Gaël now stood inside an arena.
It had the proportions of the one in ValOmbre… yet larger, impossibly vast, stretched and warped by the memory of a dream. The walls rose high into a sky streaked with shifting shadows, and a twilight glow bathed the stands in an unreal, almost sacred chiaroscuro.
The crowd shimmered, black with indistinct shapes.
Not a cry. Not a breath. Only a tension so heavy it felt as though the arena itself was holding its breath.
Everything was hazy, dreamlike... Except for two figures.
The first: a teenage girl beside him, trembling with anticipation. The second: in the arena below, a bare-chested man wielding a massive sword, colossal, unmistakable.
"Brann…" Gaël whispered, throat tight.
The name slipped from him like a pained breath, but it wasn't the Brann he had known. This one was younger, less scarred, not yet gnawed by Umbra. His eyes were hard, but still clear.
The girl at his side gripped the stone railing of the bleachers, her breath shallow and quick. Gaël could hear her heart pounding as if it were his own.
"After he wins…" she murmured. "He'll come. He'll help us fight. He'll lead the revolt… and my little brother will finally have enough to eat."
She wore clothes too big for her frame, ragged, adolescent garments, bandages wrapped her chest, hiding her femininity. She wanted to blend into the gamblers, evade the leering stares, but she couldn't conceal her raw beauty, nor the faint sweetness in her scent.
It was Maera. Younger. Hopeful.
Gaël knew it, without knowing how. He could feel what she felt, read her thoughts, like a memory sewn into his own.
He was not himself.
He was a witness, an echo suspended over a past that wasn't his.
Down in the sand, Brann felled his opponent with a clean strike. The silent crowd ignited, without words. Invisible hands demanded blood and execution.
Brann raised his arm to finish the fight, but midway through the motion, he froze, because something in the air broke. A tension snapped.
Gaël's vision fractured. The ground of the arena cracked open with sharp lines of raw light, as if an invisible blade was cutting through the very scene.
The stands collapsed into silence and the shadows scattered into mist, carried away by wind. All vanished, except them.
Three figures, suspended in the void: Maera, Brann, and Gaël.
The sand beneath their feet had become a black circle, floating in emptiness. The sky held no color, no shape, only a deaf infinity, beyond time or reason.
Then Brann… began to grow. His feet rooted into the black sand. His legs tore the horizon. His torso stretched into the sky, erasing what remained of the empty dome. His face, once familiar, began to change, smoothed, hardened, no longer a man. He was becoming something else. A mountain. A god. A Judgment.
His blade followed suit, lengthening, stretching, until it arched above the world like a second moon. The metal seemed forged from silence and inevitability. It hummed with a soundless song that Gaël felt deep in his bones: the Song of the Absolute Severance.
Gaël looked up, both mesmerized and terrified. The voice of the Severance rang through his flesh, his blood, his soul. This was no longer a memory, it was a truth demanding to be faced.
"What… what is that…" young Maera whispered beside him. But her voice caught in her throat.
Her legs gave out, and she collapsed to her knees, stricken. Her face drained of all color, her lips trembled, and her eyes locked onto the colossal blade suspended in the heavens…There was no hope left in them, only the quiet wait for the inevitable.
The giant Brann had become raised his sword... A blade of horizon, silence, and verdict.
Gaël felt the intent that guided the colossus: A Judgment, pure, final.
This sword wasn't meant to kill. It existed to cut away what did not belong.
And Maera… was its target.
She couldn't move, frozen, because the Severance had locked her in place. The universe itself seemed to hold its breath, poised on the edge of that flawless, unstoppable strike.
A divine execution. A guillotine of cold light.
The Severance was not meant for women, and Maera would not survive its verdict.
Gaël, stunned by the realization, felt his chest tighten, as if something in him mourned her coming end, and he didn't understand why.
Something from that shared memory, that flicker of hope, that young girl dreaming of a better life for her brother, that beauty hidden beneath fear, had taken root inside him.
He didn't want to watch her die like this, not like this, not erased by an ancient will, mingled with the remnants of a Brann who no longer was.
So he stepped forward, and placed himself in front of her, facing the blade, facing the Judgment. His own Severance resonated, deep, raw, rising from his very core.
He didn't raise a weapon. His intent was the weapon.
'Madness? Yes. Absolutely.'
He had no chance of stopping it. The blade stretched beyond the horizon, filled his entire vision. It devoured the sky, split the world.
Tiny, insignificant, Gaël screamed... And the strike fell.
The blade went through him, but he absorbed much of its force. It wasn't meant for him, and yet its power left him shattered, undone.
The world tilted. His vision twisted, and once again, he found himself at the edge of the abyss. He had returned.
Fenrir slipped from his grasp. The blade spun in the air, fell, and plunged into the spiraling void.Maera fell with it, without a word, the shadow of a scream frozen on her lips.
He stood there, motionless, his eyes locked on the chasm, watching without fully grasping what had just occurred. The steel and Maera vanished, swallowed by the darkness, like a final salute… like a farewell.
A sharp pain clenched his chest. Then, a flash of agony burst from his throat in a brilliant, explosive geyser of blood.
He collapsed.
Someone, a firm hand, maybe Kaien's, caught him just in time, before he tumbled fully into the void.
Then came the dark.