Chapter 5

Pyre woke in motion. Not falling exactly, because falling implied a sky, a ground, a world for gravity to claim him.

There was none of that here. No sky. No ground. Only the sensation of descent, endless and unanchored, directionless, Pyre not able to distinguish where he was heading or if he was even moving at all, if this wasn’t all just a figment of his imagination.

But then he saw others like him, and orienting his own position from theirs told him he was plummeting, their forms being stripped of color until they became monochromatic, the same happening to Pyre as he spiraled toward the unknown.

This is death.

The thought surfaced, and he buried it with anger. The fall of Farreach, the death of his friends, being abandoned by Karastella, the memory of Daedalus’s final light, the Swordsman—the echoes of his world’s destruction still rang at the edges of his consciousness.

As more gray bodies joined him, all falling toward oblivion, Pyre kept expecting to hear someone shout or sob, to cry out in agony or shock, but there was nothing of the sort. Only silence. Only ash. Only the plunge toward the unknown. And for Pyre, a fall stained by the faint afterimage of the cathedral he had seen just before everything went white, a place that should not have existed anywhere, least of all after the total annihilation of Farreach and the death of everyone he knew.

Find the Shepherd, he thought as countless moments passed, eons and seconds, Pyre fighting to maintain consciousness at the same time he questioned if he was even conscious to begin with.

Pyre glanced at another one of the falling gray people and called to them, but the words that came out of his mouth didn’t feel like words at all, nor like sound. He couldn’t hear himself, and he realized in attempting to extend his hands just how gray his entire body had become.

The others falling alongside him started to shear away, layers of armor and flesh ripped clean from their forms. Something darker came next as monsters that resembled Devourers swept toward the falling gray people, picking them out of the sky, tearing them to ribbons.

Aware that he had died, that he would either hit the ground, fall forever, or be ripped to shreds by a monster he could barely fathom, Pyre once again settled on the last thing he could recall—how the Swordsman had rushed him and run a blade through his body.

The coward, he thought, the bitterness steadying Pyre, allowing him to better control his descent. Why do you get to decide?

Heatless purple fire ignited around him, blooming through the void in slow, crawling tongues that gave off no warmth at all.

Gray bodies fell through it, some snatched apart by winged beasts, others simply unraveling as they dropped.

Pyre endured, resentment boiling deep within him as he remembered what the Swordsman had said about Karastella.

As he continued his fall, something small, heavy, and persistent appeared in his grip.

Pyre’s hand was only half there, washed thin and gray, the fractured sword little more than a shadow. But the weight of the broken blade anchored.

It held him together when everything else felt like it was slipping away, as more were devoured and his fall accelerated. Pyre spun past bolts of lightning and through crushing tides of pressure, where he got caught up in avalanches of wind that buried him, scattered him, then flung him onward.

Pyre pushed on, no matter how damning or frightening the descent became, a spark of defiance holding him together.

Pyre’s fingers closed around the hilt of the broken sword as a chorus of whispers rose up. Agony tore through him, a soul-deep burn that flared white-hot at the edges of his being, like a spike driven into something he had never known could suffer.

The sensation didn’t fade.

It sank into him, searing its way inward, his armor and clothing fusing with his body, flooding him with alien heat. A silent scream came over him, one he couldn’t release as a black sheen crawled over what remained of his broken blade, consuming its old brightness.

Pyre released the Sigil, the invisible fragment slipping from his grasp, clattering against nothingness as if hitting invisible stone.

He forced his breath to steady. His hand still burned faintly, but the agony had receded into a deep, simmering ache.

I can’t let go, Pyre barely thought as chaos erupted around him, falling gray bodies snapping apart in midair.

He imagined reaching for the fragment again. This time, it did not burn him the same way; it felt heavier, as if a thin thread of his soul had snagged onto it and could never be fully untangled.

Pyre’s brutal plummet slowed as his form solidified, hands, arms, body, and breath locking into place until he was able to hover.

A horizon appeared where no horizon should have been, a dark, violet sweep of storm-like swirls spiraling through emptiness. Below him an ocean of liminal figures rose and sank without ever touching anything solid.

Hands brushed against him from the void below, reaching toward Pyre, yet he pushed past them as he floated higher, guided by something unseen.

There? he wondered as a distant city shimmered at the edge of perception, shifting like a heat mirage, melting away every time he tried to focus on it.

Pyre did not know the word for what happened next, but he felt it deep in his soul.

It started as a whisper, a low pressure that became an insistent pull. Beneath him, the wispy forms of ghostly bodies came apart in a storm of limbs and light, shredded by a force that did not slow for their screams.

Grief split at the seams and poured through him, raw and blinding, flooding Pyre with pain, with fear, with terror made flesh.

Still he forced himself on, refusing to fall to the smothering darkness of being as the pressure ramped up, the sound ear-splitting, the tension drowning, holding him down, keeping him from moving forward until it all finally dissolved at the edges.

Memories softened, and for a heartbeat, Pyre felt himself thinning, losing shape.

Let go…

The voice was Pyre’s, but he knew not to listen to it. He knew to keep moving forward to that great city beyond, that mirage that continued to send ripples of light toward him even as the souls he had seen below were ripped to shreds, devoured by the darkness.

Pyre clenched to any memory he could, that final battle in the courtyard, Old Danar’s wheezing laugh, Daedalus’s golden tears as he realized he had lost it all. The pressure intensified. Every time he held on to a feeling, the nothingness pushed harder, trying to strip it clean from him.

Most souls would have let go; most would have dissolved and finally filtered away into the void, joining the spectral masses below.

But Pyre refused.

He did not relinquish his grief or his anger. He did not surrender his name, Velius Pyre. He did not abandon the vengeance burning in his heart. And he did not release the broken shard of a dead angel’s Sigil.

Pyre held onto all of it.

His resistance anchored him, the man certain he could sustain it when he hit the bottom; not a physical impact, but the violent snapping of identity slamming back into place.

His name remained, his pain lessened, and his rage bore on as the darkness folded around this stubborn spark and, at last, relented.

Pyre reached solid ground, where he watched color slowly creep up his arms, his body no longer gray.

A path formed beneath his feet, rough, crystalline stone emerging grain by grain. An arched doorway took shape ahead, built from swirling shadows that solidified.

“Where am I?” he asked, aware now that he had a voice, a breath, Pyre startled by what lay before him. The place was ancient, its presence pressing in on him as though he had stepped somewhere not built for people like him.

Pyre hesitated.

Then, something in his chest pulled taut, warm and unyielding, dragging him forward despite himself. A whisper reached him from beyond, his name carried on it.

Pyre took a single step toward the sound, and light spilled through the doorway.