narrowed.
"Neither."
He raised the blade.
"I came to end a promise I once made."
The Priest lunged—so fast the air rippled.
The Traveler moved faster.
The sword didn't swing.
It shuddered—as if reality itself blinked.
The High Priest was gone.
Not dead.
Erased.
The chamber panicked.
Chains snapped. Glyphs flared. Cultists screamed.
The Veiled One laughed—and the mirrors cracked, revealing memories not your own. Images flashed:
A kingdom burning.
A woman falling with eyes like the child's.
A man made of smoke reaching toward a child in a crib.
A sword melting in someone's hands.
And… the Traveler, kneeling before a god, saying: "If I must lose everything to keep my word… so be it."
The girl floated upward.
Her eyes opened—and they were white voids.
She spoke.
No voice. Just power.
"You… are not of this world."
The Traveler didn't flinch.
"Neither are you anymore."
He struck.
The Veiled One screamed.
The girl fell.
When it was done, the chamber collapsed inward—consumed by its own lies.
The Traveler carried the girl out. She slept now, no longer dreaming.
The boy ran to them, tears streaking his dusty cheeks.
"You saved her…!"
The Traveler said nothing.
He looked to the stars.
One of them blinked out.
Far away, in a tower made of teeth, another god opened its eyes.
"The Shardsword walks again."