He walked.
He didn't know for how long, just that each step took him further from the Rootspire, from that broken symbol of everything he thought he knew.
The air never cleared. The ash never stopped falling. It clung to his hair, to his skin, to the inside of his throat like the world was trying to choke him from the inside out.
He kept walking anyway.
The ground dipped and rose, cracked in long, jagged seams. Trees thinned into twisted silhouettes, and the sky above bled gray like a wound too deep to close.
Sometimes he saw things in the distance, shapes that moved when he blinked. Sometimes he heard sounds that didn't belong to him. Low groans. Scraping metal. Breathing. But when he turned, there was always nothing.
Or maybe whatever was there just didn't want to be seen.
Eventually, he found the ruins.
Old stone, crumbled and half-swallowed by dirt and ash. Arches leaning like dying things, doorways that led nowhere.
It looked like a chapel once, small, forgotten. The kind of place players ran past without a second glance.
But he wasn't a player anymore.
He moved slower now, more careful, dragging his steps through the gray dust, until he saw it, barely visible beneath a blanket of ash and moss.
A faint spiral of light etched into the stone.
He froze for a while
His breath caught in his chest, and for the first time in hours, he felt something close to hope.
A Site of Grace.
Exactly like in the game. Same shape, same glow, same promise.
He staggered forward, dropping to his knees, heart pounding against his ribs. His fingers trembled as he brushed the dirt away. The glow responded to his touch, soft, flickering, weak.
But it was there.
He laughed. Just a short breath, more relief than joy. Maybe things were finally starting to make sense. Maybe the game hadn't completely abandoned him.
He reached for it.
The light pulsed under his palm. Warmth bloomed through his fingertips, crawling up his arm like fire through frost.
And then, silence.
The warmth faded away, the spiral dimmed.
The glow collapsed in on itself, flickering once… then vanishing altogether.
Gone.
Just like that.
He blinked. Stared and tried again.
Still nothing.
He pressed his hand to the stone. Harder. Desperate. His rune still pulsed, faintly, ember like, but it didn't connect. The Emberlight didn't respond.
He was right here. Bleeding, broken. He needed this, he needed the world to give him something.
But it didn't, and it probably wouldn't.
The realization hit him like a knife to the gut.
He was without a Flame Keeper and now the Emberlight had died down.
The words echoed in his head, not like a voice, not like a game message. Just cold truth.
He was alone. No guidance, no resurrection. No checkpoint, no one coming to save him.
The Emberlight didn't light for him because it wasn't meant to.
He was never supposed to be here, he didn't even fully know what here was.
He stumbled back from the circle, sat in the dirt, and stared at his hand. The rune still glowed, but it felt like a mockery now. A brand more than a blessing. A costant reminder of the mistake he made.
You chose this.
You clicked "Yes."
He clenched his fist.
The wind howled through the broken chapel like a warning, stirring the ash into little flurries that danced across the dead stone.
He didn't move. He couldn't, he didn't know where he was going.
He thought he'd hit rock bottom back at the Rootspire. Thought seeing that divine, golden tree twisted into a rotten corpse had been the moment everything shattered.
He was wrong.
This was it.
This.....this quiet rejection. This emptiness, this lack of anything.
No guidance, no second chances. Just the cold, gray ash settling on his shoulders.
No Emberlight for the Forsaken.
He tilted his head back, looking up through the broken roof. The sky wasn't black. Wasn't blue. Just a constant, smothered gray.
He laughed again, harsher this time.
"What now?" he whispered.
The world didn't answer.
He wanted to scream. Wanted to throw the dagger, wanted to claw at the Emberlight and make it work. But none of it would help, none of it mattered.
He was outside the system.
An intruder in a world that had rewritten its rules and it hated him for being here.
For a long while, he didn't move. He just sat in the crumbled chapel, surrounded by silence and bones, and let the weight of it all crush him.
He wanted to quit.
But there was no pause button. No logout. No menu.
Just him and this cursed, dying world.
Finally, with a sound that wasn't quite a groan and wasn't quite a sob, he pulled himself up.
His ankle still screamed, but he ignored it. His body wanted to stop, his mind wanted to curl into itself.
But he was still here, still breathing, still marked.
So he picked up the broken dagger. Tightened his grip and walked out of the ruins with no Emberlight to guide him.