Chapter 80: The Echo of a Falling Sky

The world did not just vanish. It was torn away, shredded into a billion screaming fragments of light and sound. Ren was no longer in the vault. He was no longer in his own body. He was a disembodied point of consciousness, adrift in a chaotic, roaring sea of pure memory.

He was standing on a spire of impossible height, the wind whipping a fine, silver cloak around him. But the body was not his. The hands, clad in storm-grey gauntlets, were not his. He looked down and saw a city of breathtaking beauty spread out below him, a metropolis of crystalline towers that seemed to drink the light of the twin moons in the sky. The Sunken City of Ouros. Alive.

He felt a deep, resonant hum vibrating through the very stone of the spire, a feeling of immense, coiled power waiting to be unleashed. He was standing beside the "Heart of the Tempest," but it was not a fragment. It was a massive, perfectly formed crystalline spearhead, fifty feet tall, humming with the power of a chained god. It was the apex of a Storm Spire.

And he was not alone. Standing beside him, his hand also resting on the humming crystal, was another figure, clad in identical silver armor. But Ren could feel, with an intimacy that transcended sight, that this other person was not just a comrade. He was a brother.

The memory was not a film. It was a lived experience. He felt the chill of the high-altitude air, the fierce pride in his heart, the deep, unquestioning loyalty to the brother standing beside him.

"This is my memory," Zephyrion's voice whispered, not in his mind, but all around him, a part of the memory itself. It was a voice filled with a sorrow so profound it was a physical weight. "This was the day our world ended."

Below them, the sky began to bleed. A jagged, crimson tear appeared in the fabric of the heavens, a wound that dripped with a malevolent, chaotic energy. It was a Rift. But it was not like the small, pathetic things Ren had seen. This was a Grand Rift Break, a cataclysm that blotted out the stars.

From this wound, the abominations came. Not the skittering beasts of the swamps or the mountains, but true horrors. Creatures of impossible geometry, of shifting, maddening forms, their very presence an insult to logic and sanity. The Abyss was not just sending its children; it was sending its nightmares.

He felt his hand—Zephyrion's hand—clench into a fist. He felt the surge of righteous fury, the absolute, unwavering certainty of his own power. He and his brother were Raijin. They were Sky-Lords. They were the masters of the storm. They would hold the line.

"For the Empire!" his brother's voice shouted over the rising shriek of the wind, a voice filled with a brave, tragic fire.

"For the Empire," he heard himself reply, his own voice a thunderclap of absolute resolve.

Together, they placed their palms upon the Heart of the Tempest and unleashed their will. The massive crystal flared with a light that consumed the world. A bolt of pure, divine lightning, a spear of raw creation, shot upwards from the spire, striking the heart of the Rift.

For a glorious, beautiful moment, it worked. The crimson tear in the sky began to close, the divine lightning of the Raijin cauterizing the wound in reality.

And then, from the closing Rift, a new entity emerged. It was not a beast of shifting flesh. It was a single, perfect, geometric shape—a flawless, obsidian octahedron that seemed to absorb all light, all hope, all sound. It radiated no Aether. It radiated nothing. It was a point of absolute, perfect nullity.

It descended slowly, silently, towards the city.

The Raijin's lightning, the power that could shatter mountains and boil seas, struck the octahedron. And it was simply… erased. The divine energy vanished, consumed by the perfect, silent void.

The octahedron continued its descent. It touched the central spire of Ouros.

There was no explosion. No sound. No shockwave. The city, the spire, the land for a hundred miles in every direction, simply ceased to be. It was not destroyed. It was unmade, its very existence edited out of the fabric of reality by an impossible, silent god of nothingness.

He felt a single, final moment of absolute, soul-shattering despair. He felt the bond with his brother being violently, utterly severed. He felt the agony of being unmade.

And then, he was back.

Ren was on his knees in the vault, gasping for air, the crystalline shard clutched in his hand. His body was trembling, drenched in a cold sweat. He had not just watched a memory. He had lived it. He had lived the death of his ancestor.

The shard in his hand was no longer dormant. A single, faint, azure spark now pulsed within its core, a tiny, lonely echo of the cataclysm that had destroyed a civilization.

He had found the source. He had found the truth of the Great Cataclysm. The Raijin had not lost a war. They had faced a god. And that god, that silent, geometric void, was still out there.