Her tone left no space for hesitation. Spirit energy shimred faintly around her hand as she reached toward the lid, the pulse matching the tray’s growing hum. The air thickened instantly—cold, charged with potential. The scent of ozone grew more tallic, more pointed, like sothing about to crack.
"You’re soul will interconnect every 122 days," she said, as she brought her other hand into place, steadying the surface. "Roughly a single day will pass back on your ho world. When that happens, you’ll lapse back to your original body, temporarily."
Her eyes t Elias’s, sharp behind the lenses. Not unkind—just precise.
"It’s important that neither body dies during that period. You’re now tethered across both tilines. If one ends..."
She shook her head once, jaw tight.
"I don’t know what happens to a split soul after death. But it won’t be good."
The hum intensified.
Dot’s glow pulsed in rhythm. Elias’s shimr followed, and the chamber’s walls responded—veins of red light crawling higher like circuitry coming to life.
And the countdown began.Elias’s glow pulsed unevenly, the edges of his light fraying with hesitation. His voice wavered as it slipped through the tension-heavy air, reaching across the chamber.
"I’m sorry... I’m not sure I get it," he said.
It wasn’t defiance. Just raw confusion. And under that—fear.
He hovered above the tray’s smooth surface, the resonance of the tower pressing inward like a weight on his chest. Dot remained dim beside him, still curled in her orb, the pulse of her light just barely in sync with his own. The ache of Kikaru’s absence, of the unknown that lay ahead, bore down harder than ever.
Emma didn’t look at him.
She kept her eyes on the tray interface, the glow of spirit energy flickering across her fingertips as she adjusted the final rune sequences. Her braid shifted with the tilt of her head, catching the faint shimr from the starlight pouring through the high split above.
Her tone ca sharp. Clinical.
"Well, too bad."
Her words cut the air like a scalpel—efficient, unapologetic.
"You’ll figure it out as you go. I don’t have the luxury of slowing things down just because soone didn’t finish asking questions."
Her palm hovered above the release lock, spirit energy gathering tighter in a swirling halo.
"I don’t want to waste ti regretting the data."
Elias’s glow dimd again.
He tried to speak. A final thought, maybe a joke, or a plea for sothing slower. Anything that might ease the weight coiling in his chest.
"I thought ti was endle—"
The lid ca down.
Hard.
The clang split the air, echoing off every bone-threaded wall in the chamber. For a mont, the pulse of the room halted.
Then the tray lit up in full.
The hum turned into a deep vibration that traveled through the floor, into the tower’s foundation, through the veins of crystal and mist—shaking the walls as if the structure itself was exhaling.
And inside that sealed compartnt, wrapped in layered folds of dinsional charge, Elias and Dot began to fall. Suddenly, a guttural engine roared to life beneath the tower, deep and ragged like the breath of sothing ancient waking for the first ti in eons.
The sound filled the entire chamber—not just with noise, but with pressure. Every inch of air seed to vibrate, molecules pushed against one another by so unseen force, the crystalline walls quivering under the strain. The telescope-like device bucked in its fra, and the fine-point needle at its tip flared to life—white-hot, violent, a piercing spear of energy focused into a singular, unflinching direction.
Spirit energy spiraled around its spine, blinding in intensity, the obsidian casing shaking as if resisting the power it was designed to wield. Cracks splintered across the do overhead, though none spread far—anchored by sothing more stable than matter. Crimson mist whipped through the room in violent eddies, torn into spirals by the rapidly rising energy signature, as if the Expanse itself was being drawn into focus.
Then the sky ruptured.
A single, apocalyptic bang echoed across the entire tower. The sound didn’t just resonate—it slamd into the stone and bone like a tidal wave. The floor jolted. Runes on the walls lit with frantic, cascading pulses of blue and red. Stars overhead twisted into distorted threads of light.
And Elias—
—was gone.
Shot like a bullet through reality.
There was no tunnel. No atmosphere. No propulsion he could understand.
Just force.
He scread, but the sound was swallowed instantly, torn from him like excess weight. His body—what little remained of it in this incorporeal form—flickered violently as the sheer velocity of travel shattered his understanding of speed. Every second, he was stretched further. Compressed tighter. His glow surged, then dimd, then surged again as if struggling to hold cohesion.
Streaks of light—cot-like ribbons—dashed past him, red and blue and gold, shifting into strange symbols before dissolving. Shapes blinked at the edges of his perception. Windows into alien systems. Frozen planets. War-torn worlds. Vast beasts that drifted between galaxies without ever touching a sun.
He felt them watching him.
One pair of eyes blinked open from within a dying moon. Another shape—a ring of light devouring a world at its center—paused mid-collapse, almost like it noticed him.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t cry. Couldn’t scream.
The guilt still smoldering from that final mont in the arena. But sothing else pushed beneath those layers now. A heat in his core—different from the mist, different from the shard.
It pulsed once.
And the universe twitched in response.
A color he’d never seen before bled across the stars. The starlight around him bent—not away from his velocity, but toward him, as if sothing in him was pulling it. The air didn’t just carry pressure now; it carried mory. He felt it—a whisper at the base of his form. Not from his mind. From sothing older.
You weren’t the first to be sent this way.
But you may be the last.
The void twisted, folding in on itself, and a shape erged in the distance—massive, slow-turning, alive with motion and color. The planet Giselsin.
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