They walked for three days without night.
The sky stayed that impossible, wounded blue—
as if the world had forgotten how to bleed,
or refused to remember how.
On the fourth morning, the ground ended.
Not a cliff.
Not a chasm.
The earth simply folded upward,
quietly, neatly,
as though reality itself had been turned inside out.
And there—hanging above the world like a drowned memory—
waited Eldren's Reach, the old imperial capital.
But inverted.
Its towers grew downward from a lake of black water
that hovered in the sky like an upside-down sea.
Bridges arched into nothing.
Cathedral bells dripped upward, ringing in reverse—
dong—ngod—gno—
as though time were trying to swallow its own echo.
The city had not fallen.
It had been pulled.
And at its heart, suspended inside the inverted lake,
the original Rift pulsed like a second sun—
violet, steady, almost gentle.
As if waiting.
Veyra stopped at the fold's edge.
The little girl—
the version of herself carved from the Final Mirror—
clung to her hand,
eyes reflecting an entire upside-down world.
"That's where we burned everything," Veyra murmured.
"Where I laughed while the world screamed."
Seraphine—sixteen again, her gown torn at the hem
as if she had stepped straight out of her last mistake—
tilted her head.
"No," she said softly.
"That's where we started learning how to stop."
Kael did not speak.
He was staring past them—
at the inverted cathedral spire pointing down at him
like an accusatory blade.
A memory lived there.
His execution platform.
The axe that never fell.
The breath he never finished taking.
He stepped off the ground.
Gravity forgot him.
He walked upward along the underside of the world,
boots clanging against cold cobblestone—
clnk… clnk… CLNK—
stones that had not known weight
for centuries.
Veyra and Seraphine followed.
The little girl rode Veyra's shoulders,
laughing as the sky became the ground
and the ground became a rumor.
They entered the drowned city walking on its sky.
Streets curled overhead like frozen waves.
Houses dangled like lanterns.
Ghosts—or memories,
or something kinder—
watched from windows that opened downward.
Some waved.
Some wept.
Some simply watched,
as if trying to remember what hope looked like
when it still wore a face.
At the center—
where the Rift floated inside its sky-lake—
stood the execution platform.
Perfect.
Untouched.
Exactly as Kael remembered it.
The axe still hung in the air.
The executioner still waited mid-swing.
But the entire scene was encased in black water,
held in suspension like an insect in amber.
Kael stepped forward.
The water parted for him—
shhhfff—
recognizing the shape of the wound he had once been.
He entered the memory.
The axe fell.
This time, he caught it.
His hand closed around the blade.
It dissolved into violet light—
soft as breath,
warm as forgiveness—
and sank into the silver scar across his abdomen
like returning home.
The executioner looked at him—
truly looked—
with a face that might once have belonged to Alcris.
"Thank you," the memory whispered,
voice trembling like a candle in the wind.
"For finishing what we started."
Then it broke apart,
falling into drifting black petals
that floated upward
and ignited into pale stars.
The platform dissolved.
The lake followed.
The sky melted back into itself—
And suddenly they were standing
in the heart of the first Rift,
on solid ground that had never existed
until this moment.
Eldren's Reach settled around them,
right-side up again,
quiet,
waiting.
Veyra set the little girl down.
The child ran to a fountain that had been dry for centuries—
and squealed as clear water gushed from the stone saint's mouth,
ordinary and miraculous at once.
Seraphine knelt in the plaza dust
and pressed her palm to the ground.
Flowers erupted instantly—
not lilies this time,
but crimson roses with black thorns
and a wick of silver witch-fire burning at their heart.
Kael watched them both.
Then he lifted his eyes.
The Rift remained—
but smaller now.
No longer a wound.
A doorway.
And on the other side,
he saw the shape of everything that came next—
not gods,
not monsters,
just people
learning how to live with the holes inside themselves
instead of filling them with cages.
He took Veyra's hand.
She took Seraphine's.
The little girl took Seraphine's other.
And together,
four people who had once been the end of the world
walked through the door
into whatever waited after endings.
Behind them, Eldren's Reach inhaled.
The first shop opened.
The first child laughed, unafraid.
The first bell rang—
forward,
clean,
honest.
And somewhere very far away,
a Pale Serpent without a rider
coiled around a tree made of silence
and listened to a new song
with no seals,
no chains,
no endings.
Only beginnings.