Chapter 13 – The Dawn and the Fire (Part 3)
The storm was gone.
But its echo lived on.
When the Rift collapsed, it left behind silence – not the peaceful kind, but the kind that pressed against your chest and made breathing feel like guilt. The once-glorious sky of Amaranth was grey now, dimmed by the remnants of Riftlight bleeding faintly through broken clouds. What had once been the towering heart of St. Kareth's Academy was now a crater of scorched glass and twisted spires, half-swallowed by its own reflection.
Smoke drifted lazily across the valley. The wind carried the faint scent of ash and iron. Amid the ruins, Taro stumbled through the rubble, his clothes torn, his expression raw with disbelief. His hands were shaking – he didn't know if it was from exhaustion or because he could still feel the tremor of the explosion ringing through his bones.
"Reika?" he called out, his voice cracking. "Kairo?!"
No answer. Only the soft crackle of cooling stone and the faraway moan of a Riftstorm dying in the distance.
He found Reika first – half-buried under debris, her arm bloodied but still moving. Taro dropped to his knees, frantically clearing the rubble. She coughed once, opening her eyes to the dim light. "You're…still loud," she murmured, managing a faint smirk.
Taro let out a shaky laugh, tears running down his face. "Yeah, well…someone has to keep the mood up." He tried to sound casual, but his voice broke. "Where's Kairo?"
Reika didn't answer. She just looked toward the centre of the crater – where the Ruft had been.
There, at the very heart of the destruction, golden flames still burned, gentle now, like the last heartbeat of a dying star. In their glow, faint figures shimmered – images of people long gone. The students. The fallen Custodians. Even fragments of St. Kareth's old halls flickered in and out of being, like memories refusing to fade.
And in the centre of it all, Kairo stood, or something that resembled him – his body a silhouette of light and smoke, his eyes calm for the first time. The Tyrant King was gone. What remained was only the man – the boy who had been forced to burn the world to save it.
He turned his gaze toward them.
Taro instantly ran to him and pulled him into a tight embrace whilst crying his eyes out. "You had us worried you idiot."