Chapter 50 — Into the Toll

DONG.

Kael’s body buckled, and the world around him shattered like glass. The girl’s scream stretched thin, muffled, until even her voice was ripped away.

When the sound died, he stood in silence.

Not the battlefield. Not the ruins. Not even the Sovereign.
He was inside the toll itself.

An endless plain stretched out before him, black and silver, as though someone had painted the world with ash and moonlight. A single crack split the sky above, glowing faintly, as though reality itself had been torn.

Kael staggered forward, his blade flickering in and out of his hand. His reflection walked beside him in the silver dust—not mirroring, but lagging, as if a memory struggling to keep pace.

“Where…?”

“You’re nowhere.”

The voice wasn’t the Sovereign’s. It came from the reflection—his own face, his own voice, but older. Hollowed. Eyes dark with something heavier than rage.

The reflection stepped closer. “You should’ve vanished long ago. You were not chosen. You weren’t supposed to exist. And yet, here you stand—clinging, feeding on scraps of defiance.”

Kael snarled. “I’ve heard this song before. You think words will make me stop fighting?”

The reflection tilted its head, smiling faintly. “No. I think you’ll join me.”

The ground split. From the fissure rose fragments of his past—half-forgotten battles, faces blurred by the erasure, echoes of names that were taken from him. Each toll he’d endured had peeled something away. And here, they gathered, circling like vultures.

He clenched his blade, but when he swung—
the strike passed through. They weren’t shadows. They were truths, pieces of him long denied.

The voice from earlier whispered again, now clearer.
Don’t fight the sound. Become it.

The reflection extended a hand. Chains of silver light coiled around its wrist, connecting upward, toward the unseen bell above.
“If you can’t kill the toll, Kael… then wear it. Bind it. Become the eleventh toll itself.”

His chest heaved. The thought was poison—and yet… tempting.
The Sovereign ruled with the bell. But if Kael fused with it—if he turned its toll into his own weapon—he might sever the Sovereign’s rule from the inside.

For a heartbeat, he hesitated. The silver chains lashed toward him, aiming to tether him as one of the toll’s echoes.

Kael roared, driving his fractured blade into the earth. “If the world thinks I don’t exist—then I’ll carve my existence into the toll itself!”

The eleventh toll quaked, and the ash-light plain split open, swallowing him whole.