The world shuddered and twisted.
A sudden, overwhelming sense of reality unraveling engulfed Ezra. He staggered back, disoriented, his knees buckling under him as the sky splintered, each fragment reflecting flashes of distant memories.
The masked figure—the being he now knew to be more than just a watcher—remained silent, its gaze never leaving him.
The name it had spoken—Sovereign—felt like it didn't belong to him and yet felt unnervingly familiar.
Ezra forced himself to stand, his legs unsteady. His mind was in a tornado, trying to grasp at the fragments of memory that kept slipping through his fingers.
"Sovereign?"
He murmured the word aloud, but the taste of it on his tongue felt wrong.
The figure's head tilted ever so slightly.
"Do you remember now?"
Ezra's breath hitched, something deep inside him stirring, though the details still eluded him. He shook his head. "I—I don't know what you're talking about."
The figure's response was soft, almost pitying.
"You were once a king. A ruler, who held dominion over worlds that no longer exist. Time—time was never meant to bend around you."
Ezra stumbled, his body suddenly feeling too heavy, as if the weight of this revelation was physically pulling him down.
A king?
Over worlds?
This was absurd. Impossible.
But the pain in his chest—the gnawing feeling of something lost, of something deeply familiar that had been buried—was too real to dismiss.
"You are the last of your kind. The one who remembers what the others have forgotten."
Ezra's head spun.
He could barely focus on the figure's words, and yet they felt too true.
He had been someone. Something.
He was more than this. More than the twisted mess that was currently his life.
"The throne," Ezra whispered. "That's what you want. You want me to take it back."
The figure remained still, the mask reflecting the fractured light from the breaking world.
"It is not a matter of want."
A low hum vibrated through the air, the broken city around them seeming to shift with the pulse. The ground beneath Ezra's feet shifted, as though the very fabric of reality was stretching.
In the distance, the air itself seemed to fold inward. A door was beginning to form, one made of shifting shadows and impossible angles.
Ezra took a slow, measured breath, forcing his thoughts back into focus. His grip on the dagger still felt solid, though his mind was anything but.
"Why now?"
The masked figure stepped forward, its cloak sweeping like liquid shadow. "Because you are the only one left who can stop the storm."
Ezra's gaze snapped to him. "What storm?"
A faint smile tugged at the edges of the mask. "The one you caused."
The words hung in the air, heavy with a truth Ezra wasn't sure he could comprehend.
He caused it?
The world around him rippled again, and this time, he couldn't ignore it—the sense of loss, of something much larger than himself that was slipping away, piece by piece.
He felt it. A deep, aching emptiness that stretched across time and space.
He was beginning to see it, but it was like looking at a reflection in shattered glass. He could see the image, but the pieces didn't quite fit together.
And as the door in the distance continued to materialize, Ezra realized one thing:
He had no choice.
The past was calling him, and whether he was ready or not, he had to face whatever truth lay beyond that door.
The whispers in his mind, the unnerving sense of déjà vu, the strange feeling that he had been here before—it was all leading him back to the one thing he couldn't escape.
"You are not just a survivor, Sovereign. You are the last of the beginning."
Ezra's hands clenched into fists. "I'm not who you think I am."
The masked figure stepped closer, its presence looming.
"The throne does not care who you think you are. It is who you truly are that matters."
And then, in that moment, the air itself shifted. The door loomed before him, and behind it—Ezra felt the weight of an entire history that he had long forgotten, now crashing down on him.
Without another word, he stepped forward.