Reven awoke to quiet.
Real quiet.
Not the tension-filled silence of the Supreme Isles or the humming presence of the Rift. This was the stillness that came after.
He blinked up at a sky that was no longer fractured. It bore the faint outline of the Rift's scar, yes but no longer bleeding light or shadow. Just there, like the memory of an old wound.
The light was soft. Natural.
Kaela sat nearby with her back against a pillar, cleaning one of her blades with a cloth that had long since given up the idea of ever being clean again. She didn't look over.
"You took your time."
Reven tried to sit up and regretted it immediately.
"Everything hurts," he muttered.
Kaela smirked without smiling. "Good. Means you're alive."
Lirien appeared a moment later, descending from one of the high ledges with practiced grace. She moved more slowly than usual, wings tight to her back. Even she looked drained.
"How long was I out?" Reven asked.
"Three days," Lirien said.
"Three?"
"You weren't asleep," she added. "You were somewhere else. You weren't breathing at first."
Reven ran a hand over his face, skin still tingling from where the Rift's energy had touched him.
"I saw versions of myself," he said. "Hundreds. Lives I never lived. Things I could've become."
Kaela looked at him now. Her eyes didn't have the usual sharpness. Just curiosity. And concern.
"Did any of them look... better?"
"Some," Reven admitted. "Most didn't."
He looked at his hands, flexed them slowly.
"But none of them were real."
Later, they stood at the edge of the isles and looked out over the world below. What they saw wasn't peace but it wasn't war either.
The chaos had receded.
The creatures born of memory, of malfunction, of mirrored lives they were gone. Or dormant. What remained was fractured but calm. The land would need time to regrow, and people would need time to remember who they were without something hunting them in the dark.
"Is it over?" Kaela asked.
Reven shook his head. "No. But the worst part is."
Lirien turned her gaze upward, toward the scar in the sky.
"It'll never really go away, will it?"
"No," Reven said. "And it shouldn't."
She raised a brow. "Why not?"
"Because we need to remember what it cost to survive it."
They descended from the Isles two days later.
Not on a sky-platform. Not through ancient gates.
They walked. They chose a long-abandoned tower, climbed its rotting bones, and took the slowest, most human path back to the surface.
No fanfare.
No gods.
Just three people walking down from the sky.
When they reached the ruins of the lowlands, they found others Beast-Kin rebuilding, scavenger bands sharing water with once-hostile tribes, old machines reawakened but not hostile.
Something was different now.
The fear that had once shaped the world was breaking.
And something new was rising in its place.
Reven didn't take his name back.
He didn't announce who he was or what he'd done.
He just moved through the world like someone who had finally stopped running from it.
In time, they reached the edge of the Ember Valley. Fires still burned there, but not wild. Controlled. Ritual. Renewal.
Kaela watched from a distance, arms crossed.
"I thought this place was dead," she said.
"It was," Reven replied. "Until you helped light it again."
Lirien crouched near a cracked monument and traced a name etched into stone.
"What happens now?" she asked.
Reven looked at the sky.
The Rift scar shimmered faintly overhead. Not glowing. Just there.
"Now," he said, "we live with it."