The explosion of Aethelgard should have been the end. When the gravity-plates hit the earth, the sheer release of compressed mana created a "White-Out" zone—a three-mile radius where physics ceased to function.
Kael lay at the center of the crater. His lungs were full of silver dust, and his ribs felt like shattered glass. Varg was no longer an armor or a cloak; it was a thin, translucent film barely clinging to Kael's skin, pulsing a weak, dying grey.
"Wake up, Little King," the Viking soul coughed. "The ground is too cold for a nap."
Kael forced his eyes open. He expected to see the wreckage of the palace. He expected to see Harald's broken body.
Instead, he saw The Rift.
Where Harald had died, the space hadn't closed. Because Harald had been "stitched" to this world by the Norns, his death didn't just leave a corpse—it left a hole. A jagged, purple tear in reality that was sucking the ambient mana of the fallen city into a vacuum.
And standing on the other side of that tear wasn't a Viking.
Kael saw a glimpse of a world made of clockwork and obsidian. Thousands of figures, far more powerful than the Fate-Binders, stood in rank and file. At their head was a silhouette draped in starlight, holding a staff that looked like a spine.
"The anchor is broken," a voice boomed through the rift, vibrating in Kael's very marrow. "The Scout-King has failed. Prepare the Harvester Legions. This world is ripe for the culling."
Kael realized the horrifying truth. Harald wasn't the "Hidden King" of the world. He was just a Vanguard. He had been sent to stabilize the world so that something much larger—something from the Great Void—could move in and consume it.
"Varg..." Kael rasped, his fingers digging into the dirt. "We aren't... done."
The Shifter let out a faint, metallic hiss. It began to crawl toward the purple rift, not to close it, but to taste it.