The tear in the sky bled noise and light. Screams in languages no throat could speak echoed across the broken sanctum, and shapes that defied anatomy poured through—living sigils, twitching wings of glass, creatures stitched from prophecy and ruin.
The Nameless had not come alone.
Kael was already in motion, blade drawn, his aura flaring into arcs of deep violet. He cut through one of the approaching horrors, but the thing simply reassembled itself from the fragments of its own unraveling, humming in a discordant key that bent time around its core.
"They're Echo-Sworn!" the moonlight woman cried. "Memories that gained will!"
The obsidian giant hurled a meteor of compressed gravity into the swarm, scattering a cluster of them. "Kill them fast or they'll learn your shape!"
Lyra grabbed Orion's arm. "We're not winning this here."
Orion's body moved on instinct. The Weavers' mark within him pulsed in time with the rhythm of the invaders. For a heartbeat, he could almost hear what they heard—an ancient sound, not of footsteps, but of something arriving.
He reached inside himself, not just into the symbiont, but deeper—into the fragment the Weavers had left, into the golden wound in his soul.
And he let it speak.
A blast of golden light erupted from him, not destructive, but revealing. The illusions around the Echo-Sworn faltered, and in their place, Orion saw the truth.
They were pieces of possibility, culled from timelines that had been devoured.
Each one represented a version of someone who might have been.
And several of them… were him.
Twisted. Broken. One with bone wings and eyes like bleeding stars. Another, wrapped in Hollow flesh. A third—calm, beautiful, regal—wearing a crown of Weaver thorns.
They all turned toward him.
One spoke.
"We remember the choice you haven't made."
Kael shouted something, but Orion didn't hear it. His mind fractured again, not from force—but from recognition.
These were futures. His futures.
"Orion!" Lyra's voice, sharp and near. Her hand gripped his shoulder, grounding him. "Don't let them pull you in!"
He blinked. The Echo-Sworn lunged.
But this time, he didn't back away.
He surged forward, golden power bleeding from his fingertips, and touched the first of his twisted selves.
Memories. Agony. Triumph. Endless lives poured into him at once.
He saw himself as a tyrant. As a god. As a sacrifice. A martyr. A monster. A savior.
He screamed.
But he didn't let go.
Because beneath all of them, at the core of every version, there was one common thread.
Lyra.
She had been with him in every timeline. Sometimes as an enemy. Sometimes as a lover. Sometimes as the weapon that ended him.
But always there.
He latched onto that truth like a blade.
And cut.
The Echo-Sworn fractured. The pieces of possibility screamed and scattered like broken dreams. The sky began to seal itself, the rift pulling inward like a closing wound.
The sanctum fell into silence again.
Kael helped Orion stand, his eyes narrowed. "You just absorbed what should've destroyed you."
"I didn't absorb it," Orion said hoarsely. "I remembered it."
The moonlight woman stepped forward slowly, awe in her gaze. "You've started to unify."
Lyra helped steady him. "Unify?"
"The fragments," Kael said. "The timelines. The selves. He's beginning to merge the possibilities into a single path."
Orion's eyes burned gold. "Then we don't have much time. If the Nameless knows what I'm becoming, it'll send more."
Kael nodded. "It already has."
The child with the crystalline sphere hovered beside them. "Then we go to the Threshold."
"What's that?" Lyra asked.
The girl tilted her head, her voice suddenly older, echoing. "Where the first version of Orion made his choice. Where the multiverse first cracked."
Orion's breath caught.
The battle had only begun.
And now, they were going to the place where the war truly started.