Nysha watched him with a sinking realization, this wasn't as simple as rejecting a threat. Lindarion saw himself in the echo. And the echo knew it.

The being lifted its cracked face. "You would condemn me to oblivion again? Without choice? Without justice?"

Lindarion's aura pulsed once, and the sigils faltered.

Not from weakness.

From hesitation.

The echo-being saw it—and spoke with almost human softness. "I am not your enemy. I am your shadow. Your potential. Your lost future. If you kill me now, you kill a part of yourself."

Lindarion didn't step back. But the air shifted around him.

Ashwing whispered, "Oh no… he's thinking. That's the BAD SIGN. Thinking means emotion. Emotion means doom—"

Nysha elbowed him to shut up.

The echo-being rose slowly.

Its form stabilized just enough to stand, but its limbs flickered like glitching light.

"You said you wanted freedom," it murmured. "Then why chain me again? Why repeat the sin committed against me?"

Lindarion lowered his hand.

The sigils dimmed.

The echo-being let out a faint, almost relieved breath—but its relief was cut short when Lindarion spoke again.

"I'm not killing you," Lindarion said quietly. "I'm rewriting you."

The echo froze. "You can't."

"I can."

"It is metaphysically impossible."

Lindarion stepped close enough that the tips of their fingers nearly brushed.

"Then watch me."

The desert reacted instantly.

Not violently, not chaotically—deliberately. The sigils around them reformed, converging into a single diagram under both of their feet. The sand hardened into glass, the glass cracked into lines, and those lines glowed with fire-white mana.

Nysha shielded her eyes. Ashwing hid behind her head.

The echo-being's form flickered wildly. "You're merging the paths—no, transcending the split—this isn't a third option, this is a fourth—"

Lindarion placed his hand on the echo-being's chest.

White light exploded outward.

The echo screamed—not in pain, but in shock.

"WHO ARE YOU TO DEFY FATE!?"

Lindarion's voice cut through the light.

"I decide my own path."

The echo's body burst into streams of shadow and light, spiraling around Lindarion like a storm being swallowed into his mana core. Nysha tried to step in, but Ashwing grabbed her hair with his claws to stop her.

The desert shattered into radiant dust.

The echo's voice collapsed into a whisper:

"Then I… will become what you make me…"

The last fragment dissolved, sinking into Lindarion's heart like a falling spark.

The sigils vanished.

The desert fell still.

Lindarion stood alone in the center of the glassy crater, eyes closed, breathing steady.

Nysha ran to him. "Lindarion—LINDARION—are you—"

His eyes opened.

And Nysha recoiled.

They were no longer just gold.

They were layered—gold over white over something deeper.

Something unbound.

Something new.

Lindarion exhaled. "It's done."

Ashwing peeked nervously. "Uh… and what EXACTLY is 'it'…?"

Lindarion looked toward the distant dunes.

"The echo didn't die," he said. "It didn't merge either."

Nysha frowned. "Then what happened?"

Lindarion answered with a calm certainty that didn't belong to this world.

"I rewrote it into a future that won't chain either of us."

The desert wind finally resumed, brushing across his hair and shoulders.

But even the wind felt different—warmer, almost reverent.

Nysha swallowed. "Lindarion… what are you now?"

He didn't answer immediately.

When he did, his voice was quiet.

"Something that wasn't supposed to exist."

The dunes moved first.

Not with wind, not with shifting sand, but with intention. Entire ridges of the desert curved toward Lindarion as though bowing. The glassy crater beneath him hummed with low, ancient resonance, and faint lines of light crawled outward in a widening circle.

Nysha stepped back instinctively. "The hell… the terrain is reacting to you."

Ashwing flapped upward to escape the shifting sand. "Nope. Nope. Nope. I've seen magical lands, cursed lands, demon-lands—but this is new. I hate it. I love it. Actually I hate it."

Lindarion didn't move. He let the desert shift around him, listening to whatever pulse it carried.

His core wasn't chaotic, strained, or unstable.

It was balanced—a tranquility that didn't exist before. The echo had been rewritten into a possibility instead of a chain, and in its wake, his mana had settled like a still lake after centuries of storm.

The world noticed.

A deep vibration moved underfoot—slow, rhythmic. Footsteps.

Nysha drew her dagger immediately. "Something's coming. Big."

"No…" Lindarion murmured, recognizing the pattern. "Not something. Someone."

The horizon distorted.

Not from heat, not from mirage—but from sheer scale. A shape trudged across the dunes, each step reshaping the sand. A towering silhouette—humanoid, but far from human—its form carved from stone, metal, and cracked obsidian crystal.

A titan.

Another one.

Nysha choked for a moment. "That's not the same one from before—this one is smaller—but still—still titanic."

Ashwing stared wide-eyed. "Smaller!? That thing could punt mountains like pebbles!"

The titan approached slowly, carefully—as if every movement was made not to threaten, but to show respect. Its eyes glowed faint blue, ancient sigils etched across its chest shifting as it stopped a dozen strides before Lindarion.

Then—

It knelt.

One knee into the sand.

Its enormous head lowered until its forehead nearly touched the ground. A gesture no titan had made in the last ten thousand years.

Nysha grabbed Lindarion's sleeve. "What did you do? Titans don't kneel to their own creators, let alone to—"

"They kneel to possibility," Lindarion said quietly.

The titan's chest sigils rearranged, forming a simple pattern—an older, almost forgotten symbol.

Not reverence.

Recognition.

The titan spoke, if it could be called that—deep resonant vibrations echoing like mountains grinding:

"Fourth Path… awakened…"

Nysha stiffened. Ashwing dropped from the air in shock.

The titan lifted its hand, revealing something cupped within its stone palm: a shard of obsidian crystal, translucent at the center, glowing faintly with the same layered light now in Lindarion's eyes.

Lindarion instinctively stepped forward.

The titan remained motionless, waiting.

"Take it," Nysha whispered, though she didn't know why.

Lindarion lifted the shard.

It hummed—like a faint echo of the being he had rewritten.

A connection.

A seed.

The shard dissolved into particles of light that flowed into Lindarion's hand, sinking beneath the skin and settling against his core like a soft pulse.

Ashwing pointed. "So… that was…?"

"The desert acknowledging him," Nysha murmured. "Or maybe the titan acknowledging… whatever he's becoming."

Lindarion exhaled, and the light behind his eyes dimmed to normal.

Not gone—just quiet.

The titan rose, turning away. Its voice rumbled one last time:

"The sealed ones stir.

The sunless city opens.

Walk carefully, Fourth Path."

With tremors that shook the dunes, it strode away—disappearing into the horizon like a fading mountain.

Nysha let out a long breath. "Sunless city… that's a myth. A relic. A recorded impossibility."

Lindarion started walking.

"That's where we're going."

Ashwing panicked. "WAIT—WHAT—NO—WE'RE GOING WHERE? The place where ancient demi-gods lost their sanity? THAT one!?"

Nysha jogged after him. "Lindarion! You can't just head toward a city that doesn't exist!"

He didn't slow. His eyes were fixed on the path the titan had indicated—where the dunes curved unnaturally, almost like a corridor leading deeper into the forbidden desert.

"It exists," he said. "The titan called it sunless because it lies beneath the desert, hidden since the end of the First Era."

Nysha narrowed her eyes. "You mean the void catacombs—?"

"No," Lindarion replied. "Older."

Ashwing swallowed audibly. "O-older than void catacom—why am I here—why do I follow you—why—"

The dunes shifted again.

A long, slow tremor.

A warning.

Nysha tensed and moved closer. "Something's waking up."

Lindarion nodded.

"The titan said sealed ones. Plural."

Ashwing groaned. "Fantastic. That's great. Multiples. Absolutely amazing."

But Lindarion wasn't looking at the dunes.

His gaze was fixed on the sky.

Nysha followed it—and her heart stopped for a moment.

There, far above, something enormous moved behind the clouds.

Not a titan.

Not a beast.

A structure.

A floating mass of runes and spires, hidden by mirage and distance. Ancient, drifting, resonating with power long dormant.

Nysha whispered, "Is that… a fragment of the Old Sky-Realm?"

Lindarion didn't answer.

Because the drifting structure—massive, silent, ancient—was aligning itself.

With him.

The fourth path had been chosen.

And the world was beginning to rearrange in response.

The desert grew unnervingly quiet.

Not the soft, natural silence of windless dunes—this was a suffocating, surgical stillness, as though the air itself was holding its breath. Even the heat felt muted. Dimmer. Wrong.

Ashwing hovered low over Lindarion's shoulder, wings pulled tight. "Okay. Okay. So. Floating ruin in the sky. Titan bowing. Desert doing the spine-tingly thing. All bad signs—no offense—but what exactly are we walking toward?"

Nysha scanned the horizon with a soldier's predatory precision. "Something wards this area. I can feel distortions—layered ones. At least three barrier fields interwoven."

She stepped ahead and reached out. Her fingertips brushed the air, and a ripple of distortion shimmered outward like light striking glass.

"There," she murmured. "A veil. A big one."

Lindarion didn't slow. "We're approaching the threshold."

The word threshold did something to the atmosphere.

The mirage ahead—once just shifting heat—solidified for a heartbeat, revealing jagged silhouettes beneath the dunes. Tower spires half-buried. A colossal archway made of obsidian and bone. But the illusion snapped back immediately, as though the desert realized it had shown too much.

Ashwing's pupils shrank. "I. DON'T. LIKE. THAT."

Nysha's voice was low. "Even the legends of my homeland don't describe anything like this. Whatever lies ahead—it's not elven, not titan-born, not Demi-Human."

Lindarion closed his eyes briefly.

"It's pre-epochal."

Both Nysha and Ashwing froze.

Nysha whispered, "You mean pre—"

"Before recorded time," Lindarion said. "Before humanity, before elves, before titans."

"And older than Dythrael," Ashwing added quietly.

Lindarion nodded once. "Yes."

The dunes began to slope downward.