The light that spilled from the door was not the light of the sun or the Aethyr or any light that Kaelen had ever seen. It was older, softer, the colour of memories that had been buried so deep they had become dreams.
He walked toward it, the Echo pulsing in his pack, the marks on his chest burning with a warmth that was not pain. Behind him, he heard Theron's footsteps, his son's breathing, the steady rhythm of a heart that had learned to be brave in a world that had no mercy for the weak.
And then he was through the door, and the light was everywhere, and he was standing in a place that he had seen before.
It was the city he had burned. Aethel's Rest. But it was not burning now. It was whole, alive, its towers rising toward a sky that was blue and clear, its streets filled with people who walked and talked and laughed and lived.
And standing at the center of it all, waiting for him, was a woman he had never seen before.
She was tall, taller than any mortal, her skin the colour of old stone, her hair the colour of moonlight on water. Her eyes were the colour of the sky just before dawn, and they were looking at him with something that might have been pity or might have been hope.
"You came," she said. "We were beginning to think you never would."
Kaelen stopped, his hand going to his blade, his body tensing for a fight that he knew, somehow, would never come.
"Who are you?"
"I am what you destroyed. What you tried to burn. What the Skylords have been trying to bury for a thousand years." She stepped closer, and the light around her shifted, changed, became something that was almost solid. "I am the last of the Firstborn. The last of those who remember what the world was before the gods came. Before the chains. Before the hunger."
She reached out and touched his face, and her fingers were warm, warmer than anything he had felt in five years.
"You carry the marks of the one who broke you. Valkara. The Unyielding. The one who made you into a weapon and then threw you away when you were no longer useful."
Kaelen flinched, but he did not pull away. "I carry them because I have to. Because they're the only thing keeping me alive."
"No." Her voice was gentle, but there was something in it that was not gentle at all. "You carry them because you have not yet learned to let them go. Because you are still holding on to the rage. The grief. The hunger for vengeance that has been eating you alive for five years."
She let her hand fall, and the light around her dimmed, and for a moment, she was just a woman, standing in the ruins of a city that had been dead for a thousand years.
"The Echo can kill the Skylords," she said. "It can destroy them, tear them apart, scatter their souls to the winds. But that is not what it was made for. The Firstborn did not build weapons. They built tools. Tools for building. For healing. For making things new."
She held out her hand, and in her palm was a shard of light, pulsing with the same rhythm as the Echo in Kaelen's pack.
"The Echo can bind the Skylords. Chain them to the world in a way that they cannot escape. Make them into something that serves rather than consumes. But the price is high. Higher than you know."
Kaelen looked at the shard, at the light that pulsed in her hand, at the door that stood open behind him, waiting for him to choose.
"What price?" he asked.
"The Echo must be wielded by someone who has been broken by the gods. Someone who knows what it means to be a weapon. Someone who has the strength to choose mercy over vengeance. Love over rage. Creation over destruction."
She looked at him, and her eyes were old, older than anything he had ever known.
"Are you that man, Kaelen? Are you the one who can break the cycle? Or are you just another weapon, waiting for someone to point you at the enemy?"
Kaelen stood in the light of the city he had destroyed, facing the thing he had tried to burn, and for the first time in his life, he did not know the answer.