They left the glass field without speaking. Not from fear or uncertainty, but because silence was the only language wide enough to hold what they had just witnessed. The bearer the Core had rejected. Not killed. Not erased. Remembered. And buried beneath memory.
Kaela didn't press. She knew when Reven carried too much to say aloud. Lirien watched the sky, wings tensed, as if expecting it to fracture again. Kaelex walked a half step behind, not because she deferred—but because for the first time, she wasn't sure she should lead.
Reven walked ahead, slower than usual, the Flamecore quiet in his hand. It no longer felt like a weapon. It felt like a wound. They made camp near the ridge. Low ground, sheltered by stone—tucked beneath the shadow of a ruin that had once been part of a transit tower, long since collapsed into itself. Vines had overgrown the wreckage, but nothing bloomed. The soil was too tired.
Kaela set the perimeter with motion lines and sat at the edge of the firelight. Lirien perched above, eyes on the dark. Reven sat across from the fire, hunched forward, elbows on his knees. Kaelex brought him a thermal flask. He took it, but didn't drink.
"I've seen deaths," he said.
Kaelex waited.
"I've seen people turned into weapons. Programs stitched into children. Whole lives rewritten to fit whatever story the system needed told."
He looked at the Flamecore, the way it pulsed faintly against his palm.
"But what I saw today wasn't a mistake. It was design."
She sat beside him, quiet.
"They made the Cores to bind us. Not to carry us forward—but to keep us from falling apart. And when one of us refused to fit… they buried him like a broken gear."
Kaelex nodded. "That's why I asked if you wanted the truth."
"I didn't understand what it would cost."
"You do now."
He turned to her.
"Do you regret it?"
Kaelex didn't answer immediately.
Then: "Sometimes I think I was designed to."
The fire cracked. Kaela stirred from across the ring. "So what's the next step?"
Reven looked into the flames.
"Two Cores left," he said. "Each one deeper than the last. Each one holding more of what the system didn't want to share."
Kaela nodded. "And Hollowlight?"
"It's watching," he said. "Not interfering. Not yet."
Lirien dropped from her perch. "Then maybe the next Core forces it to choose."
Reven glanced toward the horizon, where the night had thinned to a line of pale blue.
"They're not pieces anymore," he said.
Kaela frowned. "What do you mean?"
"The Cores. They're not fragments. Not relics. They're voices. Not all agree. Not all want the same future."
Kaelex stood. "And the last one?"
Reven exhaled.
"The last one doesn't want a future at all."
Sleep was difficult.
Reven drifted in and out—half dreaming, half remembering things that hadn't happened to him. Versions. Lives. One where he had never left Emberfall. One where Kaela had died during the siege at Rivenhold. One where he had destroyed the first Core before ever activating it. They weren't nightmares. They were warnings.
He awoke just before sunrise. Kaelex stood alone on the ridge, her silhouette sharp against the bleeding sky.
"You've changed," she said, not turning.
"So have you," he replied.
"No," she said. "I've just remembered more."
He stepped beside her.
Below them, the landscape stretched—broken, veined with riverbeds long dry and cities too far gone to rebuild. In the distance, where the Rift bent the light, he saw the shadow of a structure. Angular, black inverted and breathing.
"The next Core," he said.
Kaelex's voice was colder now.
"That's not a Core," she said. "That's the cage we built to keep it quiet."
He turned to her.
"Who's we?"
She met his gaze.
"The ones who survived long enough to lie about it."