You choose annihilation.

The relics flare with terrible light. You pour everything into them—your anger, your grief, your three-hundred-year-old rage on behalf of the founders. No mercy. No redemption. Just an end.

“NO!” Varek screams, but it’s too late.

The light hits him like a hammer. His shadow armor cracks, shatters, dissolves. The Hollow King staggers, clawing at the air as the power that sustained him for centuries is ripped away.

But something is wrong.

The founders’ spirits are screaming too.

“The connection!” Seraphine cries. “He bound us so deeply—destroying him is destroying US—”

You try to stop, but the relics have their own momentum now. The light is hungry. It wants to cleanse everything.

Varek falls. His form crumbles, shadow bleeding away, until all that remains is a figure—small, broken, weeping. The real Varek, exposed at last. But there’s no redemption in his eyes. Only hate.

“Curse you,” he whispers. “Curse you all.”

And then he’s gone. Utterly, completely gone. Not just destroyed but erased, as if he never existed.

The founders collapse.

“We’re… we’re free,” Aldric gasps. “But we can’t… we can’t stay…”

Their spirits are fragmenting. The destruction of Varek shattered the Binding so violently that they have nothing to anchor them. They’re dispersing, scattering to the winds.

“Wait!” You reach for them. “I can help—”

“No.” Seraphine’s form is already fading. “The destruction was too complete. We’re… we’re everywhere now. In the wind. In the stones. In the very light of the gem.”

“We’ll still watch over Eldermoor,” Thornwen says, her voice a whisper on the breeze. “But we’ll never be whole again.”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I didn’t know—”

“You made a choice.” Aldric’s final words. “We are free. That’s what matters.”

They fade. Gone. Everywhere and nowhere.

The gem’s light stabilizes, but it’s dimmer now. Colder. The city is saved, but something has been lost.

Something that can never be recovered.

Varek is destroyed. Utterly, completely erased from existence. The founders are free—but their souls were too intertwined with his power. They’ve scattered, dispersing into the world itself. They’ll never know peace, never find rest, only an eternal existence as fragments of themselves.

Eldermoor survives. But the gem’s light is cold now. The city mourns without knowing what it’s mourning. And you… you carry the weight of a choice that saved the world but broke something irreplaceable.