Leon stepped onto the crystal path, each footfall resonating like the toll of a distant bell—solemn, heavy, yet strangely affirming. The whispers from the fragments murmured around him in broken dialects, ancient tongues, long since forgotten by the surface world. They spoke of choices, regrets, memories... and truths.
As he advanced, the Rift's Vein shifted. It was no longer a tunnel but a fractured reality stitched together by sheer will and trauma. Echoes of timelines—ones that could have been, might still be, or had already ended—played around him. There, to his left, a vision of himself broken and lost, having failed to contain the Tandav Surge. To his right, a version of him ruling the Ascended as a tyrant, his humanity long burned away by Destruction's lure.
But Leon didn't flinch. He kept walking.
"These are not my truths," he said aloud, his voice cutting through the mirages like a blade. "They are warnings. I won't follow their path."
