You laugh. The sound is hollow in the empty square.

“Human?” you hear yourself say. “Humanity is weakness. Mortality is a cage. I didn’t build Eldermoor to watch it crumble while I rot in the ground.”

Your hand closes around the gem.

The pain is immediate. Absolute. It tears through you like fire and ice and something far worse – the feeling of yourself being unmade, rewritten, hollowed out and filled with something ancient and eternal and utterly empty.

You feel your soul being drawn into the gem. Not consumed like the others – bound. You become the fourth pillar. The keystone. The vessel that holds the other three in place.

And in that moment, you stop being Varek the Shieldborn.

You become something else. Something that wears his face, speaks with his voice, but has traded everything that made him human for centuries of cold, endless existence.