The Grotto of the Gossamer Heart overflowed with magic. The Gossamer Heart itself beat within its crystalline shell. The Fey Artifact pulsed slowly while the Sable Elegy devoured the protective crystalline layers of solid energy surrounding it. The opalescent cavern walls flickered, dancing in and out of existence. Each time they became more insubstantial, the walls' loss of substance revealed them as a mere memory of what they were the moment before, a cycle of degradation that could end only in true oblivion.

The air was thick with memory, fragments of forgotten voices, and shrouded in a mist formed of stolen histories, which drifted as spectral particles performing an eternal ballet. The mosaic tile floor shifted underfoot, uncertain whether it should be solid, ethereal, or nothing.

At the center of it all, the being once known as Maeravel Thornheart—now, the Sable Elegy, The Hollow Cantor—hovered above the Gossamer Heart. Shards of condensed—once the protective shell around the Gossamer Heart—fell from her maw like cookie crumbs. The Sable Elegy had become something beyond undeath, beyond lament, beyond existence itself—she is a terrible dirge given form. Behind the maw existed only a void.

Unlike the spirits, undead, and specters that Dahlia controlled, the Sable Elegy does not float like a spirit nor move like a physical being. Its existence and presence are paradoxical. She constantly frays and reforms, never completed but never undone. The most that could be recognized of Maeravel Thornheart in the Sable Elegy was the vaguely regal silhouette—possibly humanoid, but who could tell, with the constant shifting and unending reformations?

The Sable Elegy sang. A low, mournful wail, a hymn of lost names and erased fates. A hymn that tried to remove Dahlia, the Ebon Chorus, and Aelwyth Morghaine itself from existence. Even with the activation of The Last Ember’s mark upon each of them, Ruth, Lorien, and Drynthor flickered in and out of existence. Pain flooded the back of Dahlia’s mind as the three who began service as spirit allies were attacked on an existential level.

Dahlia wrote their names in the Gloam, bolstering the protection already afforded to her minions by The Last Ember. Weapons, even mighty Gloombough and Shriekfang, weakened and flickered. Dahlia bound them, inscribed their names, and the concepts of sword and shield to reality. No matter how furiously she scribed names into the Gloam, the Sable Elegy devoured reality around them. The Grotto rapidly reduced to a hazy place, a forgotten dream, anchored only by the will of a tiny fairy.

Unlike the Sable Elegy, Dahlia sang a song of words.

♪”You were sung in dusk and sorrow,

Woven bright, then torn away.

Let your Silence steal memory of you away,

Let no Void unmake you without trace.” ♪

Xeras Duskmourn drove Gloombough into the cloud-like ground beneath them. Dark green energy cascaded outward from the warrior. He said no words; he shouted no war cry. As was the duty of the Lost Knight of Silent Threnodies, he fought for the inheritor of Lyrindris—in his own way. The ground hardened—some—enough that none might fall through it. The Gloamknight lacked godly relics, but he possessed dedication, loyalty, and conviction strong enough to anchor reality itself, at least a little. He, like Dahlia, was of Fey Nobility and would not submit before a Chorister of the Discordant, regardless of what profane evolution it had undergone.

Ruth and Lorien launched fire and arrow at the Sable Elegy—both merely vanished from reality long before they could strike. Much like the Sanguis Argentum coils that Shriekfang launched at the Sable Elegy, they dissipated without touching it.

Drynthor attempted to shield Dahlia from a lash of oblivion, but he lost one of his shields and most of an arm in the process.

The Spirit Hornets, a collective swarm of thousands of fragments of memory, a gestalt mind more incredible than the individual pieces, shot into the air, and their angry buzzing seemed to do what others could not. They stung the paradox of song; they interrupted the seemingly nonexistent cadence, and for a moment, the Aria of Oblivion sputtered out.

Dahlia’s voice took center stage in the brief moments of respite bought by the Spirit Hornet Swarm.

♪”Threads unspooled and voices stolen,

Fate unmade in hollow breath,

Yet I weave what dusk remembers,

In Twilight bound, spared from death.”♪

Shriekfang launched itself across the unraveling battlefield. The rapier parried threads of oblivion, the obsidian blade a memory of Xal’Zyrath—an entity with vast experience in the dissolution offered by oblivion.

The blade unleashed a terrible shriek, a teeth-gnashing wail that made the cries of a banshee seem pleasant in comparison. A shockwave of raw, discordant power split the air like a war cry and lunged for the Sable Elegy despite being without a wielder.

The silhouette of the Sable Elegy flickered to the side, the reckless thrust a complete miss, and fractured lines of oblivion closed in on the rapier's hilt.

Shriekfang, a sword that existed to break certainties and inscribe fates of ruin upon whole worlds, vibrated with frustration when it could not land a single wound upon the ill-defined enemy.

“You are bound to cause and effect,” the Sable Elegy whispered. “I am beyond both.”

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A line of oblivion that seemed like it might be the Elegy’s arm extended for Shriekfang, and unlike when Maeravel Thornheart had done so and damned herself, it was Shriekfang who recoiled. The blade twisted, vibrated, and dodged the grasping of the untouchable aspects of oblivion, but not a single thrust of its blade did more than merely deny the Hollow Chorister.

Dahlia had overwhelmed Shriekfang with power, and now the Elegy overwhelmed him through the sheer absence of being. The rapier wailed at the futility.

♪ “Tears that fell into the shadow,

Lies that time would see unspun,

I return what you have stolen,

I deny what you have done.”♪

The room exploded in light while Dahlia took a deep breath. Divine light crashed across the room like a peel of thunder and illuminated every corner of the barely held-together reality that existed in the Grotto of the Gossamer Heart. The source of it all? The bone ring upon Dahlia’s right middle finger. The ancient light bore too many memories for the Sable Elegy to obliterate them all, and it penetrated the silhouette and branded her—it—with the brand of the Sun’s Final Light, the holy symbol of Amun-Ra. This was no mere spell but a High God’s cosmic reckoning.

Lines of oblivion, spaces that had previously been the absence of existence, congealed into a shadowy dark thing that looked vaguely humanoid. A black cloak hung behind her, an unpleasant affair woven of sorrow. Maeravel had once been flesh and blood, but now she was a husk formed of obsidian run through with lines of solar fire. The solar flame bound her into the husk, imprisoning her into a forced remembrance of what she was before her transformation. She tries to splinter and break apart, but the light brands hold her together implacably.

Only a maw and a void of a face had feasted upon the Gossamer Heart, but now a white ivory mask, blank and lacking lips, and eyes, gave a brief reminder of what Maeravel had given up in becoming the Sable Elegy. If one looked too long upon that face, you could see the devoured spirits trapped beneath the surface of Maerevel’s prison, and they whispered through the cracks.

The Sable Elegy transformed from a force of inevitable unmaking into a wounded wraith forced into the same cycle she once escaped, bound by a power greater than herself. It was being trapped by Shriekfang all over again.

“She’s vulnerable!” Ruth shouted.

♪ “Not forgotten, not unspoken,

Never unwritten in the gloam.

Sing their names, and they awaken,

Rise, Rise, and take their stories home.”♪

Shriekfang wasted no time. The obsidian blade burrowed deep into the chest of the Chorister; again and again, the blade unleashed a flurry of thrusts driven by the state of rage it had been driven to. Vengeance was necessary for making the blade question its reality.

Yet, for each hole made in the obsidian husk, a hole for the power contained within was opened. Bolts of discordant power blasted across the room to strike any unlucky enough to be in their path. Drynthor, down to only his Spiritual Shield and one arm, blocked those aimed at Dahlia and Mr. Disapoofer. One large blast of power obliterated the Spirit Hornet swarm, and another reduced Lorien to a hazy wisp, barely retaining his form.

Xeras pulled Gloombough from the ground and charged to join Shriekfang in the battle against the husk of Maeravel. The Gloamknight parried blast after blast from the Discordant Fey, an angry grunt escaping him with each additional attack that prevented him from closing the distance.

Dahlia’s voice echoed into Ruth’s mind.

“A-are you sure? Alright…” Ruth responded with a slight stammer, shocked by what she’d been commanded to do. Still, she lifted the wand that had belonged to her mother and burned three charges.

A larger-than-normal globe of shimmering black fire surrounded by a haze of purple bioluminescent spores launched from the end of Ruth’s wand. The ball shot quickly toward the Gossamer Heart, where the pulsing orb detonated. Tongues of black fire and purple destruction licked across the crystalline shell that protected the heart. On top of all the fissures created by the Sable Elegy, deep cracks appeared in the shell, and then massive chunks of the crystal fell.

Maeravel wailed. Her existence broke in the wrong direction!

Xeras, annoyed by being forced to dodge crystal chunks, bolts of discordant power, and the enraged slashes of Shriekfang, grasped the cursed rapier in his left hand and wielded the larger Gloombough in his right.

The Gloamknight unleashed a reckoning: five blows, a dance of slashes and thrusts, a lethal performance of the ultimate kinetic drama. The extra attack from Gloombough’s recent upgrade, mixed with the use of Valor Surge, turned the Gloamknight into a blur of violence that most of his companions could not keep up with to witness the glory of a Gloamknight unleashed.

And yet, the wrath of Gloamknight, Gloombough, and Shriekfang failed to kill Maeravel. More Discordant blasts escaped the binding solar brands, and the Grotto felt as if it might tilt back towards dissolution at any second—too much energy escaped the shattered husk. Despite the protections, despite their own strengths, Xeras, Gloombough, and Shriekfang teetered on the edge of existence by the time they retreated from the barrage of oblivion.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Drynthor shouted. The satyr didn’t know that Xeras had been buying time—time for Dahlia to absorb the power of the fallen

Dahlia hated what she knew she had to do. Maeravel didn’t deserve the mercy. All of her hackles rose, and she wanted to puke a pile of rainbow vomit all over Mr. Disapoofer rather than do what she knew would work. Every single mote of magic, every fiber of her being, even the deep core of magic within her that marked her the Inheritor of Lyrindris, recoiled at the unfairness of it all, at the grotesque necessity of what came next.

Maeravel was a monster—a lament that unmade, a thing that feasted on the Gossamer Heart, that tried to erase her, her minions, and the whole material world from existence with a song. She was a stain on the cycle of death and rebirth, a hunger that would never be sated. Her ilk didn’t deserve to exist. They needed to be expunged and exterminated, and everyone had to be wary against the rise of any new Discordant.

The taste of ashes filled Dahlia’s mouth as she forced her fingers, trembling with apoplectic rage, and wrote another name into the Gloam.

“Maeravel Thornheart of House Vesperwyn.” Dahlia spoke the words as she inscribed them into twilight—prismatic bile burned at the back of her throat the whole time. The name should be erased, forgotten, and not protected. But she spoke it anyway.

Reality snapped like a broken string on Dahlia’s lute. The fraying threads whipped through the Ebon Chorus like razor-edged echoes, unraveling the very fabric of the cosmic song and shadows alike. The grotto lurched. Its walls were simultaneously solid stone and unraveling mist, caught in a clash of remembrance and oblivion as reality reshuffled.