The skies over the Hollow were bleeding light when it happened. Not the soft blush of a setting sun—but a ragged, copper glow, like something inside the world had been torn loose and left to rot in open air. The clouds churned low and angry, fractured by memory storms that lashed with emotion more than rain. Everything felt heavier.
Brael had known this day was coming.
He just didn't know it would come like this.
The briefing had been short. Too short.
Nova Veil's intercepted signal had confirmed that Velrax's Vanguard was mobilizing a warp breach near the Divide's western cusp—too close to Ashenveil's memory-etched ruins. If they completed the breach, Echo Gate would no longer be a place. It would be a weapon.
Riley stood by the edge of the comms table, knuckles white against the metal.
"They'll breach in six hours. That's not enough time to reroute the whole defense line."
Brael didn't flinch. He stared at the moving threads of data, fingers tapping silently over his thigh.
"Then we give them a different target," he said.
Daphne looked up from her gauntlet. "You're suggesting we divide the Echo-Born? Again?"
"No," Brael said. "I go alone."
Riley turned sharply. "No."
"It's the only way. I'll lead a false assault on the breach signal, light up their sensors. Make it look like we're throwing everything we've got. That'll buy you time to get to Echo Gate."
"You won't come back from that," she said.
He smiled softly. "I've already been gone once. This time, I get to choose it."
He launched at dusk.
No ceremony. No goodbyes. Only a brief nod to Daphne. A single, fierce hand-grip with Riley.
Their Soul Link hadn't passed through Brael, but it didn't need to. Something else had always tied them together—something older than fire. A trust forged not in words, but in consequence.
She watched him vanish into the haze, the shape of him swallowed by ash-streaked winds.
Brael's internal monologue, as he crossed the ash-plated ridgeline, was silent for a long time. He wasn't thinking about glory, or sacrifice, or even the future.
He was thinking about the first time he failed.
A city, now erased from all timelines, once stood between the Watchtowers and the Gray Crescent. He'd led a strike team into the breach without backup. The enemy wasn't the Skuldrith then—it was fear, turned flesh. They hadn't made it out. He alone returned, memory-twisted and half-mad. It had taken years before the fire inside him had steadied enough to be useful again.
Now he understood.
That fire had never been about survival.
It had been preparing him for this.
The breach tower shimmered into view. Skuldrith scouts circled its base—formless, oily things with too many limbs and not enough solidity. They weren't yet real. But they would be, once the breach finished calculating enough pain.
He activated his gauntlet.
Not to call for help.
To sing.
A low-frequency hum spilled out over the valley—an encoded pattern known only to the old guard. A lullaby of flame. A death march.
Every Skuldrith in the valley turned toward him.
"That's right," Brael whispered. "Come see the ember you couldn't extinguish."
In the control bunker, Riley felt it first.
Her knees nearly buckled as a pulse tore through the flame tether, her bond screaming against the distance. Daphne caught her, eyes wide.
"What is it?"
"He lit the signal," Riley gasped.
And then she saw it.
In the far distance, across the ridgeline—
Fire.
Not just a flare. Not an explosion.
A column.
Brael had triggered a full ignition.
He was burning himself into a beacon.
Inside the breach tower, Brael stood at its heart, flame searing through the structure, cracking it open like a vein too long clotted.
The Skuldrith closed in.
He didn't fight them with weapons.
He knelt.
And pressed his palm to the breach gate.
Memory surged. Every failure. Every choice. Every life he hadn't saved.
And one image, held like a prayer:
Riley Cross.
The child who had become the flame.
"This is how I remember you," he whispered to the fire.
The world responded.
A second flare detonated upward, spiraling into the breach's spine.
Reality bent.
The breach collapsed inward—folding the Skuldrith into themselves, denying them the timeline they needed.
The valley swallowed the flame.
And Brael was gone.
The aftermath was not silence.
It was breath.
Daphne stood over the scanning console, tears slicking her cheeks. Riley knelt nearby, fists clenched around nothing.
She didn't cry.
She remembered.
Later, in the ash field where Brael had once stood, the Echo-Born buried a sigil stone.
They didn't know his full name.
But they etched the flame anyway.
Here fell the ember that chose to burn.
Not for glory.
But so the fire could move forward.
So the gate could open.
So one life could light the path for countless more.
And far beneath the Divide, deep in the fracture between timelines, something shifted.
A presence once thought erased stirred.