CHAPTER 1521: STORY 1521: COLLAPSE OF THE CRADLE

The Cradle of Ash cracked like a dying star. Its towering walls of bone split, raining jagged shards that crushed the ground in thunderous bursts. Rivers of molten light burst from fissures, cutting across the battlefield in glowing veins that devoured everything they touched.

Kael wrenched at the sword, but the blade refused to budge, swallowed deeper by the titan’s convulsing heart. He roared against the grip, his arms trembling with effort, until the hilt seared white-hot under his palms.

“Kael—leave it!” Elara’s voice pierced through the quake, sharp with desperation. She stumbled against him, smoke coiling from her blistered skin as she reached for his arm. “If we stay, we die with it.”

The Unborn’s newborn form shuddered, its faceless head snapping between collapse and emergence. Its ribs flared outward, splintering into jagged arcs that scraped the sky. From the cracks in its chest, streams of light spilled like liquid fire, each pulse stronger than the last.

“You think collapse is ending?” it thundered, its voice fractured into a chorus of wails. “Collapse is birth. Ash is cradle. You do not flee me—you are carried in me.”

The ground split wider, throwing Kael and Elara to their knees. Spawn poured from the fissures, twisted guardians born only to die, their howls drowned beneath the chaos.

Kael’s grip loosened at last. He tore his hands free from the hilt, skin scorched, breath ragged. The sword remained buried in the titan’s chest, burning with Elara’s fading fire, a stake of defiance lodged in the womb of beginnings.

Elara pulled him upright, her arm trembling as it wrapped around his waist. “We can’t kill it here. Not now. But maybe... maybe we’ve slowed it.”

He met her gaze—hollow, furious, unbroken. “Then we live long enough to finish the job.”

The cradle convulsed, its skeletal walls folding inward like a dying lung. Ash rained in choking clouds. Shards of bone as tall as towers collapsed in waves, each impact a quake that threatened to bury them whole.

Elara ignited a flicker in her palm, not to fight but to guide. A thread of flame cut through the smoke, revealing a path toward a fissure splitting open to the night beyond.

“Run,” she rasped, dragging him forward.

Kael staggered beside her, every step tearing at his wounds. Behind them, the titan’s scream shook the marrow of the world, its body half-born, half-breaking, yet still impossibly alive.

They sprinted across crumbling ground, leaping fissures that belched fire. Spawn clawed at their legs, only to be cut down by Kael’s last furious strikes or burned away by Elara’s flickering fire. The cradle’s walls caved inward as they reached the fissure’s edge.

With one final surge, they hurled themselves through the collapsing maw of ash.

The cradle fell behind them, consumed in fire and shadow. The scream of the Unborn rose above the ruin, echoing into the night like a prophecy unfinished.

Kael and Elara lay gasping on the scorched earth outside, broken but alive.

And somewhere beneath the rubble, the heart of beginnings still pulsed.