Chapter 3: The Last Vestige

In the hollow hush of a realm untouched by time, beneath a sunless sky and amidst ruins that whispered with voices long dead, Raizen walked alone. The land before him was called Virelya, but no map bore its name — for it existed outside the known world, past the edges of every sea and sky.

Here, time itself recoiled. The stars overhead had long since ceased to move. Gravity faltered, and reality warped like stretched glass. This place was a scar — not of war or fire, but of truth denied.

And in the heart of this forgotten domain, Raizen found it:

The Vault of Echoes.

A sealed chamber carved from obsidian and bone, older than the oceans. Not built, but remembered into existence.

Its guardian was not flesh, nor shadow — but a consciousness, fragmented and bound to the walls like dust in a dying breath. It spoke in chords and echoes, in languages Raizen did not know but somehow understood.

"You seek the Crown's origin," it intoned, not with voice, but with memory."Then behold the ones who forged it."

The walls around him came alive, and Raizen was drawn into a vision that was more than sight. It was inheritance.

He saw a world before worlds.A cosmos before time.And at its apex, stood the Primarchs — beings not born, but willed into being by the dream of existence itself.

They were not gods.They were governors of law, chaos, form, thought, and death.

Each Primarch bore a fragment of a throne not made of gold, but intention — a metaphysical convergence of control over reality's most fundamental forces.

Together, their throne was the Crown of Shadows — a symbol of balance, of constraint and choice.

But then, they created… life.

And life — curious, volatile, ever-evolving — saw not guardians, but masters.

Fear turned to rebellion. Reverence turned to hatred.

The children rose.

Raizen watched as entire galaxies became weapons. The Primarchs were betrayed — not by enemies, but by their own creations. Their throne was stolen, sundered, scattered. The Crown's pieces were sealed across dimensions, and the Primarchs — defeated — were erased from memory.

All but one.

Back in the Vault, Raizen knelt before a massive mural — an ancient carving of a Primarch with wings of night and eyes like dying stars. It bore his face.

His bloodline, it seemed, was not divine in the way myths claimed. It was not mortal, either.

It was a vestige.

He was the final flicker of a forgotten sovereign — a reincarnation, perhaps, or a conduit for the last ember of the Primarchs' legacy.

"You are the Last Vestige," the Vault whispered."Not to rule. Not to conquer. But to choose."

Raizen staggered from the chamber, his breath ragged, his vision blurred by tears he hadn't known he still had.

He understood now.

The gods, the crowns, the wars — all were echoes of a far older cycle. A struggle not of good and evil, but of control versus freedom. The Crown of Shadows had never been meant to dominate.

It had been built to restrain the very power he now held within.

And he…

He had only begun to understand it.

When he rejoined his crew days later, he said nothing of the Vault.Not yet.

But in his eyes was something new — not fear, not pain.

Resolve.

"There's one more place we have to go," he told them."To where it all ends. Or begins."

And as the wind carried them toward the final horizon, Raizen looked back once more at the lands of the known world —and forward, into the abyss where only forgotten truths dared sleep.

The path of the Last Vestige had begun.

END OF THE CHAPTER3