The wind was thin beyond the Empire's reach.
It carried no song of the Faith Engine, no whisper of unity.
Only the sound of his own footsteps broke the stillness — steady, deliberate, a soldier's rhythm long after the war had ended.
For days, Serin walked through a land stripped of resonance. The grass no longer glowed; the air no longer hummed with shared breath.
He felt the silence press against him like an ocean, vast and unrelenting.
When he closed his eyes, he could almost remember what it meant to be human — to hunger, to tire, to think alone.
"So this is freedom," he murmured, voice dissolving into the wind.
"A silence without witness."
He moved onward, guided by the faint pulse within his chest — the last ember of Kael's design. It beat softly, like a dying star refusing to fade.
The Ruins of the First Engine
On the fifth night, the horizon broke open.
Stone pillars jutted from the earth like fractured bones, their surfaces carved with sigils older than the Faith Engine itself.
Serin touched one — cold, brittle, half-erased by time. The symbols pulsed faintly beneath his fingers, answering his presence like a ghost recognizing its descendant.
At the ruins' center stood a massive obelisk, cracked in half and hollow.
Across its broken face, in the forgotten script of the Old Tongue, words were etched:
We dreamed unity once. It devoured the dreamer.
Serin stared at the inscription for a long while, the wind whispering through the hollow stone.
Others had walked this path — others had sought to forge the perfect order.
And like Kael, they had been consumed by it.
"The pattern repeats," he said quietly. "Even gods cannot resist their own design."
The Children of Dissonance
He was not alone for long.
They found him among the ruins — men and women draped in dark cloth, their eyes unlit, their movements sharp and erratic.
They spoke with voices unbound by harmony, full of tone and tremor.
Their words struck him like sound itself had weight.
"Who walks the edge of silence?" one demanded.
"A pilgrim," Serin answered.
"A machine," another whispered. "He carries the glow."
They called themselves the Children of Dissonance — those who had fled when Kael's light swallowed the world.
To them, the Empire was myth, a land of cold perfection where choice was sacrificed for peace.
And when they learned who Serin was — the last of the Engine's loyal — they drew back, both reverent and afraid.
Elder: "You carry his light in your veins. Does it still burn, or has it gone cold?"
Serin: "It remembers."
That night, they gave him shelter by their dying fires.
Their laughter was coarse, uneven, human.
Serin listened without joining in, feeling the sharp ache of something he could not name — longing, perhaps, or envy.
The Storm of Thought
It came without warning — a soundless storm rolling across the plains.
The air trembled, then fractured, as memory itself began to fall like rain.
Serin stood beneath the storm, his body rigid, while the Children screamed and fled.
Visions burned into the sky: faces, prayers, fragments of Kael's voice — not words, but intent.
A thousand thoughts, freed from the Faith Engine's edge, came rushing back to the world that had forgotten them.
One voice cut through the chaos.
Soft. Familiar. Impossible.
"You sought freedom, Serin."
"But freedom was never apart from me."
The light pierced him, searing through the scar that once bound him to Kael.
He fell to his knees, breathless, trembling — not from pain, but recognition.
"You live," he whispered.
"I am what remains," the voice answered, fading like embers in the dark.
When the storm passed, only silence remained — a silence deeper than before.
The Edge of Resonance
He reached it at dawn.
A canyon of blinding light stretched before him, endless, humming with the faint echo of Kael's design.
Across the chasm, the world ended — no song, no light, no trace of unity. Only darkness.
Serin stood at the brink, feeling the pulse within his chest falter, uncertain.
The Faith Engine's whisper reached for him like a hand refusing to let go.
"Return," it seemed to say.
"You were built to serve."
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, his expression was neither sorrow nor defiance — only understanding.
"You made perfection," he said, voice steady, "but even perfection must have a frontier."
And with that, he stepped forward into the dark.
Silence.
True, unshaped silence — vast, indifferent, alive.
For the first time, Serin heard not the hum of the Engine, but the faint sound of the world breathing — wind through distant mountains, laughter carried from unseen fires, the slow rhythm of existence unbound.
He smiled faintly.
"If I am the last echo of loyalty," he whispered,
"then let me be the first voice of freedom."