The world ended not with a roar, but with a silence that screamed.
One moment, Kael was there, a solid, stubborn, infuriatingly permanent fact in Ren’s universe. The next, he was… not. There was no body, no blood, no final word. There was only absence. A perfect, vacuum-like void where his friend had stood. The Dusk Manifest’s attack hadn't killed him; it had retroactively declared that he had never been.
The supernova of grief that had vaporized the Manifest left nothing in its wake but a glassy, hollow crater and a silence so profound it felt like the universe itself had been punched in the gut.
Ren stood at the crater's edge, his hand still outstretched. The golden light was gone. The star-mark on his chest was dull, inert. He felt… nothing. A vast, howling emptiness where his power,
