Epilogue: The First Glimpse of the Hollow Sky

  "The past is not the past. It is waiting to be rewritten."

  Scene 1: The Sea That Does Not Move (Ragnor’s Exile Begins)

  It began as a whisper in the wind—a shift so imperceptible that none noticed at first. Then, the waves ceased their rhythm. The stars became fixed points, cold and distant. When the crew finally realized, it was too late; they had already sailed beyond the world they knew.

  The ocean stretched before him, vast and endless, yet utterly still. It was not the silence of a calm sea nor the deceptive stillness before a storm. It was something unnatural—something wrong. The water, dark as polished obsidian, did not ripple. No waves lapped against the hull of the ship. The air carried no salt, no breeze, no scent of life. It was as if the world had paused, caught between one breath and the next.

  Ragnor stood at the prow, his cloak tattered and heavy from the battles behind him. His hands, still scarred and calloused from the war, gripped the wooden railing, but he felt no movement beneath his feet. The ship, once a proud war vessel, now drifted across this unbroken mirror of blackness, its sails full yet utterly still.

  He had left Albion behind. The land was nothing more than a distant ghost on the horizon, swallowed by the mist. He had walked away from fate, defied the gods, shattered the cycle that bound him to an eternal war. Yet the weight of the past had not lifted.

  A hesitant voice broke the stillness.

  “Lord Ragnor…”

  He did not turn immediately. He had learned, in war, that men hesitated before they spoke the words that mattered.

  The voice belonged to one of his few surviving crew, a younger warrior with a face hollowed by exhaustion. He stood just behind Ragnor, hands gripping the hilt of a rusted sword as if it still meant something.

  “The sun,” the man said, his voice uneven, “has not moved in three days.”

  Ragnor exhaled slowly, his breath the only thing that stirred in the empty air. He had already noticed. The sky was locked in an eternal twilight, as if dawn and dusk had tangled together, neither willing to give way. The stars had faded into a haze, their shapes uncertain, shifting like ink in water.

  No wind. No current. No time.

  Something was watching.

  The thought rose unbidden, curling in his mind like the distant whisper of a name he should not remember. He had felt it before, in the ruins of Albion’s fortress, when the battlefield had begun to change, rewriting itself beneath his feet. The war had ended, but something else had begun.

  “This sea,” the young warrior continued, glancing at the water’s unnatural surface, “it is not real.”

  Ragnor finally turned, his gaze steady. “It is real enough.”

  The man swallowed, nodding. He did not ask where they were going. None of them did. Perhaps because none of them wanted to know.

  Ragnor looked back to the horizon, watching the endless expanse of black water stretch toward the unknown. He had once thought that beyond Albion, beyond the gods, lay freedom. But now, as he sailed toward something unseen, something waiting, he understood.

  There was no such thing as beyond.

  There was only what came next.

  Scene 2: Memories That Are Not His Own (A Glimpse of Something Else)

  The sky had not changed. The sea had not stirred. Time itself seemed caught in some slow decay, unraveling like a thread loosened from the fabric of reality.

  Ragnor stood alone at the ship’s edge, one hand resting on the hilt of his blade, the other gripping the railing. His breath came slow and steady, though something in the air made his lungs feel heavy. The others—what little remained of his crew—kept their distance, as if sensing an invisible threshold between them and him.

  Then the world shifted.

  Time pressed against him like a weight, heavy and relentless. The edges of the world blurred, his breath catching as an unseen force tugged at his thoughts. Then, the ocean was gone, replaced by towering spires of a city he had never seen… and yet somehow remembered.

  It was not like waking or falling into sleep. It was neither dream nor memory. It was something else—something older than recognition, something that should not be his.

  The sea was gone.

  Beneath his feet, stone. Old, cracked, and slick with mist. He was no longer on the ship but standing at the heart of a city he did not know. Towers stretched high above him, their jagged edges broken by time, their spires lost in clouds of ash and smoke. The air smelled of something ancient, of dust and something close to sorrow.

  And then he saw her.

  A woman stood at the end of the ruined street, cloaked in shadow, her back turned toward him. There was no wind, yet her cloak stirred as if something unseen moved through the space between them. She did not turn, yet he felt her gaze, heavy and knowing.

  Then—her voice.

  But she did not speak.

  She did not need to.

  The words arrived in his mind, in his bones, in the marrow of his very existence.

  "You are not supposed to be here, Ragnor. You were never supposed to find this place."

  The weight of the words struck him like a blade.

  His breath hitched. His hands curled into fists. The name—the shape of her—felt familiar in a way that made no sense.

  "Who are you?" The question formed before he realized he had spoken.

  The woman turned.

  And then—

  Darkness.

  He was back on the ship.

  The sea stretched once more, still unmoving. The sky remained frozen in twilight. His breath was unsteady, and for the first time in years, his pulse quickened in something close to fear.

  The city had been real. He knew it. He remembered it.

  But he had never been there before.

  Scene 3: The City That Should Not Exist (Vael’Zirith Appears)

  The mist rose from the horizon like a great wall of shifting specters, curling and twisting in the still air. The ship had no sail, no oars, no wind to guide it—yet it moved, pulled forward by something unseen.

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  Ragnor stood motionless at the prow, watching as the gray veil of fog began to break apart. Shapes loomed beyond it, towering and fractured. At first, he thought they were mountains, jagged peaks stretching toward the frozen sky. But then he saw them for what they were.

  Not mountains.

  Towers.

  A city, impossibly vast, rising from the ocean like the bones of some forgotten god.

  The ruins of Vael’Zirith.

  A gasp came from behind him. One of his crew—one of the few who had not yet succumbed to the strange silence that had gripped the ship—stepped forward, his face pale.

  "Vael’Zirith."

  The word slithered through the air like an invocation, sending a shiver down Ragnor’s spine.

  He turned sharply. "What did you say?"

  The man’s lips trembled. His brow furrowed as if the word had come from somewhere beyond his own understanding. He swallowed hard, shaking his head.

  "I... I don’t know. It just came to me."

  Ragnor’s grip tightened on the hilt of his sword.

  The ship slid closer, the mist parting completely to reveal the full extent of the city’s ruin. It was not empty. Light flickered deep within the broken streets, burning in places where no life should remain. The stone walls, though crumbling, bore carvings that twisted and shimmered, as though the runes were still whispering to one another.

  But at the heart of the ruin, standing motionless at the city’s great gate, was a single figure.

  A lone sentinel, clad in shadow, waiting.

  The ship’s hull scraped against the shore. The moment it touched land, the wind rushed back in—sharp, sudden, unnatural. The sea, which had been deathly still for days, now rippled as if exhaling from some long-forgotten breath.

  Ragnor stepped onto the blackened stone.

  The figure at the gate did not move.

  Yet something inside him burned with recognition.

  The name should have meant nothing to him. Yet as the word left the sailor’s lips, Ragnor felt it stir deep within his chest. A forgotten memory, or something worse—a truth waiting to be remembered. The city had a name. And that name had been waiting for him.

  Scene 4: The Ghost at the Gates (A Familiar Stranger)

  Something was wrong. The ship, the crew—still there, but unmoving, frozen as if caught between seconds. Ragnor turned back toward the figure at the gates, an unnatural silence stretching between them. When the figure spoke, its voice was not his own… yet it was.

  The city walls loomed above Ragnor like the broken ribs of a long-dead giant, their surfaces scarred by time and something far older than war. Faint embers of dying torchlight flickered within the archways, casting twisting shadows that moved as if they had minds of their own.

  Yet it was not the ruins that held his gaze.

  It was the figure at the gates.

  Unmoving. Waiting.

  Ragnor’s breath came slow and measured as he stepped forward, his boots scraping against stone that had not felt the weight of men in ages. The wind had vanished again, leaving only a heavy silence—the kind that sat in the air like a held breath.

  The figure stood tall, draped in a tattered cloak, its hood casting deep shadows over its face. But the armor beneath the fabric gleamed with a dull silver hue, marred by cracks, as if it had once belonged to a king long buried beneath the weight of centuries.

  A slow, deliberate movement. The hood tilted upward just slightly.

  Ragnor stopped.

  His grip on his sword tightened, though he did not draw it.

  The stranger’s lips curled into a small, knowing smile.

  "Welcome back, traveler."

  The voice was his own.

  A chill ran through him, deeper than any cold he had felt on the battlefields of Albion. The timbre, the weight, the very cadence—it was unmistakable.

  He was staring at himself.

  Not a reflection, not a mere illusion conjured by exhaustion or the madness of the Hollow Sky. No, this figure stood before him in flesh and shadow, in presence and defiance.

  Ragnor’s heartbeat thundered in his chest.

  "Who are you?" he demanded. His voice came harsher than he intended, the sound fractured in the heavy air.

  The other Ragnor exhaled, a quiet, almost amused breath.

  "You always ask that."

  The world flickered. For the briefest moment, the city behind the figure warped, shifting as if it had been painted on the fabric of the sky, peeling away in places where reality frayed.

  "And you always react the same way."

  Ragnor’s instincts screamed at him to move, to draw steel, to fight. But the weight of the air, of the place, of the figure before him—it held him in place.

  The other Ragnor took a step forward.

  "Come," he said, the echo of his own voice carrying into the silence. "You have been here before. It is time to remember."

  Scene 5: The City of Forgotten Names (Ragnor Crosses the Threshold)

  The statues at the gates flickered, shifting between ruin and grandeur. For a breath, Ragnor saw the city not as it was now, but as it had once been—whole, golden, filled with life. The illusion cracked like shattered glass, returning to the present. But the past had not left. It lingered, waiting.

  Ragnor hesitated.

  The gates of Vael’Zirith stood open before him, gaping like the maw of some ancient beast. Beyond, the city stretched into the mist, its towers jutting skyward like the jagged teeth of a kingdom lost to time. The air carried the weight of something unfinished, something waiting.

  The figure—his own ghost, his echo—watched him with unreadable patience.

  "You don’t remember, do you?" the other Ragnor asked, voice as even as the still sea.

  Ragnor met his own gaze—the eyes identical yet not, shadowed by an understanding he had not yet reached. He took another step forward, feeling the uneven stone beneath his boots.

  "Remember what?"

  The ghostly Ragnor exhaled, shaking his head.

  "That’s the problem, isn’t it?" he said. "You never do."

  The words unsettled him in a way no battle ever had.

  His fingers twitched toward his blade, but something in the air—some unseen force—urged him not to. This was not a battlefield. Not yet.

  Beyond the archway, the city was vast. The streets wove in intricate patterns, leading toward ruins that felt both impossibly old and curiously untouched. Statues lined the way—effigies of forgotten kings, warriors, and nameless figures with blank faces worn away by time.

  Ragnor turned to glance back at the sea.

  His ship still lingered at the shore, its sails ghostly in the unnatural twilight. The remnants of his crew stood aboard, distant and small, as if they were slipping further away with every step he took.

  As if the world outside this place had begun to thin.

  "There is no turning back," the other Ragnor said. "You know that, don’t you?"

  Ragnor exhaled, forcing his jaw to unclench.

  "If this is a trap," he said, "you should know by now—I don’t die easily."

  A small smirk tugged at the corner of his ghostly reflection’s lips.

  "You always say that too."

  Ragnor stepped forward.

  The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the air shuddered.

  A low, vibrating hum resonated from the stones beneath him, reverberating up through his bones. Above, the sky—already twisted and unnatural—blinked.

  The stars vanished for a single, impossible instant.

  A breath later, they returned, as if nothing had changed.

  But something had.

  Ragnor could feel it, crawling beneath his skin.

  His ghost—his echo—tilted his head slightly, observing.

  "There it is," he murmured. "You’ve stepped beyond the veil."

  A flicker of movement—just beyond the crumbling doorways. Dark figures shifting, watching.

  Ragnor inhaled deeply, steadying himself.

  Whatever lay ahead, he had already begun.

  He would see it through.

  Scene 6: The Hollow Sky (Something Watches Beyond the Veil)

  The city swallowed him whole.

  Ragnor stepped further into Vael’Zirith, his boots echoing against stone older than memory. The air here felt heavier than it should, thick with something unseen, something expectant. The wind did not stir. No birds cawed. No voices rose in conversation from the broken ruins.

  Only silence.

  Not the silence of death. The silence of waiting.

  The farther he walked, the more certain he became—this place had been expecting him.

  His fingers curled instinctively around the hilt of his sword, though he knew steel alone would not serve him here.

  Somewhere above, the sky rippled.

  He halted.

  Not a cloud. Not a storm.

  Something else.

  The night stretched above him, vast and endless, a void of stars and ink. But it was not empty. It was not still. Something moved beyond it.

  Not a thing with form. Not something bound by flesh.

  But something aware.

  And it was watching him.

  A tremor passed through the stones beneath his feet. The very bones of the city stirred.

  His ghostly reflection—the echo of himself that had greeted him at the gate—lingered a few paces behind, watching, waiting.

  Ragnor exhaled, the breath cold against the unnatural air.

  "What is this place?" he muttered.

  His echo smirked.

  "You tell me."

  The sky shuddered again, a deep reverberation through the fabric of reality itself.

  Ragnor clenched his jaw, but he did not look away.

  For the first time, he understood.

  The war against Albion. The gods. The cycles of fate. All of it had been a prelude, a stage set for something far older, something vast and unseen.

  He had broken the chain, but the architects who had forged it still remained.

  The Hollow Sky stretched above him, vast and endless, a window into something beyond history itself.

  And he—Ragnor Stormborn, breaker of fate, slayer of gods—was no longer just a warrior.

  He was a witness.

  A whisper stirred through the ruins, not from his ghostly reflection, not from the wind—from the sky itself.

  "You have been seen."

  A pulse of energy rushed through him. Not pain. Not force. Recognition.

  Something in the Hollow Sky had turned its gaze toward him.

  And it was only the beginning.

  The Hollow Sky did not merely watch. It remembered. As if his name had been whispered long before he spoke it, as if the path he walked had already been traced upon the bones of the world. Ragnor clenched his fists. He had broken the chains of fate—but had fate already known he would?

  THE END