The silence after the battle was unnatural. It wasn’t peace not really. It was the breath the world took before it screamed.

  Zhao Wei stood amidst the ash and ruined banners, the memory trap’s echoes still whispering through the stones. The Messenger's body lay motionless, half-buried beneath scorched ivy, but the shadows hadn’t retreated. If anything, they watched now, more patient than before. Hungrier.

  Feng Ren leaned against a toppled pillar, bleeding from his temple. Bai sat beside him, wrapping gauze with fingers still trembling.

  "They're regrouping," Bai muttered, voice tight. "Not retreating. Just... waiting."

  Zhao Wei didn't reply. Her eyes were locked on the Void Shard still faintly pulsing at her hip. It had sung during the clash—a keening sound that wasn’t sound at all. Like memory, like mourning. Like something waking up.

  And now, the earth trembled beneath her boots.

  It began as a whisper underfoot, like footsteps behind a wall. Then, without warning, the ground behind the Lantern Grave split with a thundercrack, stone upheaving in jagged spirals. Dust exploded outward as something colossal rose from beneath the ruins.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  A chained gate. Black iron, carved with script older than war.

  Zhao Wei froze. She knew this.

  The Gate of Ebonroots.

  A prison. A warning. A scar from an ancient war that should never have been touched.

  Bai screamed as ghostlight poured from the opening seam. Chains rattled. Then came the howl—not of beast or man, but something worse. Something abandoned. A creature from the era when gods bled and names burned away.

  From the gate surged a limb, then another. Claws like bone. Skin like fractured obsidian, stitched with embers.

  A guardian of the void.

  Zhao Wei staggered back, blade drawn too late. She'd seen this creature before in her final battle as Wei Ning.

  "It's bound to the shard," she gasped.

  Feng Ren pushed Bai behind a wall and raised a new talisman. "Can you control it?"

  She didn't answer.

  Because she didn't know.

  The creature stepped fully into the world, towering above them, and its first movement was not a strike but a bow. A slow, low descent before Zhao Wei, like a warrior to its general.

  Then its mouth opened, and it spoke.

  "Command me, Shadow-borne."

  Gasps from the Ember. Even the winds held their breath.

  Zhao Wei felt the Void Shard sear against her skin. In accepting it, she hadn’t just claimed a weapon.

  She’d awakened a kingdom.

  A kingdom that once bent knee to Wei Ning and now rose again.

  Bai stammered, "W-Wei, what are you?"

  Zhao Wei turned, her voice steady but hoarse. "A ghost they failed to bury."

  Behind her, the creature lifted its head to the moon, and the clouds ruptured. Crimson light bathed them all as a new sigil appeared on the sky itself like an omen.

  A broken crown split by shadow-fire.

  The Creed would see it. The spirits would feel it. The world would remember.

  And Zhao Wei...

  She would no longer run.