They stood on a hill crowned in new grass, where once nothing but raw magic had churned like a broken sea.
The scar in the sky was gone. The land beneath it had stopped whispering.
Instead, it hummed—low and warm. A harmony restored.
The Rift was not merely sealed.
It had been forgiven.
Haraza Genso watched the wind stir through the grass and thought of all the moments that had brought him here—through cities built on lies, across fields of myth and ruin, through betrayal and faith and fire. He had come to this world as a man out of place, a jack-of-all-trades flung through a door no one remembered opening.
He was no longer just Haraza of Earth.
Nor simply Haraza of Eltarion.
He was the Riftborn… and the Rift-Healer.
("You could go home,") Caela said, stepping beside him.
He turned. ("Could I?")
She gestured at the horizon, where the veil between worlds shimmered faintly. ("The Song listens to you now. If you sang with your true name, the path would open.")
Haraza looked at his hands. They bore no marks. No runes. No glow. But they trembled with a stillness that held weight.
("I don't know if I have a home left there.")
Lirien came forward, wind stirring her cloak. ("Then make one here.")
("And leave the old behind?") he asked.
She smirked. ("Did it ever really follow you?")
Brannock leaned against his warhammer like it was an old friend. ("You could forge something new. You've got all the tools.")
Ryve flipped a coin and caught it. ("And let's be honest. Earth? Bit dull compared to here.")
Haraza chuckled.
They were right.
And wrong.
Because the truth was… he didn't have to choose.
He looked up.
The sky didn't shimmer with fractured stars anymore. It was whole. But it remembered its brokenness. And in that memory was possibility.
("There's one more thing I want to do,") he said.
The old ley temple at Carenth's Spine was still standing—barely.
Once a center for harmonic convergence, it had been shattered during the Riftstorm, its columns reduced to ragged teeth, its songstones cracked. But beneath the ruin, the foundation remained: a chamber tuned to the memory of the world.
Haraza stepped into it alone.
The others waited outside, wordless but aware.
He took the keystone fragment from his coat. It no longer pulsed with chaotic potential. It was quiet now. Like a blade sheathed. A story told.
He placed it on the altar.
Then he spoke.
Not in Earth tongue.
Not in Riftscript.
But in the true voice of the world. The one he had learned not from a book or a teacher, but from fire and ash, from memory and loss, from the echo of a thousand songs that had passed through his bones.
The chamber responded.
A low hum first.
Then a light.
The fragment dissolved into sound.
And from that sound came threads.
Not of magic.
Of bridges.
When Haraza stepped back into the sunlight, he was smiling.
Caela raised an eyebrow. ("What did you do?")
("I made a door.")
("To Earth?") Ryve asked.
("To everywhere.")
They stared.
He gestured behind him. ("Not a portal. A resonance. It's dormant now, but if ever the world needs to remember itself—any world—it will hear this one's song.")
Lirien looked at him with something unreadable. ("You didn't want to go back. But you gave them a way through.")
He nodded.
Brannock exhaled. ("You're one complicated bastard.")
("Occupational hazard,") Haraza said.
They laughed.
It wasn't the laughter of victory.
It was the laughter of continuation.
Of living beyond the story.
That night, they sat around a fire on a hill where no one had ever camped before.
There were no speeches.
No final declarations.
Only stories.
Not of battles, but of people.
Haraza told them about ramen in Tokyo, about cheap coffee on cold mornings, about late-night anime binges and afternoons fixing radios that no one needed anymore.
Lirien shared tales of her mother's bow, of fishing in streams so silent you had to hum to keep the stillness at bay.
Caela admitted she had once wanted to be a playwright.
Brannock spoke of the sea.
Ryve recited a poem, badly.
They passed around a skin of sweetfire, toasted the dead, toasted the living, toasted the future.
And Haraza?
He leaned back and looked at the stars.
They were not his.
But they were here.
And so was He...