The walls screamed.
Not with sound, but with thought etched agony laced into every stone. The chamber's starlit pit churned as the Eclipseborn descended, its tendrils writhing like smoke given form. It had no face. No flesh. Only shape and malice, built from everything the world refused to remember.
Kael stood frozen.
He could feel it.
Not calling to him this time but waiting. Like a master watching an unfinished creation take its first breath.
The Black Union stepped forward, cloaks brushing the cold floor. Their leader opened his arms, welcoming the shadows.
"Let us be vessels," he whispered. "Let us become part of you."
The Eclipseborn answered in silence.
Its tendrils struck.
Each member of the Union convulsed as the darkness pierced through them not killing, but transforming. Their bodies twisted, reshaped by something far beyond mortal magic. Their eyes dimmed, their screams warping into hollow chants.
They were no longer human.
They were puppets.
Flesh-bound extensions of the being's will.
Elira flared her hand, telekinetic shockwaves erupting across the chamber. Tessan moved like a storm, horn lowered, crashing into the nearest husk. Ryall vanished into the haze, striking surgically between tendrils, dodging their reach.
Kael moved too but his body felt heavier. Slower.
He tried to summon his scythe, but shadows lagged behind his will, flickering, disjointed.
"Fragment returned… but flawed…" the Eclipseborn whispered again, its voice threading through every crack in his mind.
Then came a blur of silver and silence.
A woman leapt into the fray from a newly-formed rift behind Kael, armor black and gleaming, movements surgical. Her face was hidden behind a helm marked with the insignia of the Marked not seekers of power, but exterminators of loose ends.
She didn't pause. Didn't speak.
Her blade drew an arc of red through the air, narrowly missing Kael's throat.
He fell back, instinct twisting his body, shadows barely reacting in time to shield his chest. Sparks erupted as steel scraped ethereal darkness.
"Who—?" Elira began.
"She's not one of them!" Ryall barked, appearing behind her. "She's Marked!"
Kael gritted his teeth, parrying another blow. "They sent her for me."
The assassin didn't deny it.
Every strike was meant to end him. Her weapon a long dagger tipped with siphoning runes cut deeper than skin. It drank from him. His regeneration faltered. His limbs ached.
He wasn't ready.
Not yet.
Tessan roared and hurled a chunk of stone, trying to intercept her, but she slid past, spinning in mid-air, dagger slicing toward Kael's heart
A tendril struck her mid-lunge.
It wasn't Kael who stopped her.
It was the Eclipseborn.
One black strand of ancient darkness speared her through the chest, lifting her off the ground.
She thrashed. For the first time, emotion flared behind her mask rage, confusion, defiance.
> "Unneeded," the Eclipseborn murmured.
The tendril pulsed.
And she disintegrated.
Not into dust. Not into blood.
Into absence.
As though she had never existed.
Kael dropped to one knee, breathing hard. The runes on his arms pulsed faintly, reacting not to his will but to the presence watching him.
The corrupted Black Union surged again, faster now, their limbs unnatural, voices echoing in broken languages.
"We have to end this now," Elira hissed.
Kael stood.
His shadow flared not in obedience, but in instinct. Raw, untrained, desperate instinct.
The Eclipseborn observed him silently.
Then—
> "Begin."
The final battle of the Verge had begun.