When they finally emerged from the catacombs, the storm had already begun to gather.
The sky above the Black Spire was a jagged bruise of violet and ash, clouds swirling like a living thing. The air reeked of wet stone and old lightning, sharp enough to sting the lungs. The rogue cultivators moved in uneasy silence, their torches sputtering against the rising wind.
No one dared walk too close to Ezra Thorn.
He carried no torch. He didn't need one. The faint blue light pulsed under his skin like a heartbeat, illuminating the mist around him. His eyes, once the calm gray of overcast skies, now shimmered faintly with that same electric hue.
Each step left the scent of ozone behind.
Ravel trailed near the rear, clutching his cracked sword. The man's arrogance had long since drained from his face, replaced by something like disbelief. "He shouldn't be alive," he muttered. "No one absorbs essence raw and walks away whole."
Serah didn't respond. Her copper eyes never left Ezra's back.
The climb back through the Spire's tunnels took hours. The passageways twisted like veins through ancient stone, their walls faintly throbbing with residual energy from the catacombs below. Every once in a while, the torches would flicker—responding to some unseen rhythm in the mountain, as though the place itself had begun to breathe again.
When they reached the upper camp, night had fallen.
The mist clung thick around the tents and makeshift watchtowers, muffling the distant rumble of thunder. Dozens of eyes turned as the group appeared through the fog. The campfires dimmed. Even the air felt heavier, denser.
"By the Saints…" someone whispered. "They said no one ever comes back from the lower catacombs."
Serah ignored the murmurs. "Clear the path!" she ordered. "Wounded first!"
Her voice snapped them to motion. The surviving scouts moved quickly, tending to the injured. But most couldn't help glancing back—drawn to the figure standing alone near the cliff's edge.
Ezra.
He said nothing. The wind whipped his hood back, revealing the faint glow tracing his veins like molten silver. His expression was unreadable—neither weary nor triumphant. He looked, Serah thought, as if the storm itself had borrowed his shape for a time and was deciding whether to let him go.
She approached slowly, stopping a few paces away. "You need to rest."
He didn't answer at first. His gaze was fixed on the dark horizon, where the lightning crawled like veins through the clouds. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet—measured, but distant.
"The man in the mask. He wasn't alive."
Serah frowned. "A remnant spirit?"
"No. Something older. Something… waiting."
She crossed her arms. "You think it marked you."
Ezra gave a slight nod. "Or maybe I marked it."
Serah studied him. There was no arrogance in his tone—just an unsettling certainty. The same calm that had unnerved even the most hardened of her followers. She'd seen geniuses before, prodigies with too much pride and too little caution. But Ezra was different. He treated power like a dangerous tool, not a gift.
It was what made him frightening.
"You absorbed those wraiths," she said finally. "Their essence should've torn you apart from the inside."
"It tried," he replied simply. "But it didn't know what to become."
That answer didn't make sense. And yet, looking at him now, Serah had the distinct sense that logic no longer fully applied.
Ezra turned slightly, his gaze falling on her. "The others. How many did we lose?"
"Three," she said softly. "Two scouts and Varric."
He nodded once, as if committing it to memory. "Then we bury them at dawn."
Serah blinked. "You'd do that yourself?"
"They followed me down there," Ezra said. "Whether they meant to or not."
He walked past her then, heading toward the center of camp. The cultivators stepped aside wordlessly as he passed. Even the flames seemed to bend subtly, drawn toward his qi. The tension that followed him was palpable—half awe, half dread.
Ravel spat into the dirt once he was gone. "He's not human anymore."
Serah's eyes lingered on the fading crackle of light where Ezra had stood. "No," she murmured. "But he's still himself… for now."
The burial took place beneath the first light of morning.
The storm had broken sometime before dawn, leaving the air clear and sharp. The mist parted over the cliffs, revealing the valley below—green, endless, and empty. Three stones stood where the earth had been disturbed, each marked with a carved rune of passing.
Ezra stood before them, silent. The others kept their distance.
Serah watched from the ridge as he knelt, placing three small crystals at the base of each marker. They pulsed faintly—the residual qi he'd drawn from the wraiths, condensed and purified. A final offering.
When he rose, his expression was unreadable. But his voice carried softly on the wind.
"May your spirit find a sky worth ascending to."
Serah found herself exhaling, tension she hadn't realized she was holding slipping away. There was humanity in those words. Remorse. A sense of weight that most cultivators lost long before their first breakthrough.
For a moment, Ezra Thorn didn't seem like the Heaven's Defector.
He just seemed… human.
By noon, the camp's whispers had evolved into stories.
They said he had tamed the lightning within the Spire.
They said he had struck a pact with the mountain itself.
They said he was chosen by the storm and cursed by heaven.
Ezra ignored all of it.
He spent the next hours in isolation, sitting at the cliff's edge with his eyes closed. The air hummed faintly around him—qi threads drawn toward his core and then dispersed again, refined through rhythm and restraint. Every so often, sparks would flicker across his skin, burning away before they could form arcs.
His control was growing finer, sharper. But so was the danger.
Each time he reached too deep into the storm within, he felt it push back. The foreign essence fought for shape, whispering in voices that weren't his own. He heard fragments—memories of lives that had ended beneath the same cavern, dreams that had never been fulfilled.
He did not reject them.
He listened.
When he finally opened his eyes, the air was still. The mist below shimmered faintly with the afterglow of lightning.
Serah approached quietly. "You're still meditating?"
Ezra's gaze shifted toward her. "You learn more from listening to silence than shouting at the world."
"Spoken like a scholar," she said with a faint smirk.
"Or a fool."
She crouched beside him. "You plan to leave soon, don't you?"
Ezra didn't answer, but the look in his eyes said enough.
"The clans will come," he said finally. "That core below was too strong to stay hidden. When they find the Spire, they'll burn everything to claim it."
Serah exhaled, frustration flickering in her eyes. "We could go deeper. Move the camp. Hide."
"You can't hide from the sky," Ezra said softly. "And the Spire's awake now."
He rose to his feet, brushing the dust from his hands. "Whatever that masked thing was… it left a mark. Not just on me. On this place."
Serah looked up at him. "Then what do you intend to do?"
Ezra glanced toward the horizon, where thunderclouds gathered faintly once more.
"I intend to be ready."
That night, as the camp settled, Serah found herself staring at the flickering glow beneath Ezra's tent. The shadows danced along the canvas walls, shaped like arcs of lightning—silent, controlled, pulsing in rhythm with a steady heartbeat.
And somewhere deep within the Spire, the same pulse answered.
A low, distant rumble rolled through the mountain—soft but unmistakable.
The storm hadn't left.
It was waiting.
And when it came again, it would not come for the mountain.
It would come for him.