Chapter 14: The Scar Where Time Bled

The dawn that broke over the Frostpeak Valley felt... wrong.

It wasn't just the ominous silence or the sudden drop in temperature — it was the way the wind howled, as if mourning a wound that had never healed. Rael, Aika, and Ren stood before the entrance to the Elemental Scar, a fractured rift buried deep in the forgotten reaches of the north. The trees around it were half-dead, half-frozen — locked in a loop between seasons, their leaves caught mid-fall, mid-bloom.

"Time fractured here during the Age of Collapse," Aika whispered, her frost-blue eyes gleaming faintly with suppressed magic. "No one who entered came back unchanged... if they came back at all."

Rael's gaze was locked on the center of the scar — where the world split like a cracked mirror. His heart thudded painfully, not from fear, but from something deeper. Something ancient inside him stirred — a whisper in a forgotten tongue, coiling around his mind like smoke.

Ren knelt beside the frozen earth, pressing his hand against the shattered stone runes etched along the rim. "This is Old Fire script," he muttered. "Pre-Collapse. It's… Flameborn."

Aika turned sharply. "Why would Flameborn relics be here in an elemental time scar?"

Rael didn't answer.

He couldn't.

Because in his ears, a name had begun to echo. A name that had been burned out of the history books. Erased from every scroll, every archive.

"Vaerion..."

The name curled like heat against his veins, igniting his blood. His vision swam. The Dragon Soul inside him responded with a pulse of light — and agony.

He dropped to one knee.

"Rael!" Aika rushed to him, but he waved her off, teeth gritted.

"I'm… fine," he hissed, even as his skin shimmered with golden scales for a heartbeat too long.

Ren stood, hand now gripping the hilt of his newly-acquired Crimson Jadeblade, a relic from the Flameborn tomb he'd explored days ago. "We're not alone."

From the fractured veil of the Scar, shadows began to emerge — not beasts, but memories. Half-formed apparitions, echoing through time. A child sobbing. A knight falling. A dragon's death cry. The ground trembled as the elemental rift surged — and something stepped through.

A mirror-wraith, cloaked in a shifting robe of centuries past, face flickering with different ages.

"You walk where time weeps," it rasped. "Turn back… or be rewritten."

Rael stood, his amber eyes now slit like a dragon's. "We're not here to rewrite time," he said slowly. "We're here to stop it from bleeding out."

Behind him, Aika's hands lit up with frost and spirit runes. Ren's blade burned with inner fire.

The mirror-wraith snarled and lunged.

And the battle began.

Meanwhile…

In the shadows of the camp they left behind, a hooded figure approached the guards with raised hands.

"I bring a message for Lady Aika of the Mizuhana Clan," she said.

The guards raised their weapons. "Name and reason."

The girl lowered her hood.

It was someone Aika hadn't seen since she was a child.

Kohana Mizuhana — her cousin, believed to have defected to the Timebreak Syndicate five years ago. The one whose betrayal had led to the death of Aika's mother.

"I bring you her last will," Kohana said softly. "And a warning. The Syndicate is moving again."

Back at the Scar, the trio struggled.

Rael roared as the Dragon Soul flared again, his control slipping.

The name "Vaerion" burned brighter, twisting in his mind.

The mirror-wraith pinned Ren with a thousand past wounds, each playing across his body in flickers of false memory. Aika shattered a time-loop that had caught her with a forbidden technique her mother once forbid her to use: Frozen Requiem.

As the last echo of the wraith crumbled, the Scar pulsed — and in its depths, an ancient gate emerged.

On it were three symbols:

The Dragon's Crest, clawed and broken.

The Frozen Lily, weeping tears of ice.

And the Crimson Hourglass, still ticking.

A choice awaited them.

Behind the gate lay a realm untouched by time, where destinies would fracture — or be reforged.

Rael exhaled shakily. "We go in."

And together, they stepped into the place where past and future bled into now.