CHAPTER 1206: CREMATED.

The tether split cleanly down its glowing length—silent, seamless, inevitable. Gold filaments sheared apart like silk under a razor, curling at the edges but refusing to fully detach. Instead, they spread. Multiplied. Wove new patterns.

Cain jerked as if pulled in two different directions at once.

Because he was.

The shape forming inside the rift sharpened. The distorted echo of Cain’s silhouette—the one half-formed and flickering—solidified just enough to resemble a warped reflection: taller, thinner, limbs slightly too long, face blurred like melted wax attempting symmetry.

Outside the rift, the real Cain convulsed. The threads wound across his torso pulsed, embedding deeper. His skin cracked around them in glowing fissures.

Eira forced herself up, teeth grit, ribs screaming. She dragged in a breath thick with dust and magic, wiping the blood from her temple with the back of her hand.

"Cain," she rasped. "Focus on me. Not it."

His head turned a fraction. Barely. But his eyes—his real ones—met hers. A crack of awareness filtered through the gold haze.

"Eira..." he managed. "It’s—pulling my... possibilities."

She froze.

"What?"

"It’s not trying to copy me." His voice trembled with strain. "It’s trying to choose me."

The rift shuddered violently. The half-formed reflection inside it snapped its head toward Cain like a puppet yanked upright. The lines of its body glitched—flicker, stretch, re-align—until its proportions were closer to his.

Not exact.

Close.

Close enough to be a contender.

The Fallen wasn’t copying Cain.

It was constructing its own version using Cain’s existence as the template.

And something in it wanted the better version—the version that would survive crossing into reality.

Eira’s pulse hammered. "Then don’t give it anything! Shut it out!"

"I’m trying," he hissed. "But every time I resist, it takes another—"

His body convulsed again. A shockwave rippled from him, sending dust spiraling.

"—piece."

The tether surged. Golden cords wrapped around his legs, his waist, his shoulders—then pulled, hard enough for his bones to audibly creak. Cain snarled through clenched teeth, pulling back with everything he had, muscles bulging, veins glowing under the strain.

The reflection inside the rift mimicked him, every movement delayed by a fraction of a second—but with an eerie precision that made Eira sick.

It wasn’t mimicking his struggle.

It was anticipating it.

Preparing for its turn.

The Fallen’s emerging torso twisted unnaturally, the gold-cracked plates shifting to accommodate more of its body forcing through. Another arm shoved its way out—this one less skeletal, more formed, almost human but with fingers that tapered into needle-like blades.

Its second hand slammed into the ground, leaving molten gold cracks spiderwebbing through the dirt.

Eira steadied her footing.

The thing wasn’t fully through.

Which meant she still had time.

She sprinted back toward Cain.

This time, the Fallen didn’t swat her aside—not directly. The ground in front of her erupted, a jagged gold spike launching upward where her foot should have been. She swerved sharply, heart punching against her ribs.

More spikes burst from the earth, forming a wall of crackling gold veins.

It wasn’t trying to kill her.

It was penning her in.

Keeping her away from Cain.

She slid to a stop, skidding dirt with her boots, scanning the spikes for an opening—

—and froze.

The spikes weren’t just blocking her.

They were mirroring her path. Every shift in movement, every angle she tested, the gold stone grew to counter her trajectory.

It was reading her intentions.

"Perfect," she muttered. "Because I’ve had a horrible day."

She lunged forward—not at the spikes this time, but at a tree to her right. She sprinted up its trunk, boots pounding bark, and launched herself sideways. The spikes reacted, shooting up toward where her feet would have landed.

They aimed wrong.

She’d jumped earlier than the reflection predicted. By a split breath. More instinct than calculation.

She twisted in the air, landed on the far side of the spike wall, rolled—

—and stopped dead.

Cain wasn’t there.

He was halfway inside the rift.

The gold threads had pulled him up to his waist into the swirling vortex. Got it. I’ll continue the scene cleanly from that exact cutoff without restarting anything and bring it to a proper end.

---

His arms clawed at the edge of the tear, fingers scraping against nothing, catching only shreds of collapsing light. The rift shrank around him like a tightening throat. His nails split. His knuckles bled. His scream warped as the distortion folded over his chest, then his ribs, then his face.

The tear snapped shut—silent, surgical—and Yuri’s outstretched hand closed on empty air.

For a heartbeat the world stayed frozen. Dust hung mid-fall. The Temple’s residual glow trembled, guttered, and faded as though ashamed to keep illuminating the space where someone had just been erased. The only sound was Yuri’s breathing: thin, clipped, not quite steady.

Then the quake hit.

A low groan rolled through the stone floor, deep enough to vibrate bones. The remaining sigils—those that hadn’t shattered during the struggle—flared in frantic sequence, one after another, like a chain of detonating stars. The entire chamber pulsed with the same message: breach, breach, breach.

Yuri staggered back and braced himself on the nearest pillar. The runes etched along its surface writhed like stirred serpents, rearranging, rewriting, reacting to what he’d done—what he’d allowed to happen.

A fissure split the floor where the rift had closed. Heat pushed up through it, humid and sharp, carrying the smell of iron. A single purple spark floated from the crack, drifted upward, and vanished. Another followed. Then more. Dozens. Hundreds. Rising like embers from an unseen forge.

Yuri watched them ascend, jaw tight, expression unreadable. Finally, he exhaled through his teeth.

"He wasn’t meant to cross alone."

The words didn’t echo. The room swallowed them.

Footsteps approached from behind—measured, deliberate. Yuri didn’t turn. "You saw?"

A woman’s voice answered, low and stretched thin with fatigue. "I felt it. Everyone within five kilometers felt it. That tear wasn’t small, Yuri."

"He forced it open. I couldn’t—" He stopped, cut the excuse short. "It’s done."

She came to stand beside him. The dim glow revealed her face—ashen, eyes rimmed red as though she’d been awake for days. She glanced down at the crack pulsing faintly beneath them.

"What’s on the other side?" she asked.

"Not the place he thought," Yuri said. "Not anymore."

The embers rising from the fissure turned red. A distant rumble followed, far below the temple’s foundations. The woman flinched.

"We need to leave," she said. "Now."