The Rebirth Of The Beast Tamer

The silence after the battle was not silence at all. It was the hum of dying storms, the faint hiss of scorched air, and the brittle sound of crystal shards that was cracking under the Crest's boots.

Where once phantasms had towered and illusions forged from grief and flame, only fragments remained. Shattered cores of green-black crystal lay scattered across the ruined shrine, which was still smoldering with necrotic heat.

The Crest stood in the wreckage, panting and each of them was filled with blood, each of them was trembling from more than wounds. They had fought memories tonight, not merely monsters.

Kelvin marked first, his gauntleted hand hovering over a shard as large as his palm. It pulsed faintly, with veins of light threading across its fractured surface. It did not feel dead. It felt like is waiting.

"Be careful," Lyra warned, with her bow still half-drawn and her eyes sharp. "If these are born of the Veil, touching them could be ....." But Xerion's voice rumbled through Kelvin's mind, silencing all other thoughts.

The End-Tyrant lowered his titanic head, with its eyes glowing like deep furnaces. His tongue flickered, tasting the shard's essence from afar. These are not traps, they are remnants and fragments of what bound us. Consume them, and our chains will be weakened.

Kelvin swallowed his saliva with his fingers tightened, then he pressed the shard to his chest and light surged through his gauntlet, racing up his arm, into his veins.

For a heartbeat his vision blurred green and his heart skipped like it might stop. After was it became released. Like a knot untied in his soul.

Xerion hissed in satisfaction, coils rippling with renewed strength. His scales shimmered darker, edges outlined with ghostly runes that had not been there before. Yes, the Veil's touch will not claim me so easily now.

One by one, the others followed. Lyra gathered two slender shards, pressing them to her bow before letting Salaris bow her head to touch them. Light shivered across the falcon's feathers and hardened their edges until each plume gleamed like a blade.

Salaris shook her wings, sending faint arcs of wind that was slicing through the stale air. Lyra exhaled with her chest lighter than it had been in months.

Darius's shard was the largest, it was jagged, heavy, like a broken fang. He set it against Rhoam's chestplate. For a moment, it seemed to sink with molten veins spreading across the beast's armor.

Rhoam roared while stomping, his plates and locking it tighter and thicker. His presence radiated like an unmovable wall.

When the glow dimmed, only ash remained. As they cracked and dissolved, whispers went into the air. Not from mouths, not from any throat but from the broken crystal itself. They were thin, desperate and fractured voices that clung to the Crest's ears like cobwebs.

"The Hollow's Den…" "The…prison of souls…" "…the cult feasts… the cult feasts…"

Lyra stiffened with her bow lowered, though her eyes were darted across the dead plains as if it was expecting another ambush. "Prison of souls? What in the gods' names does that mean?"

"It means," Darius growled with his hand tightening on his sword hilt, "this storm was nothing compared to what waits ahead."

Kelvin remained silent, staring at the ground where the last shard had cracked. His reflection in the dust seemed older, worn out and heavier. A prison of souls. And the words rang in him like prophecy.

Xerion coiled tighter around the shrine, his massive body shoke the fractured stone. It is no lie. I have heard whispers of such places, even in the oldest echoes of my kind.

A Hollow that feeds on the living and the dead alike. If the cult has bound themselves to it, then what we faced tonight were nothing but sparks from a greater fire. The Dawn's Ashen Light.

The storm passed as quickly as it had come. The clouds peeled apart, while moving into a pale horizon. Immediately, The Dawn arrived, if one could call it dawn.

The sky was drained of color, washed in grays and sickly whites. The plains stretched outward, but no grass moved, no bird stirred. It was as though the storm had stolen life itself. Every tree was ash-barked and every rock bled of hue.

Lyra shivered while pulling her cloak tighter. "This is not morning. It feels like the world forgot what light should be." Kelvin stood tall, though his shoulders bore exhaustion. His gaze swept the horizon, and though no words came, his jaw was clenched with silent fury.

Darius pressed a hand to Rhoam's armored neck, grounding himself against the stillness. His voice was low and bitter. "The cult is not just spreading corruption. They are carving life out of the world itself and they are… unweaving it."

Xerion raised his head, higher and higher, his coils shifted until he loomed over the shrine. His scales caught the dead light, while reflecting faint glimmers of runes. His voice rolled like thunder that is breaking distant mountains.

Then we march. If they believe pain will break us, they are wrong because tonight had proved it. Our scars are not their chains.

The Crest gathered what supplies they could salvage from the shrine. Wounds were bound and words were few. The silence was not heavy, not anymore but it was purposeful.

They had walked through their past and survived. They had stared into illusions that promised despair and answered with determination.

Kelvin placed a hand on Xerion's scale, the serpent lowered his massive head so only the two of them shared the breath of that moment.

"You were right," Kelvin whispered. "I am not that boy anymore." No, Xerion rumbled. You are the man who turned grief into a blade and I am the serpent who chose him for it.

Lyra stroked Salaris's wing, whispering a vow beneath her breath. Not to Elara because Elara was gone. This vow was for herself. That she would never again stumble blindly into guilt's embrace. That she would fight with eyes clear, for the living and not for the dead.

Darius walked at Rhoam's side, his steps steady now. Survivor's guilt had weighed him like shackles, but in the storm he had realized the truth: Ironholt's fire was not an ash in his hands, it was a torch that is to be carried and to be passed forward.

Together, the Crest turned their backs to the shrine. Ahead, the land was stretched barren and gray, but somewhere within that horizon lay the whispers' promise, which was the Hollow's Den.

The necrotic storm had not broken them. It had scarred them, yes. It had cut deep, reopening old wounds and burnt grief into their skin like brands. But those scars were not burdens anymore.

They were proof, a proof of their survival. Proof of their determination. And as the Crest walked into the gray dawn, their beasts towered beside them, Xerion's coils blotted the ashen horizon, Salaris's wings sliced the still air and Rhoam's armored frame was unshakable,

They walked not as haunted souls, but as sharpened blades because their past had tried to consume them. Instead, it had armed them.

The horizon cracked open in a glow, ash-thick clouds that were stitched with veins of green lightning that slithered across the sky. Each flash lit the land below like a corpse that is under a surgeon's lamp, that is starked and terrible.

The Abyssal Hollow had finally revealed itself. From the ridge where they stood, the Crest could see everything. The land fell away into a crater so massive that it seemed to have swallowed the world, a wound punched into the earth's heart.

Its walls spiraled downward in broken ledges and blackened stone. Fissures cut jagged paths through the ground, glowing with rivers of green fire that pulsed like veins. The glow painted everything in a sickly hue, a realm where life had no place.

Kelvin leaned on his glaive and stared. His breath came slow and heavy, as if the Hollow's weight pressed down on his chest. "It feels…" His voice trailed, softer than the moans drifting up from the pit. "…like the world itself is bleeding."

Beside him, Lyra didn't answer. Her bow hung loosely in her grip, with arrowheads trembling ever so slightly. Her eyes scanned the Hollow with the precision of a hawk, cold and sharp, but her hands betrayed her. They shook until she curled them into fists, pressing her knuckles white against the bow's grip.

On the other side, Darius let out a low grunt and tightened the leather straps of his gauntlets until they creaked. "Ironholt would have fallen twice over if this place had stood at its gates." His gaze did not waver from the chasm. "No fortress can stand against a wound like that."

The beasts reacted differently. Xerion uncoiled his massive serpentine body along the ridge, with scales glinting with void-light. The air vibrated faintly as his voice rumbled across Kelvin's mind.