Arka possessed no concept of how long he had remained prostrate upon the earth.

  Perhaps mere hours, perhaps days as measured by the alien chronometry of that dimension. He simply wept until his tear ducts ran bone-dry, until his vocal cords were too shredded to produce another sound.

  Slowly, agonizingly, Arka forced himself to stand. His legs betrayed him, trembling like brittle reeds.

  His visage was a ruin. His eyes were violently swollen, his nose flushed crimson, and his cheeks were smeared with primordial dust mixed with the residue of his tears. He looked utterly shattered, a far cry from the arrogant, untouchable Heir of Sagara.

  He looked upon the ancient elder with a gaze of pure, naked desperation.

  "Master Gatekeeper..." his voice was a gravelly whisper, nearly swallowed by the silence.

  "...can you return me to my grandfather?"

  Arka swallowed a dry lump in his throat, instantly amending his plea. He lacked the psychological fortitude to face Rajendra Sagara right now.

  "Not Grandfather Sagara..." he murmured weakly. "...the grandfather on my mother's side."

  The Lantern Bearer remained silent for a heartbeat, then offered a solemn, slow nod.

  His skeletal arm rose, giving the iron lantern a slight shake.

  Clink...

  The glacial blue fire flickered and died, and reality was violently wrenched once more.

  KRASSSHHH!!

  The sound detonated directly against Arka’s eardrums.

  The suffocating silence of the titans' graveyard evaporated, instantly usurped by the maddening roar of mountainous waves crashing against stone.

  Arka stood atop a jagged coral fortification that aggressively jutted out into the open, turbulent ocean. Before him, colossal, dark blue breakers pulverized the stone pylons, vomiting explosive sprays of white sea-foam in every direction.

  A brutal, unforgiving gale whipped across the precipice, mercilessly lashing Arka’s face. The wind carried jagged grains of sand and biting saltwater, making his raw skin sting fiercely.

  Yet, Arka did not blink.

  He stood paralyzed, permitting the sea hurricane to torture his swollen eyes. The abrasive, airborne salt drove directly into his corneas, but the physical sting could no longer pierce him.

  His flesh might be suffering, but his soul was entirely numbed.

  The agony in his eyes was microscopic compared to the apocalyptic vision of the slaughter he had just endured. This ocean brine was nothing against the tidal waves of titan blood. The psychological scarring burned into his retinas by that primordial cataclysm had become a permanent lens, rendering all mundane, earthly pain blunt and utterly irrelevant.

  Arka drew a long, rattling breath, inhaling the heavy, coppery scent of the brine.

  Then, he registered the presence of another.

  He slowly turned his head.

  At the far end of the stone pier sat an ironwood chair. And occupying it was a figure Arka had absolutely not anticipated.

  It was no weathered old man.

  Arka beheld a youth of startling, almost ethereal beauty.

  His skin was as flawless and pale as porcelain; his long, spun-silver hair whipped wildly in the sea gale. His features were impeccably refined, hovering on the precipice of the feminine, yet radiating an undeniable, oppressive aura of high nobility.

  The youth sat with his eyes clamped shut, seemingly lost in the orchestral roar of the crashing waves, or perhaps he simply possessed naturally hooded eyes.

  However, Arka’s abrupt manifestation—ushered in by the flare of blue lantern light—caused the silver-haired youth to flinch violently.

  Despite his closed eyes, he seemingly "perceived" or instinctively felt the sudden rupture in the air that announced Arka’s arrival.

  The youth’s jaw slacked in sheer shock. His mask of serene composure shattered instantly.

  "What?!" he gasped.

  He vaulted to his feet in a blind panic, his boots tangling in the legs of his own chair.

  Clatter!

  He nearly pitched backward over the seat, his arms pinwheeling desperately to regain his center of gravity, before finally slamming his hands down upon the stone parapet, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.

  His breathtaking face drained of all remaining color, "staring" blindly in Arka’s direction with eyes still tightly sealed, reacting as though a vengeful phantom had just crawled out of his past.

  Arka completely ignored the hyperventilating, beautiful youth.

  He pivoted swiftly.

  Standing there, an unmovable monolith actively defying the hurricane gale, stood a massive, broad-shouldered figure positioned just behind where the chair had rested. The titan of a man wore a heavy, sweeping greatcoat; his face was a map of harsh, unforgiving lines, yet his eyes radiated an unwavering, absolute warmth.

  It was the very silhouette Arka had been desperately yearning for.

  The singular soul who had never demanded he forge himself into a flawless killing machine.

  The singular soul who permitted him to be merely human.

  His grandfather... Gauss Renville.

  "Grandfather!!"

  Arka’s final psychological barricades were pulverized. Gone was the stoic pride of an Aksesa; gone was the untouchable arrogance of the Sagara Heir.

  He sprinted straight into the teeth of the gale, his footfalls heavy and drenched in despair, slamming into his grandfather in a brutal, desperate embrace.

  "Huaaaaaa!!!"

  Arka wailed, a guttural, ugly sound, weeping precisely like a terrified child who had just awakened from the most harrowing nightmare of his existence. He locked his arms with crushing force around his grandfather's massive waist, burying his filthy, swollen face directly into the man's chest.

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  His grandfather immediately brought his massive arms up, caging Arka’s head against his broad, solid chest.

  The embrace was a furnace—impenetrable, unyielding, and carrying the heavy scent of cured tobacco and sea salt. The scent of home.

  Arka sobbed violently. His shoulders hitched and shuddered with brutal force, his breaths fragmenting into jagged, agonizing gasps.

  "Grandfather..." he choked out, his voice muffled by the thick wool of the greatcoat.

  "...those titans..."

  The visceral memory of decapitated heads the size of foothills rolling across the earth, and rivers choked with coagulated blood, violently ambushed him anew.

  "They... huhuhuhu..."

  His weeping fractured into an uncontrollable wail again. Arka lacked the strength to finish the sentence. The crushing weight of the guilt was astronomical. He felt as though his own hands were saturated to the elbows in their blood.

  Gauss Renville held his grandson in an embrace of absolute, uncompromising protection. His brawny, tree-trunk arms fully enveloped Arka’s trembling frame, forging an impenetrable aegis against the howling gale, against the cruel world, and against the paralyzing agony.

  His massive, calloused hand moved with impossible tenderness, slowly rubbing up and down Arka’s spine in a steady, grounding rhythm.

  Gauss asked no questions. He already knew. He knew precisely the apocalyptic burden his grandson had just been forced to witness.

  He bowed his own head in shared mourning. His typically piercing, hawk-like eyes dimmed, brimming with unshed tears as he stared down at his grandson's tangled, raven hair.

  "Huhuhuhuh..." Arka continued to babble incoherently through his violent sobs.

  "Grandfather... those giants... huhuhuhuhu..."

  Arka’s fists twisted the fabric of his grandfather's coat, gripping it like a drowning man holding a lifeline.

  "...I... I..."

  He wanted to confess, 'I am the one who butchered them.' He wanted to scream, 'My power is the original sin.' But the words snagged, choking him like broken glass.

  Gauss tightened his vice-like grip, pressing his weathered cheek firmly against the crown of Arka’s head.

  "Ssshhh..." Gauss rumbled, his voice abyssal and vibrating with a mirrored, ancient grief.

  "Arka, hold fast..."

  "I am here... Grandfather is here, Son. You are safe now."

  Upon that storm-battered stone fortress, two generations of Renville shared a primordial, blood-soaked mourning, while the stunning, silver-haired youth beside them could do nothing but stand paralyzed in the silence, bearing witness to the broken wails of a knight whose heart had just been violently shattered by the true weight of history.

  Beneath the roaring firmament and amidst the brutal lashing of the salt storm, Arka experienced a sensation that had long since been violently excised from his life: absolute sanctuary.

  The suffocating embrace of Gauss Renville felt akin to an impenetrable, invisible aegis. Even as the oceanic gale howled with temperatures capable of flash-freezing blood, Arka felt a radiating, life-affirming heat defying the glacial chill.

  The core heat emanating from his grandfather's massive frame bled through their soaked clothing, as if actively attempting to thaw the solid block of ice that had encased Arka’s heart after witnessing the apocalyptic extinction of the titans.

  However, the sheer emotional gravity he had just shouldered wildly exceeded the operational limits of mortal endurance.

  The visceral vision of millions of colossal entities being butchered, the crushing guilt of wielding the very Void power that annihilated them, and the sheer physical exhaustion of weeping so violently, finally demanded their toll. Arka felt his internal reserves plummet to absolute zero.

  The shroud of unconsciousness descended rapidly.

  His swollen, tear-blurred vision began to darken at the edges. The deafening, concussive boom of the crashing waves slowly muted, warping into a distant, muffled hum. His lucidity began to detach, floating away from the harsh reality of the stone pier.

  He felt his skeletal structure surrender.

  The strength in his legs completely evaporated. Gravity seemingly hooked its claws into him, dragging him down into a serene, pitch-black abyss. Arka no longer possessed the marginal energy required to simply remain standing.

  Yet, he did not collapse against the unforgiving, coarse stone.

  His fading consciousness registered the massive, scarred hands of his grandfather violently arresting his fall.

  Arka felt Gauss's colossal, rough, yet infinitely tender hands snap around his shoulders and waist with predatory speed. He felt himself hoisted effortlessly, crushed even tighter against the broad chest, as if his grandfather refused to allow a single inch of his flesh to strike the freezing deck.

  "Rest now, Arka..." Gauss’s voice echoed from a vast distance, yet carried a profound, anchoring solace. "Grandfather holds the watch."

  With one final, ragged exhalation, Arka surrendered to the dark. The world blacked out entirely, and for the very first time since he had set foot upon the cobblestones of Myst, he slipped into a profound slumber, utterly devoid of the terror of lingering jasmine or the blood-soaked phantoms of the past.

  The wind did not howl within this dimension of suffocating fog, yet the bruised clouds above churned and roiled with a violent agitation that perfectly mirrored the tempest raging within Arka’s chest. As far as the eye could track, there was only an oppressive, endless expanse of gray—an infinite void that had become the absolute prison of his consciousness.

  In the dead center of that harrowing, sensory-deprived silence stood the singular anchor of reality—an anomaly that violently defied every natural law of existence.

  The Dark Gate. The gargantuan monolith pierced the very horizon, its towering pillars forged from a material infinitely denser and darker than a starless void. It stood with an arrogant, unyielding stillness. It boasted no ornate filigree; it bore none of the sacred, glowing runes that adorned the Totems of heroic champions in the ancient fables. It was merely an expanse of flawlessly sheer obsidian that aggressively devoured every microscopic particle of light foolish enough to approach it.

  Its manifestation there was not merely an architectural construct; it felt like a definitive, absolute death sentence handed down by the cosmos itself. It stood silent, yet radiated an abyssal frost that drove straight through the flesh to gnaw at the marrow.

  Arka stared up at it for an eternity, his boots feeling as though they were bolted into the intangible, freezing earth. His gaze upon the leviathan structure before him was now saturated with a profoundly agonizing contemplation. Within his ribcage, a chaotic maelstrom of emotion raged—a violent war between desperate denial, paralyzing terror, and a sickening wave of nausea slowly crawling up his throat.

  He was a true Aksesa now. The exalted title that millions of youths bled and died dreaming of to elevate their bloodlines. Yet destiny, it appeared, was currently executing the most sadistic, twisted jest upon him.

  By all logic, the awakening of a Totem should be the absolute pinnacle of sacred glory. His ancient forebears had perhaps manifested blazing swords of fire, elemental dragon spirits, or at the very least, radiant aegises symbolizing absolute protection.

  Yet, what he had been cursed to manifest was the literal embodiment of the End of All Things.

  The Death Gate. This was no blessing. Even classifying it as a mere "curse" felt like a gross understatement. To Arka, the monolith standing silently, patiently awaiting his command, was a catastrophic, apocalyptic plague. He had not been consecrated with the power to safeguard life; he had been damned with the absolute authority to extinguish it.

  Once more, his hollow gaze swept across the endless plains of fog. The initial shock had bled away, leaving only a corrosive emptiness that slowly, methodically cannibalized his sanity. The Black Gate remained anchored there, so impossibly serene and tranquil, utterly apathetic to the psychological hurricane currently ravaging its master.

  Its pitch-black surface reflected absolutely nothing, as still and dead as a subterranean lake on a moonless night.

  However, piercing through that deceptive tranquility, Arka could see it—a panoramic vista of absolute horror unspooling far beyond the boundaries of rational imagination.

  The phantom silhouettes of millions of slaughtered titan knights.

  They did not lie in peaceful, honorable repose. They were strewn haphazardly, tossed aside like broken, bloody dolls discarded by a petulant god. The gargantuan, archaic armors that must have once gleamed with terrifying majesty now appeared dull, fractured, and permanently stained by blood that had calcified over millennia. The colossal corpses lay violently entwined with one another in the throes of their final death throes, forging silent, rotting hills of meat at the very foot of the gate.

  It was profoundly, agonizingly tragic. The suffocating silence lingering amongst the corpses of the titans rang infinitely louder than any roaring war cry; it was a mute, eternal elegy for an era of absolute supremacy that had long since been violently extinguished.

  Arka knew exactly who they were. The legends were not mere tavern tales or bedtime fables to frighten children. They were the Ashgada Nation—the primordial, first iteration of humanity to ever tread upon the crust of this world. A race consecrated with a physical density and martial supremacy that transcended epochs; the original architects of early civilization, who were now reduced to nothing more than myth buried beneath the ash of history.

  And amidst that suffocating, soul-crushing grief, a singular name flashed across his mind, dragging with it a revelation heavier than a mountain range.

  Gauss Renville.

  The intimidating, fiercely mysterious persona of his grandfather abruptly snapped into perfect, horrifying clarity. Arka stared down at his own trembling hands, feeling the heavy, dense blood rushing beneath his skin.

  Yes. House Renville was not merely a stubborn lineage of old aristocrats clinging to power in the frozen north. They were the absolute final remnants of that shattered, primordial glory.

  They were direct descendants of the Ashgada Nation. The blood of the titans pumped fiercely through his very own veins, irrevocably tethering him to the millions of butchered corpses currently casting their long, dead shadows over the Death Gate before him.

  This destiny... it was a coincidence so cruel it was suffocating.