But Harran saw the truth. The Church didn’t want the breach sealed. They wanted it directed —aimed like a cannon at the city of Celtor, to wipe out a political rival.

Harran was not a hero. He was a warden. A warden of the deep fault lines that ran beneath the Lumen Jungle, where the Kyrsgarde first clawed their way from the silence between worlds. The Church of the Unbroken had hired him to seal a breach—a crack in reality leaking Dreadstar corruption.

And somewhere, deep beneath the world, the last fragment of Harran the Sunderer began to sing.

At the center of the slick cobblestones lay a fragment of a monument—a broken slab of dark stone, carved with a single, unmistakable symbol: a downward spike piercing three concentric rings. The mark of the Earth Piercer .

Kaelen looked at his hands. They were trembling, but not from fear.

The ground didn’t shake. It focused . A single spike of obsidian and compacted time erupted from the fault line, clean as a spear, and traveled seven miles underground. It emerged directly beneath the Church’s hidden basilica. Not a soul died. But the basilica—every vault, every relic, every contract written in sinner’s ink—sank into the crust, folded like paper, and was never found again.

“The truth about the Mantra of Piercing,” he whispered. “It’s not for killing. It’s for exposing .”