I. The Silent Divide
Dawn painted the frostbloom field in hues of violet and gold, but the Legion's victory felt hollow. The Echo of Lyra had vanished into the Veil's corruption, leaving Kael with more questions than answers. The blooms, once vibrant, dimmed in her absence.
Kael stood at the edge of the camp, gripping his symbiont-marked arm. The battle had drained him—physically, mentally—but the worst wound was the whisper of his sister's voice, warped and distant.
Veyra approached, her holoreel flickering with projections of the star map uncovered in the ruins. "The Echo Nexus," she said, adjusting the feed. "If Lyra's Echo knew about it, then the Hollow Ones do too. We need to move."
Jara scoffed from where she sat cleaning her rifle. "You sure that's not another trap? We don't even know what the Nexus is."
"We don't have a choice," Kael said, his voice quieter than he intended.
Eris, the young wanderer with the bioluminescent scars, sat nearby, tracing patterns in the frostbloom spores. "The Hollow Ones believe the Nexus is sacred," she murmured. "They think it's where the Veil's true heart lies."
Jara narrowed her eyes. "And what do you believe, kid?"
Eris hesitated. "I believe… it's where the Forgotten Ones wait."
Silence fell.
---
II. Through the Shattered Expanse
The journey to the Echo Nexus took them beyond the frostbloom fields and into a new nightmare. The Shattered Expanse—a labyrinth of fractured sky and floating ruins, where the laws of physics twisted under the Veil's lingering influence.
Kael's symbiont pulsed erratically, struggling to anchor him in the distorted gravity. Tarek used his reforged prosthetic to tether the group together with Voidforged cable, each step a gamble in stability.
"Stay in formation," Veyra warned, her holoreel mapping the terrain. "One wrong move and you might not land where you expect."
The sky above wasn't sky at all—it was a void of shifting reflections, showing glimpses of other places. Kael saw flickers of Lyra, trapped in endless loops of memory. He gritted his teeth and pressed forward.
Then the first anomaly struck. A ripple in the air, then two Jara's appeared—one slightly delayed, as if her past self had fractured forward in time.
"What the—?" Jara recoiled as her duplicate flickered, distorted, then snapped back into nothingness.
Veyra cursed. "Temporal echoes. The Veil's collapse is rewriting time itself."
Kael's symbiont burned as another ripple passed through him. For a brief moment, he saw an alternate version of himself—eyes blackened, symbiont fully consumed by the Veil. The vision whispered:
"You cannot stop what's coming."
Then it was gone.
---
III. The Hollow Ambush
They reached the Nexus's perimeter by dusk—a valley where the ruins bent inwards, as if reality itself was collapsing into a singularity.
But they weren't alone.
From the shadows of the broken structures, the Hollow Ones emerged. Not the robed fanatics of before—these were warriors, their bodies reinforced with Voidforged exoskeletons, their eyes hollowed by the Veil's corruption.
Leading them was a figure draped in tattered cosmic silk, their skeletal hands laced with black fire. The Harbinger of the Hollow, second only to the High Priest.
"You carry the seed of the false light," the Harbinger rasped, his gaze fixed on Kael. "The Veil does not wish for you to exist."
Kael barely had time to react before the ambush began.
Jara fired first, a plasma round searing through the air. The Harbinger deflected it with a flick of his hand, the round phasing out of existence.
"They're using Veil-warping tech!" Veyra shouted, dodging a blast of dark energy. "We need to disrupt their frequency!"
Kael lunged forward, his symbiont burning with raw energy. He slammed his palm against the ground, channeling the frostbloom spores beneath them.
A pulse of light erupted, disorienting the Hollow Ones for a brief second—long enough for Tarek to charge in, his obsidian prosthetic shattering one of their exoskeletons with sheer force.
The Harbinger's laughter echoed. "You think you fight the Hollow? You are already part of it."
Then Kael's vision fractured.
---
IV. Visions of the Nexus
He stood in a world outside time. The Echo Nexus.
The sky was a sea of black stars, stitched together by veins of silver light. At its heart was a structure—a vast, spiraling construct of impossible geometry, pulsing like a dying heart.
And Lyra stood at its center.
She turned, her form flickering between human and cosmic shadow. "Kael," she whispered, as if she had been waiting for him.
Kael stepped forward, but something held him back. A presence, unseen but felt. The Forgotten Ones. Watching. Waiting.
Then the vision shattered, and he was back in the battle.
The Harbinger loomed over him, one skeletal hand outstretched. "You see now," he murmured. "You are nothing but echoes of something greater."
Kael gritted his teeth. "Then let's see how an echo fights."
He unleashed the symbiont's power.
---
V. The Fractured Light
Kael's energy surged, intertwining with the frostbloom spores in the air. He directed them like a living weapon—tendrils of luminescent energy lashing out, piercing through the Hollow Ones.
Jara and Tarek moved in tandem, cutting through the weakened enemies as Veyra activated a disruptor pulse, shorting out their Veil-tech armor.
The Harbinger snarled, shadows coiling around him. "You cannot fight the inevitable!"
Kael met his attack head-on, their energies colliding in a violent storm of light and shadow. For a moment, Kael saw through the Harbinger—his past, his transformation, the moment the Veil consumed his soul.
He had been human once.
That hesitation nearly cost him. The Harbinger struck, his fingers curling around Kael's throat, darkness seeping into his veins—
A gunshot rang out.
Jara's plasma round tore through the Harbinger's head, his body disintegrating into void-stained dust.
"No speeches," she muttered, lowering her rifle.
The battle was over. But the war was far from won.
---
VI. The Path to the Heart
As the dust settled, Eris knelt beside the fallen Hollow Ones, tracing the marks on their flesh. "They never had a choice," she whispered.
Kael turned toward the valley ahead. The Nexus pulsed in the distance, waiting.
"No more delays," he said. "We reach the heart of the Veil."
Veyra adjusted her holoreel, scanning the unstable terrain ahead. "If we go in, there's no guarantee we'll come back."
Tarek smirked. "Since when has that stopped us?"
Kael's symbiont pulsed, resonating with the unseen force ahead. He took a breath and stepped forward.
Behind him, the frostblooms shimmered—one final flicker of light before the darkness swallowed them whole.