The Power That Should Not Return
High above the fractured Cliffs, the Council of Nine no longer whispered.
They feared.
One by one, the Elder Mirrors darkened as the vision returned: the First Tenth had stepped into the world — unbidden.
Even Xir had failed.
Even Jinai had hesitated.
Even the Vein Choir had been silenced.
But one voice did not flinch.
Elder Tharos of the Second Flame, slayer of gods in the Forgotten War, guardian of the Pure Pulse, rose from his obsidian seat.
"I will go," he said.
"You sent monsters," Tharos spat, "and ghosts."
"What you need now—"
"—is a fire that finishes."
---
He did not arrive with an army.
He arrived alone, wrapped in robes of iron-thread flame, his body still bearing the scars of when the Realms first broke. His presence cracked the stone underfoot as he descended from the sky.
He did not speak to Kai.
He walked straight through him, toward the First Tenth.
"You were a mistake," Tharos said.
The First Tenth didn't respond. He only stood taller.
"You were mercy where there should have been extinction."
A column of flame erupted around them.
Kai stepped back, aura flaring instinctively.
But it was not fast enough.
Tharos whispered, "Burn."
And the world obeyed.
---
The First Tenth caught the blow. His aura held for a blink—
Then shattered.
No blood.
No body.
Just memory, crumbling.
He turned to Kai one last time.
"There is no body left to bury, Kai."
"Take what I was, before they take what you are."
And with that…
He let go.
---
The fire turned to silence.
Ash fell, but Kai did not burn.
Instead, the pieces of the First Tenth drifted toward him, dissolving midair. Symbols. Names. Forgotten stances. Broken truths.
And one by one—
He absorbed them.
The sky shuddered.
His aura exploded outward — not just light or sound, but something deeper: a vibration that touched every realm at once.
Jinai fell to her knees, eyes wide.
Even Tharos staggered back, whispering, "No—"
But it was too late.
The Tenth did not awaken.
It merged.
Kai's eyes burned with white fire, and when he spoke, it was with ten voices:
"We are not one."
"We are what was stolen."
"And we have returned."
The world around them bent.
Time stuttered.
Old laws cracked.
Kai floated a few inches above the blackened ground, eyes turned skyward. The Cliffs trembled. Reality reeled.
And the Nine Realms — all of them — heard a name spoken they thought they had erased:
"Kai Sen, of the Tenth Remembering."
And they knew:
The war had just changed sides.
They thought he would burn.
They thought the fire would end him, as it had ended so many others.
But as the ashes of the First Tenth faded into Kai's skin, something else emerged — not power, not light…
A presence.
A weight.
It pressed against the inside of his skull, his bones, his memory. Like a second self — no, more than that — a thousand selves, speaking all at once.
> "The Nine made a cage. You opened it."
Kai tried to stand, but his knees buckled. His vision fractured. The sky above him split — not with lightning, but with history. A seam in the air tore open, bleeding impossible light, and he was dragged upward, away from the Realms, away from everything he had ever known—
—and into the place the First Tenth had once called home.
---
He landed on nothing.
A space without floor, without sky, without rules.
And yet it pulsed — alive with collapsed time and broken truths.
This was the Ten-Thousandfold Universe — not one universe, but ten thousand overlapping attempts to suppress the truth of the Tenth.
Each one broken.
Each one still collapsing.
> "This is where they buried us."
> "Every version of us they feared."
> "Every version that couldn't be killed."
Kai screamed — but his voice echoed in too many directions, bouncing off ruined timelines and malformed stars.
The First Tenth's voice was inside him now, whispering, warping.
Every blink revealed another Kai:
One with golden wings.
One with no face.
One already dead, cradling the same scroll Kai had once hidden under his mat.
One that was only a whisper of violence.
They circled him like vultures.
> "You were the soft one," said a Kai made of smoke.
> "You were the vessel," said another, split down the middle by light.
> "Now you must become all of us."
He staggered through the ruins of ten thousand fates, each more unbearable than the last. Each one fighting to define him.
---
One of the collapsing universes broke apart mid-breath — a city folding in on itself, its people forgetting their names before the light swallowed them.
Kai fell to his knees. "I can't carry this. I'm not—"
> "You already are."
> "You made the choice the Nine feared most."
> "To remember."
> "Now you must endure it."
---
From the edge of the void, something reached for him.
Not a creature.
Not a god.
A memory, older than thought.
The Original Pulse.
It wrapped around his spine. It did not ask permission.
It simply entered.
And he understood — not in words, but in a pulse of pure knowing:
He would never be just Kai again.
He was becoming something new.
And if he survived this transformation—
He would be the first true Tenth the Realms had seen in millennia.
But first—
He had to escape the collapse.
---
The Ten-Thousandfold began to unravel faster now. All ten thousand versions of reality folding inward, seeking a single soul to anchor them.
Him.
The pressure was unbearable.
His bones cracked from inside. His skin pulsed with forgotten sigils. His mind—
His mind nearly broke—
Until one final truth whispered through the storm:
> "They built this to break you."
> "If you walk out of it alive… they will know their end is near."
---
And so he walked.
Through fire.
Through silence.
Through the screaming faces of a thousand selves.
He walked—
And the Ten-Thousandfold collapsed behind him.
---
In the Realms, a storm of impossible geometry split the sky.
Kai fell from it.
Burning. Breathing.
Changed.
His eyes now reflected multiple moments at once.
And his aura?
It made the ground flinch.
He was no longer merely Kai.
He was now the Remembering.
And the war?
It had become his.