Vin stared up at the approaching storm.

It was vast—dark, looming, and angry. It cast the world beneath in the shadow of a giant, nimbus beast, rolling forward overhead. The clouds making up the storm were thick enough to look black. Vin had no doubt that the weight of the clouds would fill a lake several times over, and yet, the rain did not fall.

Instead, it brought with it the scent of rain and ozone, so thick that it choked the air even from miles away.

What approached them was not just a storm.

It was a calamity.

The thunderhead leading the typhoon approached, casting them in darkness. Light fled. Ice crackled over rubble as the temperature dropped. A storm covered the sky, and lightning flashed a blinding white—

And then he was there. Standing among them.

Silence.

Vin stared at their newest visitor. The outsider stood between him and the Lady of Crows, who’d stiffened at his arrival. Vin didn’t blame her. Right now, the thing between them was less of a man, and more of a roaring flame. Volatile, dangerous. He wore no weave, but instead channeled his power through something else—something that would soon snuff out. Vin watched him with caution.

He kneeled over the prone Blight Witch, inspecting her.

“Severe poisoning, scorched veins, and muscle atrophy from elixir overdose,” the pale man said, his voice quiet. “This would have killed any other person a thousand times over.”

Nashandra reached out to him, but something in the stranger flared. She flinched back.

“Boy—”

“—Halcyn,” the pale man interrupted, and the wounded prince looked at him. “Do you remember? We had a deal. My family’s safety, in exchange for helping end this war. And yet you’re here, working Elanah like a slave, to the point that she’s…”

Comatose. The pale man didn’t finish, but Vin knew the signs. He watched the stranger’s hand curl into a tight, trembling fist. The clouds turned blacker overhead. They writhed and churned in countless, monstrous shapes. Looming, giant forms, coiling and vanishing into the mass of clouds with teeth of black vapor and eyes that flashed with lightning.

At the tone of the stranger’s voice, Halcyn stepped back. The Fae beast behind him growled. Violence was in the air. Enough that the rainwater filling the swamp began to smell faintly of copper and smoke.

Vin chose that moment to step in.

“Let’s not devolve into violence before we get to learnin’ each other’s names, alright?” he said, stepping around the man to block the prince from his sight. He met the pale man’s black eyes and smiled. “Name’s Vin. Who might you be, stranger?”

The man opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Vin confirmed his suspicions. With a shake of the head, the pale man turned to the unconscious Blight Witch once again.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “All you need to know is that I’m here to send her home.”

Vin nodded, “And what if I say we need her expertise to control the silverplague?”

“You won’t need her. Not with me here.”

“So you’re him, eh? Her mysterious partner. I didn’t think you’d be standin’ so tall,” he replied, grinning. Vin stepped next to the man and stared down at the unconscious Elanah. “If that’s the case, then she’d be better off home. Not that she would be capable of helpin’ in the state she’s in.”

With a nod, the man glanced at the Lady of Crows, “Bring her home, Nashandra. I don’t care what you tell her. Just make sure she stays there when she wakes up.”

The masked woman hesitated. Vin could tell she wanted to say something—to ask the question all of them were thinking. But she didn’t. Because she knew the answer. As did Vin. Without a word, her cloak of raven feathers expanded on her back, forming into two, humongous wings. Within seconds, a massive raven stood where Nashandra once was, and the bird took the Blight Witch onto her back.

She looked at him, “I hope you don’t regret the decision you’re making, boy.”

“It’s for the best. Please, just go. Don’t worry about me.”

“…You make it hard not to.”

With a final beat of her wings, Nashandra rose into the sky and flew away, towards Felzan in the far east. The storm didn’t so much as flash where she passed, completely silent and under control. Like a beast in chains. Obedient only to one master, so long as he retained control.

Vin turned to the master in question. “Are you sure that what you’re doin’s a good idea, kid?” he asked, and the pale man turned to him. He shook his head.

“I already lost most of it. I might as well use what’s left as kindling.”

“Then let’s—”

A sigil-carved badge of metal lit up on Vin’s shoulder. He frowned at it, then gave it a brief tap of a finger. A voice from within buzzed to life.

“Sir! Anomaly detected near the rift. There’s an unknown entity within its vicinity.”

Vin glowered at the rift in the distance, “Don’t engage it without me. Hold your fire, regroup, and return to point 7-B. Keep track of its trajectory when it descends, and tell me where it—”

“—It isn’t descending, sir.”

The voice cut him off, and Vin’s frown deepened. “What the hell’s it doin’, then?”

“Sir, it’s… I think it’s trying to enter the rift.”

Ildrex was floating.

He rose from the swamp, eyes closed, feeling the whispers dance in the wind. They were man’s wants. Their old regrets. Their grudges, desires, and passing thoughts.

Secrets.

Keravathe’s power filled him. It flooded every corner of his mind, putting his psyche through punishment that threatened to tear his sanity apart. As the Ivory Listener’s chosen, there was no mortal secret safe from his grasp. Each passing piece of information was like a moth drawn to his flame. They searched for him. Sought him. And every echo that came reverberated across his scalp.

I want to go home. I killed them. My mistake cost my team their lives. I wish I told my daughter how I felt. This isn’t where I want to die. I’m resigning from the Association, once this is all over. I—

“I’m ready.”

Ildrex spoke two words, and the strain on his mind sputtered. He squashed the invasive secrets and set them aside, forcing them to a corner of his mind that wasn’t there before. It existed for his sake now. To hold what he could not handle.

With a single, shuddering breath, Ildrex continued to ascend. He opened his eyes.

Above him was a rift.

It was a massive tear in the sky, as if a wedge had torn through paper, ripping instead of cutting. It had frayed edges like jagged, living teeth. It opened above him like an eye of crimson flesh, raking across the sky, gashing the stars and the clouds. Deep within was a world of blood. Massive, pulsating walls of flesh, like titanic veins, branching, digging, reaching into the core of Blackrend’s endless corruption.

Thousands of gazerstalks protruded from the walls within. And below them was a sea of blighted beasts, forming out from the ground in sacs bloated with blood and filth. Ildrex watched them bleed out from the rift in droves. Hundreds. Thousands, spawning with every second that passed.

They fell past him without so much as sparing him a glance. The beasts splashed down into the swamp and rushed forward, into the battalions of the RWA. They died. More came to replace them.

And their endless assault would buy him the time he needed.

Ildrex rose until the night sky vanished completely. In its place was a world of crimson, beating and pulsating with the drum of a titanic heartbeat from far, far away. He hovered at the very edge of it, at the boundary between worlds. In that moment, between the sea of monsters spilling past him, and the sound of cannon fire and magic below, Ildrex had a choice.

It was the moment he’d lived the past six years for. The day he righted his wrongs, at the price of millions of innocent lives. In the second he hovered there, staring at the Blighted World, he had the option to turn away and leave.

That second passed.

Ildrex stayed.

He raised his arms toward Blackrend and called a name.

“Heart of Xaanilath, Corrupted Guardian, Keeper of the Gates. I call your Name.”

The flesh on his fingers began to peel away. The flesh drained from his fingertips in ribbons, like cutting the skin from a fresh potato, spiraling into bloody strips. Muscles unraveled. Blood streamed away. Ildrex closed his eyes, at peace despite the excruciating pain. Every nerve, every vessel, every scrap of meat. They all fled from his body.

“I seek the souls of Sahara and Cain, with this offering of muscle, blood, and pain. I hold the secret of Merden. The One Who Burns, The Moonchaser of Raim. He who flees from the future, latching to those that do the same.”

The flesh gathered into a small, crimson ball. Writhing. Condensing. It formed long, coiling channels. Cartilage, muscle, vein. It formed a beating heart, made of all that was human. An essence.

A recipe.

“He who deals with the darkness, he who lives through the power of Names. The greedy thief, the stealer of the sun, the bearer of eternal rime. The Merden of leaves and laughter and light, each taken without rhyme or reason or right. With the price of his place, the essence of my race, and the Name I named, I use my karmic right to force a trade.”

Ildrex stood in the sky, facing a rift. A skeleton. Bones, beneath the scraps of cloth clinging to his frame. Golden fire blazed within his empty eyes.

“Xaanilath, return to me the lives you took that day. For the Merden you seek lies in the Court of Frost, where you will find the Last of the Winter Fae.”

With every word he spoke, Blackrend stirred. Gazerstalks bloomed. Monsters burst from the skin of the earth. They gazed up at him, all at once, suddenly conscious, suddenly aware of the man that stood in their path. The sound of a heartbeat strengthened. It came from deep within Blackrend, in the core of the crimson flesh, where all the veins and the capillaries led.

For the first time in hundreds of years, the Heart of Corruption turned conscious. And with that consciousness came an anger, anger at a forced trade. And yet, it acquiesced.

Lights emerged from the dark tunnels leading into the world of flesh.

Dozens. Hundreds.

They rushed out from the giant, corrupted vessels and slammed into Ildrex in the air. The souls rammed into his bones, and patterns burned into the ivory mass he now called his body. They were names. Memories. Essences. Each soul was a word, and each word was a life he’d lost.

Ildrex let his body be carved by their existence, absorbing each and every one.

Except for two.

Two souls stopped in front of him. Two masses of twinkling light, hovering over his hands. Cain and Sahara, the ones closest to his heart. Ildrex’s skull stared at them and grinned a lipless grin.

“I’m back,” he whispered. “Just like I promised.”

Ildrex pulled the souls close, and he stored them in his chest. The warmth of their presence took shelter within him, waiting to return. And as they did, a dark, oppressive weight descended from within the rift.

An invisible force took hold of the heart Ildrex had created. The essence of humanity. Power flowed into it, ancient, unending, and the heart expanded. A frame took shape. A body.

First there were the bones. A skull, a ribcage, a leg. Then the veins, branching out. Snaking across its length. Ildrex watched the muscles coil around the ivory, cartilage forming underneath. Then skin, pale and new and fresh, alongside a head of brown hair and a simple, unremarkable face. One that looked like a mixture of every human visage there was.

The being finished forming, and its gaze was dark. Soulless.

The voice that emerged from its mouth was dead.

“Where is the Winter Court?” it asked, and Ildrex pointed down. Down to the Caereithian swamplands, where a hundred thousand souls were waiting to die. Down into the realm itself.

“The Winter Court is in Caereith. Waiting in the north,” Ildrex said.

The being nodded.

It floated down.

Ildrex watched its back, going down towards a realm he’d spent the last three years in. Ildrex almost tried to stop it. But he didn’t. Because Caereith wasn’t home, and nothing else was worth more than the souls of the ones that mattered. For them, he would do it. He would leave a realm and its people to rot.

With a final glance, Ildrex turned to the west. He looked far into the horizon, where the world ended at the edge of the planar boundary. Where Astalon, his home, lay at the other side of the aether. Ildrex flew towards it.

Behind him, the rift expanded across the sky—

And the end of the world began.