The road to the Broken Sea was no road at all.
It was a song of silence, carved through dunes of ivory dust and plains where gravity swirled like a drunken god. Haraza rode not a horse, nor beast, but a crafted glider called a krenn-shaft—a relic Lirien unearthed from her Order's long-forgotten vaults. Its wings were woven of shimmerglass, humming in tune with the ley lines below. Every glide over the fractured world whispered to Haraza a question he could not yet answer.
What kind of hero rewrites the world?
Beside him, Lirien guided her own shaft with practiced grace, her white cloak trailing behind like a comet's tail. Her hair, once bound by ritual braids, now flowed free in the desert winds. She no longer looked like a Speaker of the Ebon Crest. She looked like a fugitive from fate.
Which, Haraza mused, wasn't far from the truth.
("Do you feel it?") she called across the rushing wind.
("Yes,") he said, and his voice carried across the leystream like it belonged there. ("The world's humming again.")
Lirien nodded. ("We're crossing the Verge.")
The Verge was the last true border before the lands forgotten by maps. South of the Whispering Plateaus, east of the broken titanfalls, the Verge marked where the Accord's reach had once ended—and where chaos began.
And beyond that? The Broken Sea.
It was not a sea in the way Haraza understood it. No water. No waves. Only shifting shards of sky-glass, floating above the crust of a crater so deep it pierced the foundations of reality. An ancient wound, left behind by something older than war, older even than gods.
Legend said it was the first thing the Accord tried to bury.
Haraza believed that now.
The krenn-shafts slowed as the air began to resist them, like invisible molasses pressing back. The shimmerglass wings struggled against the warp-fields surrounding the Sea. Magic pooled in the air like unseen tides. They were close.
He pulled his shaft down, gliding into a slow spiral until both he and Lirien landed on the edge of a cliff made of crystallized obsidian. The view from the precipice was both terrifying and beautiful.
The Broken Sea sprawled below them in a chasm of fractured land and floating archipelagos. Islands of memory drifted above the emptiness, each one pulsing faintly with color—pale greens, bruised purples, and ghostly golds.
And in the center: a column of light that twisted into the heavens like a reverse waterfall.
("That's where the next seal lies,") Haraza said.
Lirien shivered. ("I feel it. Like… a wound that still bleeds.")
They made camp on the cliff's edge. There was no wood here, no soil. Their shelter was a dome of compacted aether-foam, and their food came from self-contained hex-packs Lirien had salvaged. The world didn't welcome them. It merely tolerated their presence.
At night, Haraza dreamed.
He stood on one of the floating shards in the Broken Sea. Not as he was now, but younger—barefoot, dressed in the work-clothes of a boy from the Outpost Wards. He held nothing. No Helm. No sword. Just his thoughts.
A voice called to him. Not the Accord. Not the Rift. Something else.
("You are the question,") it whispered.
("The Accord tried to be the answer. The Rift tried to be the test. But you—Haraza Genso—you are the question the world never dared ask.")
He turned in the dream, and saw his reflection in the shard below his feet. It wasn't him.
It was a version of him that had never fallen into the Rift. A version who lived an ordinary life.
That reflection smiled sadly.
("You'll never be that man again.")
He awoke with the dawn, the false-sun rising through the fog like an accusing eye. Lirien was already awake, gazing over the edge in silent thought.
("We're not the first to come here,") she said.
("No,") Haraza replied, stepping beside her. ("But maybe we'll be the last.")
They crossed the threshold at midday.
It wasn't a descent—it was entry. The shards of land were not connected by bridges but by resonance. They had to leap from thought to thought, letting the Helm guide them. It became clear that the Sea didn't respond to movement or logic—it responded to conviction.
When Haraza faltered, the shard beneath his feet would ripple, threatening to cast him into the void. But when he focused—when he believed—the next shard would draw closer.
By twilight, they reached the central isle.
It was unlike the others. Not smooth or beautiful, but jagged, malformed—as if something had tried to grow here and failed.
In the center stood a monolith.
Black stone. Twelve symbols carved around a central glyph that shimmered with pale violet light.
("The seal,") Haraza said.
Lirien nodded. ("Second of twelve.")
He stepped forward, and the Helm responded. Energy surged through him, not painful, but revealing. The shard beneath the monolith pulsed, and the seal activated.
The world split again.
He stood on a battlefield.
But not one he recognized.
Smoke choked the sky, and the ground was littered with broken armor. Not just human—but drakken, sylvani, even the towering umbra constructs that hadn't walked the world in a thousand years.
Haraza realized this was memory.
Not his own.
The Helm spun, and a voice echoed from the battlefield.
("You wish to break the Accord? Then face what the Accord could not.")
The battlefield shifted.
Now he stood before a colossus of wings and flame—a creature made not of flesh, but of concepts. It was fear given shape, despair given claws.
("The first Riftborn,") said the voice. ("The one we buried in the Broken Sea.")
It charged.
Haraza barely had time to draw the Helm's essence around him. He shaped a blade of will and parried, the shockwave tossing him into a nearby wreck of a shattered titan.
This wasn't a test of strength. This was a test of memory.
The Riftborn screeched, and with it came visions—not just of this battle, but of all the moments when Haraza had wanted to give up. His failures. His doubts. His betrayals.
He gritted his teeth and pushed forward.
Every strike he landed wasn't just against the creature—it was against the lie that he was powerless.
He wasn't a knight. Not a chosen one. Not a prophet.
But he was here.
He chose to be here.
With that thought, he struck true.
The Riftborn exploded in a blast of unmade color, and the battlefield vanished.
Haraza fell to his knees on the central shard. Lirien rushed to him, but he raised a hand. ("I'm fine,") he said. ("It's done.")
The seal dimmed. The second glyph on the monolith faded, replaced by a new symbol on the map behind his eyes.
Two down. Ten remain.
But the Rift pulsed again, as if watching.
Lirien helped him to his feet. ("We should leave. The shards are destabilizing.")
She was right. The Broken Sea trembled beneath them, the resonance fading now that the seal had shifted. They ran, leaping from shard to shard, the Helm stabilizing each path just long enough.
As they reached the cliff's edge, their krenn-shafts waiting, Haraza looked back once.
The monolith still stood.
But it was no longer alone.
A second figure now knelt before it. Clad in robes of reverse-fire and shadow-thread. He couldn't see the face—but he felt the intent.
Another had entered the Cycle.
And they would not be kind.