Miren's eyes narrowed at the pylon between them and the large crater.
It loomed like a monolith struck from the bones of the sky—alive with coursing light, its glyph channels pulsing in slow rhythm. Power moved through it not as current, but as command—structured, ancient, enforced.
"You want to breach a Dominion pylon?" she asked.
"That's not a door you open. It's a sentence you choose."
Cyril crouched beside her on the ridge, gaze fixed.
"Not a sentence," he said. "A signal."
Miren tilted her head. "To who?"
He didn't answer. Not directly.
Instead, he studied the terrain. Three routes—one strewn with the corpses of Braithborne soldiers, another guarded by mirrored troops forming a living wall, and the third: a gash in the rock, narrow enough to slip through if you didn't mind your ribs pressing against stone. He pointed.
"There. That chute will take us close to the base. We'll go quiet, low."
Miren hesitated, then gave a nod.
"Two blades. One chance."
"Then we crawl."
The chute was tight. Broken glassroot vines hung like veins from the walls, crackling faintly where Flow still clung to the stone. Every breath tasted like minerals and burnt ozone.
They reached the edge of the basin under cover of smoke and a kiss of luck. The pylon rose above them like the spine of some buried titan, half-planted in the earth, its base guarded by a ring of Dominion soldiers. No banners. No chatter. Just presence—silent and absolute.
Cyril watched one of them step aside to allow a Skybinder to pass. Her robes didn't drag. They glided. Flowscript trailed from her hands like tethered lightning, each strand whispering into the node's glyphwork.
She wasn't speaking to it.
She was commanding it.
Miren's breath was shallow beside him. "They're tuning the anchor. Drawing down more Flow from the shard impact."
Cyril frowned.
"Is that what this is about? Feeding their fancy skyship?"
"No," she said.
"That's what it starts as. But that much Flow doesn't just power. It imprints. If they hold this node, they don't just control the battlefield. They rewrite the structure of this entire region."
He looked again at the node's slow, heart-like rhythm.
And felt it.
The wrongness.
The Flow inside him twisted in reply, not with pain—but with protest.
"They're trying to make this place forget," he said aloud.
"Forget the crater, the screams, the ridge they just erased. This node isn't control."
"It's erasure."
Miren met his gaze, searching.
"You want to break it."
He didn't deny it.
"I came here to survive," he said.
"Escaped Dren's pit, ran through the wilds, and watched people die for things they'd never see. But that"—he nodded to the pylon—"that's not war. That's theft. Of truth. Of memory."
Miren lowered her head slightly. Not yielding. Just… seeing him.
"Then we go in together," she said.
"Quick and quiet. Disrupt the anchor point, sabotage the conduits, bleed their Flow until they have to choose: the sky, or the ground."
Cyril smiled faintly.
"I'm glad we're on the same page."
They moved in unison, so synched that they'd give those twin weavers from the arena a run for their money.
The first two guards fell to Miren's knives—one silent, the other with only a whisper of breath. Cyril's Flow dimmed to a dull throb as they crept beneath the pylon's outer supports, weaving between humming anchor lines. The structure sang above them—low and mournful, as if aware of what approached.
Inside the pylon's core basin, they found the primary conduit nexus. Runes the size of wagon wheels rotated above a shallow pool of liquid Flow, like molten glass suspended mid-vibration. The glyph-rings fed directly into the sky via vertical cables that shimmered with stored resonance.
Cyril approached it slowly. His skin tingled. The Flow in him didn't just react.
It aligned.
The conduit pulse shifted the moment he stepped forward.
Miren felt it too. "It's reading you."
"Not reading." He placed his palm on the base ring.
"Recognizing."
The rune beneath his hand flared white. The other rings stuttered in their rotation. A warning klaxon began to pulse—not a sound, but a rhythmic shift in the light. The very glyphs blinked in alarm.
Miren drew her knife.
"That's our cue. Sabotage now, get out fast."
But Cyril didn't move.
He stood in the glow, watching the patterns rearrange themselves to match his resonance signature. Not fighting him.
Welcoming him.
"Cyril," she said, low and sharp.
He looked back at her. Calm. Certain.
"I'm not sabotaging it."
Her brow furrowed.
"What are you—?"
"I'm collapsing it."
Before she could protest, he pushed.
Not physically.
Through Flow.
A surge erupted from his core—not rage, not hate—but refusal. A denial of the Dominion's right to reshape the world with silent decree. He forced his own resonance into the pylon's architecture, his will crashing like a wave against theirs.
The node screamed.
The glyph rings spun out of sync. The Flow pool boiled, then crystalized in place. One of the anchor lines snapped with a thunderclap.
Above them, the sky tilted.
The Sunvault lurched.
Its symmetry broke. The perfect hover it had before stammered, and the cathedral above began to list like a god tripping over its own certainty.
Miren grabbed his shoulder.
"Time to get the hell out."
They fled as the collapse spread.
Cables whipped the earth behind them. The basin cracked open. Soldiers screamed as the pylon's structure twisted on itself—imploding without fire, without sound, as if the world had blinked and changed its mind about what belonged.
When they reached the ridgeline again, chaos had finally erupted on the plateau.
Signal fires erupted from Braithborne camps.
Sunvault's lower pylons dimmed, one by one.
And across the fractured land, factions who watched in silence before began to move.
Cyril stared at the falling beams of golden light, now staggered and trembling.
Miren stood beside him, breathing hard.
"You didn't just pick a side," she said.
"You blazed the flames of war."
Cyril's eyes didn't leave the horizon.
"Good," he said quietly.
"Maybe this plateau didn't need a hero right now, but a man willing to spark the conflict that was hiding itself."
***
Far above the fractured continent, the Sunvault hovered like a wounded star, its vast form listing against the shifting currents of the Flow.
Inside the command chamber, Commander Serent Vale stood motionless before the vast observation window, eyes locked on the dying glow of the shattered pylon below. His golden coat, embroidered with the Vaultmark's sacred sigils, shimmered faintly in the dim light.
Behind him, officers whispered reports—distorted and fragmented.
"The node is lost, Commander," one said.
"Pylon collapse detected. Flow resonance severed."
Vale's gaze didn't waver.
"Casualties?"
"Heavy. Skybinders evacuated or destroyed. Ground forces in disarray."
He closed his eyes for a fraction, then turned with precise calm.
"The Vault does not tolerate failure," he said, voice as cold and unyielding as forged steel.
"Deploy the Shadowbinders. Seal all breaches. Hunt the saboteurs. And prepare the fleet for immediate retaliation."
A junior officer hesitated.
"Commander… the Braithborne are mobilizing. Multiple factions are responding. This will escalate into full war."
Vale's eyes flared with the Vaultmark sigil—twin horizontal slashes burning with relentless fire.
"Then we will remind them why the Vault commands the Flow."
He stepped to the communications console, voice steady and unwavering as he spoke.
"Activate all war channels. Raise every banner loyal to the Dominion. The war for the shard begins now."
Outside the command chamber, the Sunvault's obsidian hull thrummed with renewed purpose.
The long shadow of war had fallen.