Elsewhere beneath a moon that had not moved in six hundred years a temple drifted atop a sea of starlight. It was tethered by nothing. Supported by no sky. It simply was, suspended between moments and dimensions, unreachable by anything that walked, breathed, or bled.
Here, in a sanctum made of duskstone and mirrors, the Priestess knelt in silence.
Her name was Ysera. But none called her that anymore. She had not spoken aloud since the First Skyfall. Since she watched her twin sister disintegrate in her arms when the heavens broke and the Skyborne turned on their own.
Now, she was only the Oracle of the Last Pulse.
The room trembled with quiet. Every surface shimmered with possibilities future paths that flickered, faded, or flared into brilliance. But lately, only one path remained illuminated.
The path of Azrael's return.
Ysera stood. Her robes whispered like mist across cold marble. She stepped toward the central pool a still, silver lake that mirrored no sky and waved her fingers above its surface.
Ripples bloomed and a face appeared. Not Azrael's. Not yet. But the boy he now inhabited. Kai.
He had awakened the wings.
He had survived the Reapers.
The merge was ahead of pace.
Behind Ysera, statues lined the hall twelve of them, cloaked and hooded, each representing one of the Skyborne Twelve. Most had been shattered long ago. But one Azrael's remained intact, albeit cracked.
Ysera pressed a hand to its chest.
"He returns in blood," she whispered for the first time in centuries. "He returns in grief."
The pool surged. A new ripple, not of her making.
A shadow passed over the water.
Ysera froze.
A voice rose, not hers, not the gods'. It came from the Void Between Skies, a place no Oracle dared touch.
"He remembers the wrong truth. The waking is ahead of the sealing. The vessel is incomplete. We are watching."
The pool boiled black. Ysera recoiled. "No. Not yet."
"Soon."
The reflection shifted again this time to a girl. Half-mortal,half-skyspawn and living in the ruins of Aetherhold.
She was drawing symbols in the ash. Symbols no mortal should know.
Ysera's breath caught. She recognized them.
The runes of the Harbinger.
"Who taught her?" she whispered. "Who dares teach the forbidden tongue?"
Another voice slithered into the sanctum. Low. Familiar.
"You did."
Ysera turned slowly.
And standing in the doorway was a man without shadow.
He wore no armor. No shoes. His eyes were white voids.
"You were supposed to be gone," she breathed.
"I was. And then your prophecy started unraveling. Azrael wasn't supposed to awaken. You sealed him. You buried his line."
"The vessel was never meant to survive."
The man stepped into the light. "And yet he lives."
"Who are you now?"
He smiled. "A memory that refused to die. A truth you buried. I was the Thirteenth."
Ysera's knees buckled. "There was never a Thirteenth."
"Exactly."
He vanished.
The pool turned to ice.
Ysera stared down at the mirrored surface, watching the world fracture into a thousand maybes.
She saw Kai in one shard crying over Kael's body.
In another, she saw herself kneeling before a sky that bled silver rain.
In all of them, something older than gods smiled.
She looked up.
"Azrael… don't remember too much. Not yet."
She staggered away from the scrying pool, her breath catching in her throat. Behind her, the duskstone walls had begun to glow with faint glyphs, each a name—Skyborne, mortal, exiled, or erased. Ysera touched one that pulsed red-hot: Theron. Her twin sister. Burned from memory, yet never from pain.
Footsteps echoed down the distant corridor barefoot, soft, but deliberate. Ysera turned and summoned a blade from mist and moonlight. A crescent dagger, humming with sealed names.
But it was not the Thirteenth.
It was her apprentice. A girl draped in black feathers and violet light. "Mistress," she said, bowing low, "the Hourglass of Breath has cracked. Time is bleeding."
Ysera's lips pressed into a thin line. "Then the Spiral is no longer contained."
The apprentice hesitated. "Do we summon the Echo Tribunal?"
"No," Ysera said. "They would fracture more than they mend."
"Then what shall we do?"
Ysera closed her eyes. The visions flooded in a thousand Kai's screaming, burning, breaking, becoming. The seals could no longer hold back the tide.
"We must send a Watcher," she said. "Someone who can walk where mortals and Skyborne both fear to tread. Someone forgotten."
The apprentice frowned. "You mean…"
"Yes."
"The Revenant."
The pool boiled again, and this time the sky itself cracked above the temple. Thunder that echoed not in sound, but in memory. Somewhere, far below the drifting temple, a bell rang deep and jagged. A death knell. A birth signal.
Ysera raised her hands to the sky and split her palms open with her dagger.
Blood fell in strands of gold and shadow, hitting the pool with a hiss. "Awaken, silent one. They must not find the library beneath the dying moon."
Far away, deep in the ruins of a forgotten city, a tomb opened.
And something crawled out!