Maera was falling, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, but always deeper, drawn into the bowels of the rift. Brann's sword, far heavier than she was, had plummeted ahead of her. It sliced through the surrounding Umbra with terrifying ease, as if the darkness itself recoiled from what remained of the Fallen One's will.
Her descent was anything but linear: at times rapid, at times suspended, and even reversed for a heartbeat, as though the laws of gravity delighted in confusing her. She wasn't just falling. She was being pulled, twisted, scattered by a nameless force.
Darkness engulfed everything. Yet she knew it didn't touch her. Her body radiated a strange repulsion, not a halo of light, but a void, a space where Umbra refused to cling. It was like wading through a pool of mud that couldn't stain her. Corruption could no longer reach her. She saw nothing, but felt everything: the fear meant to gnaw at her, the dread of the abyss, the siren call of corruption… all of it slid off her like rain on glass.
When her feet finally touched solid ground, it was like stepping onto the warm hide of a slumbering beast. The surface was spongy, vaguely organic, repulsive. She swallowed back the urge to vomit.
Before her, embedded in that strange terrain like the final act of defiance, stood Brann's sword, Fenrir. It still vibrated, releasing a pulse that made the air around it shiver. The ground beneath it was slowly being consumed, not destroyed, but erased. Dissolved. As if the blade refused to acknowledge the existence of this place.
Around the sword, a tear had begun to open. A rift within the rift. A devouring void, not one that fed, but one that pulled. And stranger still: the Umbra, ever-present until now, was retreating. It was falling back, leaving her a path.
At the end of that corridor of receding darkness floated a pearl. It emitted no light, no warmth. It pulled. A gravitational pearl, so dense it weighed on perception itself. Maera sensed it before she saw it, it was dense. Terribly dense. It did not shine. It drew everything in.
She approached with caution, senses sharp. Each step felt heavier, as if the world resisted her. But the Umbra merely receded.
When Maera reached out, the pearl came to her, not in a surge of power, but in an inevitable slide. The contact was soft… and total. A dull warmth spread up her arm, not a burn, not a light. An anchoring, a resonance.
And then, she understood.
She had stepped off the known paths.
She would walk neither the path of the Severance, nor of the Lumen, nor of the Umbra.
_ _ _
[The Path of Coalescence]
Resonant Node : (Apprentice) – "She who feels the bonds"
"Attraction is a caress, a breath, an ancient vow between all things."
Meditation on Inner Anchoring : "Listen. The world murmurs. It calls to be joined.."
[Legacy of Lura the Inclined]
"Her hand trembled, but she refused to break the link."
The First Steps of Coalescence :"Lura was the first to sense that the world was not made of separate objects, but of forgotten connections. When she placed a stone upon the ground, she felt a resonance. When she reached for a tree, it shivered in response."
"Her legend teaches all apprentices that to feel attraction, one must first anchor oneself."
_ _ _
The Path of Coalescence had just opened.
A path that does not cut.
A path that does not cleanse.
A path that draws together, that bends and binds, and Maera would be its first heir.
She, who had spent her entire life chasing the way of the Severance, the path carved by men and steel, now felt something she had never known before: peace.
She closed her eyes, and deep within that dark abyss, for the very first time, she tugged on the faint thread that tied her to the surface. And something… tied itself to her in return.
_ _ _
Gaël staggered, suddenly swaying as if the ground had just shifted beneath his feet. Beside him, Kaëlan caught him on instinct.
"You okay, man? Everything alright?"
But Gaël didn't answer. He didn't hear his friend's voice, nor the orders barked by the Watcher captain organizing the cleanup of the charnel pit, nor even Kaien's honeyed compliments aimed at Cassandre. The world had pulled away. The path leading to the academy's gate had vanished, like a curtain slowly being drawn back, leaving behind only the hush of a single heartbeat.
Because something had just passed through him. Thin as a strand of silver, stretched invisibly through the air, it pierced his chest, not with pain, not with impact, but with absolute precision. It wasn't an attack.It was... a call. No, a tether.
Something, no, someone, had just bound itself to him, gently, irrevocably.
"Maera..." he breathed, throat tightening.
No answer. Just the echo of her name, swallowed by the wind, but he knew, he felt it, and what he felt shook him to the core.
His gaze lifted toward the sky, but it didn't come from above. It came from below, far below, from the depths he had only just escaped. From the black womb of the rift. From the yawning chasm where Brann had fallen.
A breath stirred at his nape, soft, cold, like an invisible hand resting gently on his neck.
Maera was alive, but not as before.
Something within her had shifted. She had clung to life like a drowning soul to a drifting branch, but what she had found down there, in the depths, had recognized her.
She hadn't just bonded to a force, or to a path. She had bonded to him. Through the link they had shared when they faced the Severance together, a thread had been drawn between them, silent, unseen, woven from gratitude, resonance… and a strange certainty.
And through coalescence, that thread had grown stronger. It was no longer memory, but a living, pulsing presence, a tether that bound them beyond words, beyond distance.
For she knew Gaël. Knew him as the one who had helped her find her way. The only soul who had stood before her, for her, to save her, without promise, without vows, without witnesses.
He dropped to his knees, overwhelmed by the strange, gentle pressure blooming in his chest. A heart beating within him... but not only his own. Not alone.
He could feel her, not as one senses a soul fading, but as one senses a star... rising.
END OF VOLUME ONE – NASCENT BLADE