The knock came again—soft, measured. A metronome against Kael’s thudding heart. His fingers curled into fists, nails digging crescents into palms slick with sweat. The heavy door before him was a barricade and a threshold all at once, its ancient wood warped by years but unyielding, like the truths locked behind it.

Outside, the sigil’s glow pulsed, bleeding amber light through the cracks beneath the doorframe. It was like a drumbeat threatening to drown everything beneath its thunder.

Kael’s breath hitched, ragged. The room felt suddenly smaller, the air shivering with static. A low hum rose in his ears; faint, but alive—like a beast waiting to pounce.

The knock—a third time—cut through the silence, but this one faltered, hesitant. The shadow of doubt bloomed cold and sharp inside Kael’s chest.

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

Because the truth was raw, screaming inside him, and whatever waited beyond that door wasn’t some visitor, wasn’t a friend. It was a reckoning.

---

The night wore on in fragmented silence. The sigil’s glow ebbed and pulsed like a heartbeat. Kael’s mind chased the sudden absence of Riven’s voice—the way it’d cracked moments ago, confessing fragments between labored breaths.

“...I don’t know how much time I have,” Riven’s words had slipped out in the dim campfire’s glow, a tremor threading through them like brittle glass. “But the Veil Rifts aren’t just dungeons. They’re pieces of us... pieces of something older, darker. We’re more entangled than we know.”

Kael’s throat had seared dry, the taste of ash and betrayal thick on his tongue. He’d looked at Riven, searching—searching for the man who’d stood beside him for years, the camaraderie they’d forged in blood and fire. But now, that gaze was gone, replaced by a hollowed shadow.

And then—Riven was gone.

Just like that.

His gear, still warm by the fire, but the man had slipped away into the night, leaving nothing but an echo of broken trust.

Kael’s fists slammed against the faded map strewn on the floor, the edges crumpling beneath his rage. The map—the blueprint to the next Veil Rift—now a cruel mockery.

Where do you run when the past hunts you?

---

Outside, the wind bled through cracked shutters, rattling brittle wooden beams. The scent of burnt pine mingled with the damp earth, clinging to the bones of the ruined town.

Kael bolted upright, sharp breaths stabbing his lungs. A message slid beneath the door like a serpent in the dark.

On the tattered parchment, scrawled in a jagged hand, was an ominous promise:

“Forsaken, your reckoning is at hand. The tide you sought to ride will drown you instead.”

Beneath the words: a signature.

Seraphine.

A chill shivered down Kael’s spine, knotting his muscles taut.

He crushed the parchment in a clenched fist, the cruel edges biting skin. Outside, the sigil flared with a savage light, its flames licking at the threshold like hungry tongues.

The Forsaken Rite wasn’t finished.

And neither was Seraphine.

---

Footsteps—soft, deliberate—fluttered just beyond the door now, echoing with deadly certainty.

Kael’s eyes narrowed. The room itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting.

A blade gleamed in the dark, catching the sigil’s wrathful glow.

This was no longer a knock.

This was a summons.

---

The last candle flickered out.

And silence swallowed the night whole.