The chorus node shattered mid-chant, Toula’s arrow splitting its crystalline heart with a scream of unraveling harmony. Threads of ritual magic convulsed outward like snapped cables, wild and hungry. The Crucible bucked against its bindings, its glow surging from deep starlight to raw white fire, casting the entire chamber into a storm of moving shadows.
Pag burst from cover as the blast wave hit, cloak flaring behind him, the Oracle fragment pressed tight to his chest. Arcs of threadlight licked across the vault like whips, burning patterns into the floor and walls. The Quang Seers staggered, robes flaring like dying petals, their harmony shattered.
But Pillowhorror did not fall.
He stood at the center of it all—arms wide, threads dancing around him like ribbons of pale flame, his half-mask cracked and bleeding light. His eyes—black, slit-pupiled, gleaming with cold intelligence—locked onto Pag’s.
“You,” he said, his voice a calm blade amid chaos. “I wondered who would answer.”
Pag didn’t respond.
He ran.
Sparks flew beneath his boots as he charged through a weaving cascade of burning glyphs, the heat warping the air, the taste of memory-ash thick on his tongue. He reached the base of the dais just as Pillowhorror descended, cloak trailing behind him like the curtain between two worlds.
Their weapons collided in an instant—Pag’s dagger, small and jagged with threadsteel, met the shimmering curved blade Pillowhorror pulled from his belt: a ritualist’s crescent sabre, forged of silvered thought and etched with active code.
The first strike rang like a bell.
The second was nearly fatal.
Pillowhorror flowed like liquid logic—every motion precise, every swing wrapped in predictive arcana. Pag barely parried, blade skidding along the inside curve of the sabre, sparks flying. He ducked low, rolled, came up beneath the Seer’s ruined podium and hurled a flashburst from his belt.
Light erupted.
Pillowhorror vanished into mist—and reappeared behind him.
Pag spun, barely blocking the descending blow. The impact drove him to one knee.
He surged up with a cry, channeling the Oracle fragment in his hand. A pulse of ancestral light exploded from his palm, slamming into Pillowhorror and sending him staggering backward, cloak smoldering, sabre humming with retaliatory resonance.
The Crucible’s glow pulsed again—faster now. Unstable.
All around them, the battle roared:
—Toula danced between two Quang Seers, arrows shattering their defenses as she moved like a storm of teeth and motion, her snarl carried on the echo of war drums.
—Andromeda clashed blade-to-blade with a wardbreaker, her spear carving radiant arcs in the smoke, sparks singing from steel each time she parried a moonlit glaive.
—Maverick crouched over the projection rig, fingers flickering with green-white code as he jammed the transcriptor crystal into the prism housing. “Almost got the map—buy me five seconds!”
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Pag didn’t have five seconds.
Pillowhorror lunged—faster than thought, blade flashing, and Pag twisted—but not fast enough. A line of fire bloomed across his ribs.
Pag didn’t retreat.
He leaned in.
“You think the Crucible belongs to you?” Pag snarled, voice low.
Pillowhorror’s grin cut through the mist. “No. But I understand it. Kyrbane is just a house. I’m burning out the rot.”
Pag’s blade flashed in a crosscut, but Pillowhorror knocked it aside and swept his sabre in a circle that lit the floor with glowing script.
Pag roared and charged forward, slamming into him shoulder-first, disrupting the arc. The spell sputtered, incomplete. Pag followed with a rising strike—dagger dragging across Pillowhorror’s forearm, the first real blood drawn.
The Quang player hissed, and for the first time, his voice trembled.
“You’re not trained,” he muttered.
“I’m angry,” Pag spat.
Their blades clashed again, and again—and then Pag twisted, binding.
The Oracle’s light exploded between them—pure, blinding, white.
Pag was thrown back.
Pillowhorror staggered, clutching his mask as the bound memory thread flooded into him—visions not his own, screams of forgotten Kyrbane, names and songs and fallen prayers forced into his mind.
He howled.
Pag rolled to his feet, bloodied, barely upright.
“You wanted the Crucible?” he shouted. “Take it. All of it.”
Pillowhorror collapsed to his knees, clawing at the air, his blade forgotten.
Across the chamber, the projection snapped off.
Maverick stood with the completed transcriptor crystal in hand, grinning.
“Got it.”
The Crucible pulsed again.
And then—
It went still.
Its light dimmed.
Pag fell to one knee, panting, hands trembling.
Pillowhorror knelt across from him—mask cracked, blood dripping from his nose, a wild grin twisting his features.
“This isn’t over,” he rasped.
Pag stared at him, eyes burning.
“No,” he said. “It’s just begun.”
Pag barely had time to brace before Pillowhorror moved.
He struck like a coiled serpent unbound—no ritual, no grace, just raw instinct and desperation. One moment the Quang ritualist was crumpled beneath the weight of the memory fragment, and the next, he surged forward with a snarl, claws bared, sabre forgotten but intent razor-sharp.
Pag’s eyes widened.
He raised his dagger—but too late.
The Quang’s clawed hand raked across his chest, tearing through leather, cloth, and flesh in one brutal slash. The Oracle fragment pulsed in protest beneath the blow as Pag cried out and staggered back, vision blooming with red.
Pag fell hard, one hand pressed to his chest, the warmth of blood soaking through his fingers.
“Did you think this would end with victory?” Pillowhorror rasped, breath ragged. “This is Kyrbane. No thread dies cleanly.”
He turned toward the shattered dais, sabre reclaimed, the half-mask now a jagged ruin across his face. His eyes burned—not with defeat, but with conviction.
“I saw what you forced me to feel,” he hissed. “And now I know what not to forget.”
With a sudden gesture, he hurled a crescent-shaped charm to the floor. It shattered, releasing a flash of white mist that rippled with embedded glyphs—an extraction veil, cast from within the Crucible’s breach.
“Maverick!” Andromeda shouted.
“I’m locked out! That’s Quang highscript—I can’t counter it!”
Pag tried to rise, limbs sluggish, every breath a thunderclap of agony.
The veil wrapped around Pillowhorror like a cocoon of refracted memory. His figure blurred, warping as the chamber cracked around him with pressure displacement.
“You’ve delayed me,” he said through the veil. “You haven’t stopped anything.”
Pag met his eyes—bloody, exhausted, but defiant. “We saved the truth. That’s enough.”
Pillowhorror smiled.
“That’s your first mistake.”
Then he vanished in a ripple of unraveling script and light.
Silence rang out like an aftershock.
Pag collapsed backward.
Andromeda was already at his side, pressing gauze and light into the wound, shouting for Maverick to stabilize him.
Toula knelt beside him, her claws shaking.
“Stay with us,” she whispered.
Pag’s lips twitched. “Did… we win?”
Toula looked to the Crucible—its glow now steady, the Seers either unconscious or fled, the ritual fractured beyond repair.
“For now.”