There was no sky in the Void.
No earth beneath their feet.
No air, no wind, no direction.
Only memory. And memory frayed.
Orin stumbled as soon as they crossed. The Skybrand flickered violently in his grip, its light no longer bright, but uncertain. Mira fell to her knees, clutching her head. Kaelen cried out—a choked sound of someone trying to hold onto a thought that had already slipped away.
Eryssa alone stood firm, though her eyes shimmered with effort. "Hold fast," she commanded. "The Void feeds first on your identity. Speak your name. Anchor yourself."
"I…" Orin hesitated. The silence was absolute—but inside it, something listened. Something vast.
"I am Orin," he said. His voice was a whisper, but it echoed strangely in the emptiness. "I carry the Skybrand. I remember the stars. I remember fire."
Mira rose beside him. Her voice cracked. "Mira. Bladeborn of Alvenor. I remember music. I remember war. I remember him."
Kaelen nodded, though blood streamed from one eye. "Kaelen. Of the Gale-Wardens. I remember the sky before it burned."
The Void rippled.
And the Outliers came.
Not just shadows—storms. A mass of memoryless forms that screamed in silence, pulling at their minds with claws of thought and forgetting. They fell upon the four like a tidal wave, but this was why Eryssa had come.
She moved with the grace of one who had lived here too long.
"Stay close," she barked, her blade of Memory drawing arcs of light that left trails in the Void. "Don't give them what they want!"
Mira stood beside her, her runeblade casting blue flame into the black. Kaelen called the winds—but here, wind was thought, and the currents obeyed his will, not physics.
Orin raised the Skybrand—and for a moment, the Flame of Origin burned bright. It howled against the unmaking force, its light forming a dome around them.
"They're retreating," Kaelen said—but his voice was uncertain.
"No," Eryssa said quietly. "They're surrounding us."
From above—if there was an above—came a shape larger than the others. A titan of Void. Its form was impossible geometry, limbs folding and unfolding in patterns that defied understanding.
Orin felt his name tremble inside him, as though it too wished to run. "What is that?"
Eryssa's voice was grim. "That… is the Forgotten Sovereign. The first Outlier. The one this universe abandoned before it was born."
"And it remembers us?" Mira asked.
"No," Eryssa said, raising her blade. "It remembers nothing. That's the danger."
The Sovereign moved.
The Void shook.
And the battle for the core of the Rift began.