CHAPTER 149: THE LAST BREATH OF THE DYING WORLD

The climb ended in light, but not the light of freedom.

They hauled themselves up through the last narrow crack, leaving behind the suffocating darkness of the cavern. For a moment, the cold air above felt like a release, but what waited for them was not relief.

Spread out before their eyes lay the Fork, and it looked nothing like the place they had once known. The land stretched wide like a battlefield long ago destroyed, scarred and broken, left to rot with no one to tend to it.

Towers and shapes that had once stood tall were now crooked and bent, as if the world itself had collapsed under its own weight.

The ground was torn open in great wounds, glowing faintly from within, and rivers of pale fire slid slowly through the cracks, eating away at whatever they touched.

The Fork was no longer alive. It was a body broken and abandoned, and all they could do was stand and stare at its ruin.

The sky itself bent down, bending sheets of broken geometry falling upon one another like inward folding ribs.

Great spires, once towering, now warped as if through melting spines, their summit sinking into the earth as if engulfed by tar.

Streams of wan fire slithering along the cracks, hissing, dispersing anything they touched to powder. The horizon was not a line anymore but a wound that curved inward upon itself, as if the earth had been folded and compelled its edges to converge in agony.

The Fork was not doing well—and it didn’t bother to hide it.

Mika fell to her knees on shattered stone, gasping. She curled her empty hands, as if remembering the feel of her bow no longer there. Her finger calluses dug into nothing, the pain of not-being greater than the scars on her hands.

Her lips parted, but nothing came out. She just gazed at the sight, her body shaking as if the world itself had put its hand inside her chest and tightened.

Kael stood with a barrier of warped stone, hands pressed against the wall for support.

His was a rattle of air, his skin whey-white, eyes smoldering dimly like embers, and the fissures down his arms glimmered softly with gold, strings of light tracing along him like shattered glass poised on the verge of cracking. Yet he could force words through cracked lips.

This is what occurs when the core is opened. The Fork can’t heal it. It can bleed out only.

Nyra stood a bit ahead of the group, her wings bunched tight against her spine, her silver eyes scanning the earth.

She was not sickened. She was not terrified. She was prepared—as if her hand would reach to her sword in an instant and she would charge into this dying world regardless of the fact that the enemy was the very air around her.

And at their rear, Kaito emerged last.

Light hit him differently than it hit the others.

Where it burned them, it flowed through him. The fissures of the air, the fire rivers—they pulsed in rhythm with the light outlining down his arms and across his chest. As if the Fork itself held him not as intruder but echo.

He was not of the broken sky nor the crumbling towers, but they recognized him nonetheless.

They were silent for a moment. They just stood, panting, staring into the gash of the world. Each of them locked in silence, as if to speak would break only the fragile wall of reality that clung to them.

Then Mika broke it. Her voice was small, thin, scraped bare by despair.

"Can we... even escape?"

No one answered immediately.

Kael’s mouth set into a line, and he struggled to say something even though his voice was fragile. "If the cave-in hasn’t cut off the upper paths, then there could be alternatives remaining. But they will be dangerous. Deadly."

Mika’s hands curled into fists against the stone. She looked at him, hopeful, the longing in her eyes more fragile than glass. "But there is an alternative?"

Kael hesitated. That uncertainty was enough.

Her breath caught in her throat, but she clenched her jaw and forced herself to stay quiet. The small crack in her voice was better than letting tears fall.

Crying would have given too much away—it would have made her look like someone who already knew the truth but was too afraid, or too broken, to speak it aloud.

Nyra turned to her at last, her eyes locked on Kaito. She did not blink. She did not waver.

"What’s inside you," she told her. Not a question. A statement. "It’s growing."

Kaito looked back at her, lavender light seeping faintly under his skin like glassy fingers of roots. His fingers tightened around his scythe, the curve of the blade a gleam in the firelight.

"Yes."

Mika flinched at the naked acceptance. Kael didn’t say anything, though his eyes snapped narrow, weighing him with the cold logic of a man trying to keep the line between friend and threat.

Nyra’s tone fell, the razor edge of a blade hidden in dense words. "How long before it gets away?"

Kaito’s throat closed. He could feel the Root’s pulse in his marrow, always waiting. Not pushing—not yet. Biding.

"I don’t know."

The words tasted like ash on his tongue.

The Fork groaned. A ripple spread outward, sending crashing one of the twisted towers on the horizon. It crashed to the ground in silence—no roll of thunder, no smash of impact. Only a falling-down into dust, covered at once by the light-filled crevices beneath it.

The silent devastation engulfed them, more overwhelming than any roar. The quietness shrieked more loudly than ever could sound.

Mika hid her face in her arms, muttering something half-curse, half-prayer. The words were a muddled tangle, incomprehensible. Kael pressed his hands to his temples, his teeth gritted against the echo ringing in his skull, as though the fall itself was conveyed through his veins.

Kaito squeezed his eyes shut, but it was in vain. The Root’s whisper was ever-present.

[YOU SEE IT. WHAT THEY BUILT CAN NEVER HOLD]

He clenched his fists, would not answer.

[WE REMEMBER. THROUGH YOU, WE WILL WALK AGAIN]

"No." His voice scraped out, harsh, torn. He forced it through his lips. "You won’t."

The pulse flared once, deep inside him, like mirth.

Nyra had crept in closer without him even noticing. Her hand snagged on his arm—not gently, not kindly, but intensely. A grounding weight that did not allow him to drift away.

"Fight it," she said. No gentleness. Only command.

He opened his eyes and was met with her silver eyes. "I am."

"Then fight on," she told him. "Because if you stop." She did not finish it aloud. She did not need to. The unspoken end hung between them like a sword drawn.

For a moment, the world beyond them—the rivers, the crevices, the falling spires—dissolved. There was only her hand pressed hard into him, and the weight of her voice pulling him back into his own flesh.

He nodded smallest.

Kael coughed on a strangled breath, stumbling until he steadied himself against the wall. Blood streaked down the stone, black-red against white fire. His eyes shone faint gold through the whiteness of his face, the final ember of strength refusing to be stamped out.

"We can’t remain here struggling," he told her, each word dragged out of him. "The Fork is killing itself faster than we’re capable of breathing. If there’s still a chance, we must seek it out."

Mika lifted her head, wiping her face with trembling hands. Her eyes were red, but she struggled to stand. She swayed, but she didn’t fall. "Then... let’s go. Before nothing is left to pass through."

Nyra released Kaito’s arm but did not retreat. Her wings lifted, ready, silver feathers ablaze with the light of the flames like scraps of steel. "Agreed."

They moved once more, the four of them slipping like ghosts through the ruin of a world dying.

Every step was over broken ground that shifted beneath them. Every swallow was full of dust and static.

There were faces in the cracks around them—shadows of where those once stood, or ghosts of code destabilizing into ghosts of memory. Some looked at them, mouths stretching open in silent screams. Others simply stared, empty-eyed, before stretching out into dust.

Mika turned her face aside, but her shoulders shook with every step. Kael’s jaw was set, refusing to look at them, yet his light increased rapidly in its burn at their coming as if his body knew what his mouth would not speak.

Nyra’s eyes stayed forward, her step unbroken. She did not flinch from the faces. She did not break. Her resolve was a spear thrust into wandering earth, holding them firm when other things could not.

And with each stride, Kaito felt the Root’s pulse more determined in his chest.

It did not surge. It did not struggle.

It only waited.

As if it already knew the story’s ending.