The Divide was more than a place. It was a wound. A boundary where the Gray World bled into the bones of the old Earth, where time stuttered, and flame couldn't decide whether to warm or consume. Riley could feel it the moment their boots left the cracked steel of the train line and stepped onto that powder-white ash.
"The air here burns weird," she murmured.
Daphne adjusted her gauntlet, fingers twitching. "It's not air."
They were no longer alone. Behind them trailed the Echo-Born—a dozen bonded pairs, each bearing some mark of fire, of resilience, of ruin. Faces scarred and glowing, silent eyes watching the horizon as if it might fall apart at any second.
Ahead, the veil shimmered.
The Ashenveil.
Once a containment perimeter for the Skuldrith's largest hive zone, it had long since fractured under the weight of its own defenses. What remained was a semi-permeable field of crackling pressure, laced with echoes of the past. Everything inside it twisted: trees turned to bone, shadows wept upward, and the laws of physics bent like reeds.
Brael had warned them. "Don't trust what you see inside the Veil. Don't even trust your own thoughts."
Riley led the way.
They passed through the Veil as one unit.
The moment they crossed, the light changed. It didn't dim—it shattered. The sun broke into pieces above them, scattering like shards of obsidian across the clouds. The air hummed, a constant droning that burrowed into their skulls. Each breath carried the scent of fire, salt, and something ancient.
The Echo-Born flanked them in a loose arc. Aisha and Julian moved with the grace of predators. Rajiv and Grace whispered to each other constantly, maintaining their soul-bond by keeping their minds linked. Alina Petrova, tall and haunting, watched the sky as if waiting for it to fall.
"Daphne," Riley said quietly, "how do we find the original Chosen?"
Daphne didn't answer immediately. Her gauntlet pulsed as she drew energy from the surrounding distortion. "They're not a coordinate. They're a resonance. The fire knows. We follow the echoes."
As if on cue, the ground vibrated.
A single tone rippled through the field—low, sorrowful, harmonic. It wasn't sound. It was memory echoing off time itself.
They moved.
By the third day, exhaustion blurred the line between thought and hallucination. Riley saw children where there were none. Heard whispers that weren't real. The Veil fed on their minds slowly, lovingly.
But they kept moving. Kept searching.
Until they reached the Tower.
It stood like a spine cracked in half—the remains of a broadcast relay used by Nova Veil during the Second Incursion. The fire inside Riley reacted instantly. Her knees buckled.
She saw flashes:
—a girl screaming —a child in a pod —the scent of citrus and ozone —Velrax, whispering, not in speech, but in hunger
She vomited into the dust.
Daphne steadied her, both hands glowing.
"They're in there," Riley whispered. "I saw them."
The Echo-Born readied their weapons.
The Ash King had left sentinels.
The battle began at dusk.
Skuldrith weren't monsters in the traditional sense. They were thoughts made flesh. Traumas hardened into claws. Some came in the shape of wolves made from broken glass. Others, as children with eyes like black holes. The worst were the silence-born: creatures with no form, only weight and dread.
The Echo-Born fought like dancers made of war.
Julian sang as he swung his blade.
Grace bent light into spears.
Daphne unleashed a cascade of flame pulses, her gauntlet sync-paired to Riley's own heartbeat. And Riley—she burned.
Not forward.
Inward.
She didn't attack. She absorbed.
The fire within her grew deeper, brighter, reshaping her body from the inside out. Kaelira had said she was the fire that changed its name. Now, she felt that truth rippling under her skin.
She was not a weapon.
She was the forge.
And she remembered.
They found the vault beneath the Tower.
Sealed by old Nova Veil tech and protected by sigils written in forgotten tongues. Daphne decoded the lock in seconds. Riley pushed open the vault door.
Inside were five containment pods.
Children.
Unaged.
Unchanged.
Suspended in liquid fire.
The original Chosen.
They had never been sent to war. Never been given the serum. Kaelira had pulled them into the Gray World and then... left them. Stasis. Waiting for someone to rewrite the rules.
Riley stepped forward.
The fire inside her recognized them.
"Can you wake them?" she asked.
Daphne nodded. "But they won't be like us. They weren't linked. They weren't trained."
"Then we train them. We link them."
Behind her, Alina stepped forward. "Or we let them choose. Not every fire wants to burn."
Riley nodded. "Then we light the path and let them walk."
One by one, the pods hissed open.
One by one, new eyes blinked into a world they had never seen.
And far above, across the broken sky, Velrax stirred.
The war wasn't over.
It was evolving.