They reached Red Mountain on the third day, under a sky that was now half-Tamriel, half-void. The Heart Chamber was open, the heart-stone gone—but its tone remained, a deep, resonant hum in the bones of the world. And there, standing where Kagrenac once stood, was a figure made of fractured light: Xero-Kal.

“Your world,” Kaela gasped, blood seeping from her nose, “is not the prime timeline. It is a… echo. And Xero-Kal has found the point of fracture. The Red Moment. The Battle of Red Mountain.”

“I need to get to Red Mountain,” Vika said.

The Skaal shaman, a weathered woman named Finna, found her at dawn. “You have the gandr , Vika. The walking dream. You have been touched by the thread-cutter.”