The stone in Liora's hand pulsed harder now, a heartbeat against her own, pulling her south across the dead plains. Each step felt heavier, each breath a little thinner, as if the world itself conspired to slow her down.
The land changed as she moved.
Where once there was cracked dust and broken ruins, now thorned vines clawed at her boots, and the ground oozed with blackened sap. The very earth here remembered what the White Circle had done — how it had bled the world to feed its hunger.
Ahead, the wind howled through a twisted forest of dead trees, their trunks charred and weeping smoke. Beyond that… a shimmer in the air. A dome of magic, almost invisible if you didn't know how to see it.
A barrier.
And inside it… the Heart.
Liora paused, her fingers brushing the handle of her blade, feeling the weight of it, the cold certainty it offered.
She could feel them too — the guardians left behind. Souls twisted into monstrous forms, neither living nor truly dead.
"No going back," she whispered to herself.
The Codex at her side trembled, as if hungering for the carnage to come.
Good.
She was hungry too.
She breached the barrier with a single thought, forcing her soul outward like a blade and ripping through the fabric of the spell. The dome cracked with a sound like breaking bone.
Immediately, the guardians stirred.
They came in a rush — hulking shapes of armor fused with rotted flesh, eyes burning with blue fire. Some dragged weapons that hissed with ancient poisons; others simply bore claws and teeth sharpened by centuries of rage.
Liora didn't hesitate.
She raised her hands, blood slicking her fingers, and called forth the Echo Rites.
The first guardian lunged — and Liora's shadow tore free from her body, slamming into the beast and ripping through its armor like paper. She moved next, fast and brutal, carving the second guardian in half with a spell-forged blade that shimmered with black fire.
They fell by the dozens, but still they came.
For every one she cut down, another rose.
Soulforging.
Echo Rites.
Necromancy.
She wove them together now, no longer fighting the instincts that had been awakened in her during the Trial. Her magic moved like a second heartbeat, effortless, savage.
The air turned thick with the stench of burning flesh and rotten magic. Screams tore at the sky.
Still, she fought on.
Still, she rose.
When the last of the guardians crumpled into ash, Liora stood alone amidst the carnage, her body trembling with exhaustion and rage.
The Heart stood before her now.
It wasn't a fortress, not like she had imagined.
It was a garden.
Twisting vines of silver and bone grew from the earth, blooming with flowers that bled crimson when touched. In the center, atop a black stone pedestal, a single tree stood — its branches gnarled, its bark slick with a wet, pulsing light.
And bound within its roots… bones.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, woven together into a macabre throne.
The Founders.
The bloodline the Circle had guarded and hidden for centuries.
Liora staggered forward, heart pounding.
She could feel it — the raw, undiluted power humming through the soil, seeping into her skin. It would be so easy to reach out, to take it. To claim it for herself.
But something else stirred within the garden.
Not just power.
A consciousness.
A presence that had been waiting for her.
"Come closer, daughter of ash."
The voice coiled inside her mind, velvet and razors.
She hesitated — for the first time in a long while.
The Codex burned at her hip, urging her onward.
But instinct whispered caution.
Too late.
The earth beneath her feet erupted.
Roots lashed upward, wrapping around her legs, her arms, her throat. They squeezed, not just her body but her soul, dragging her toward the tree.
In the center of the trunk, a face began to form — hollow-eyed, mouthless, ancient.
It wasn't just a source of magic.
It was alive.
The Heart was the First Founder.
The true architect of the Circle's dominion.
And it had been waiting centuries for a vessel strong enough to free it.
"You will be the new root," it whispered. "The seed from which the new world will bloom."
Liora gasped, struggling against the roots tightening around her, digging into her flesh.
Visions battered her mind — cities burning, continents drowning, life bending and warping beneath the Heart's will. A world where only the strong survived. A world without mercy.
A world built atop ash.
Was that what she had been fighting for?
Was that what all her pain had led to?
"Choose," the Heart hissed. "Surrender… or shatter."
Liora screamed — not in fear, but in fury.
She called on everything: the Echo Rites, the Codex's forbidden spells, the soul-forging arts she'd only just begun to understand. She pulled on the ash in her veins, the ember her mother had promised would one day become an inferno.
She did not surrender.
She shattered.
Magic exploded from her body in a raw, searing wave, tearing the roots apart, splintering the ground, sending shockwaves through the Heart itself. The tree howled — a sound of breaking worlds — as its bark cracked, its life-force bleeding out into the soil.
The visions faded.
The grip on her soul loosened.
Breathing hard, bleeding from a dozen wounds, Liora staggered back.
The Heart was dying.
But so was she.
Soulforging demanded a price — and she had paid it in blood, in memories, in the last scraps of innocence she had carried with her.
She could feel her body failing, her soul fraying at the edges.
But there was no regret.
Only purpose.
Burn it all.
Remake it better.
Far above the ruins, Mavrek watched from a cliff's edge, his cloak billowing in the toxic winds.
A faint smile touched his lips.
"Good," he murmured. "Very good."
The girl was stronger than he had dared hope.
And when she fell… when she finally broke beneath the weight of her own power…
He would be there.
Ready to shape the ashes into a weapon the world had never seen before.