The snow did not feel cold anymore. It felt like nothing. A blank canvas upon which a billion screams had been etched, then scrubbed away, leaving only the ghost of their impression. Elias stood at the center of the crater his own body had carved, his breath a steady, silent plume in the Arctic air. His body was whole, unmarked, a pristine vessel that belied the carnage stored within.
He flexed his hand, watching the air around his fingers bend. Not shimmer with heat, but truly distort, as if space itself were a sheet of pliable glass and his will was the pressure. A single, perfect droplet of coalesced oxygen and nitrogen hung suspended between his thumb and forefinger, a tiny, pulsing star of his own creation. It was not water, not ice. It was a new state of matter, born from his refusal to accept the old ones.
With a thought, he let it go. It fell, and before it could touch the snow, it unraveled into a sigh of vapor, its brief existence a secret between him and the void.
Defiance.
The word was not a thought, but a core truth, as fundamental to him now as his own heartbeat. He was not manipulating energy. He was refusing to comply. Gravity was a suggestion he could ignore. Atomic bonds were agreements he could renegotiate. The universe had rules, and he was the exception.
A gust of wind, sharp enough to flay skin from bone, whipped across the pole. Elias didn't flinch. The air parted around him, a respectful bow to a greater force. He looked up at the auroras, those magnificent, indifferent veils of light. They were a beautiful lie. A painting on a prison wall.
Sienna.
Her name was a fracture in his soul, a wound that would not scar because he kept picking at it, ensuring it stayed fresh, ensuring it stayed real. In this reset, sanitized world, her absence was the one thing that felt authentic. It was the proof that this peace was a lie.
"She was the echo," a voice whispered, not from the wind, but from the ice beneath his feet.
Elias looked down. His reflection stared back, but it was wrong. The eyes were too old, the mouth set in a grim line of cosmic weariness. It was the face of the Hidden Phoenix. It was his own face, from a future he had yet to live.
"You made her from your need," the reflection said, its voice a dry rustle of collapsing stars. "A focal point for the paradox. Without the fracture, there was no need. Without the need, there was no her."
"Shut up," Elias rasped, his own voice raw from disuse.
"You can't silence the truth, Elias. You are the truth. The beautiful, terrible truth that this universe cannot digest. You are the splinter in its side."
The reflection smiled, a hollow, painful thing. "And you know what happens to splinters that cannot be removed?"
The ice where the reflection swam suddenly darkened, not with shadow, but with a profound, light-swallowing absence. For a terrifying second, Elias saw it again—the Crack. The glimpse of the other reality. Oceans of blood. Mountains of bone. A sky of watching eyes. It was the world beneath this one, the rotting foundation.
It was where she was.
The vision vanished, leaving him gasping, his hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles were white. The reflection was gone, replaced by the blank, milky surface of compacted snow.
They were right. The whispers, the fragments of himself—they were right. He was the fracture. And a fracture, if pushed with enough force, could split a world in two.
He would not just find her. He would tear a hole in this false reality and pull her back through.
But to do that, he needed to be more than a boy who could bend atoms. He needed to be a force that could break chains. He needed a teacher. A crucible.
He closed his eyes, not to block out the world, but to feel it. He pushed his consciousness outward, beyond the thin atmosphere, beyond the moon's pale pull, into the deep and silent black. He was looking for a scar, a wound in the cosmos left by an old, forgotten war.
And he found it.
It was faint, a psychic bruise on the fabric of space, a billion light-years away. A whisper of agony and immense, structured thought. It was the echo of the Vash'tari Dominion's extinction, a scream frozen in time. It was a trail.
His eyes snapped open, blazing with a light that had nothing to do with the auroras overhead.
"Alright," he said to the empty, frozen world. "Time for a pilgrimage."
He didn't run. He didn't leap. He simply decided that the space he occupied was no longer to his liking.
The air around him screamed.
It was a soundless, pressure-wave scream, the protest of physics being violently overruled. The snow in his crater did not melt; it sublimated, turning directly from solid to a expanding ring of superheated plasma. The very bedrock beneath the ice cracked with a report like a continent snapping in half.
And Elias was gone.
He was a projectile fired from the sling of his own will. The sky tore open around him, not a sonic boom, but a reality boom. He was a paradox in motion, and the universe scrambled to patch the hole he left in his wake. He shot through the stratosphere, the blue of the sky deepening to indigo, then to the perfect, star-dusted black of the void.
Earth fell away beneath him, a beautiful, fragile marble of lies. He didn't look back.
His body was his ship. His will was his engine. He navigated not by stars, but by the aching pull of that distant, psychic scar. He folded space not with technology, but by convincing it that the distance between two points was an illusion. He was re-drawing the map of the cosmos with himself as the pen.
Stars became streaks of light. Nebulae, vast and glorious, passed by in the blink of an eye. He saw the birth and death of suns, the slow, stately dance of galaxies. The sheer, crushing scale of it all would have driven a human mind insane.
But Elias was no longer entirely human. He was a story that had forgotten its beginning and was hurtling towards its end.
Days bled into weeks in the subjective time of his travel. He did not eat. He did not sleep. He sustained himself on the raw potential of the vacuum, drinking in the zero-point energy that bled from the cracks between dimensions. The whispers inside him grew louder, a council of his past and future selves debating his every move.
You are approaching the graveyard, one whispered, its voice like grinding tectonic plates. It was the voice of the survivor. The place where the 27 were born. Tread carefully. The dead there do not rest easy.
They are not dead, another voice countered, sharp and analytical. It was the voice of the Hidden Phoenix. They are a pattern. A disease. And you are walking into the infected tissue.
She might be there, a third voice, younger, more fragile—the voice of Elio—suggested with a thread of hope. In the echoes. In the memories they consumed.
Elias silenced them all. He needed focus. The psychic scar was no longer a faint whisper; it was a deafening roar, a siren song of ancient pain.
He slowed his impossible flight, his body shedding velocity like a snake shedding skin. He drifted into a region of space that was… wrong. It wasn't empty. It was full—full of ghosts.
Before him hung the nebula. It was not the vibrant, colorful cloud from astronomy pictures. This was a nebula of bone and ash. The light within it was a sickly, phosphorescent green, the color of infection. Vast, planet-sized shapes floated in the haze—the skeletal remains of the Vash'tari war-stations, their psychic-reinforced alloys twisted into screams of metal. Here and there, the colossal, bleached-white ribcage of a titan drifted like a forgotten moon.
This was the battlefield. The place where the universe itself had been forced to intervene.
The air—what passed for air in this void—thrummed with a residual madness. Elias could feel it, the psychic imprint of the 27's hunger, a bottomless void that had consumed stars and souls with equal indifference.
And then, he felt something else. A flicker. A coherent thought amidst the chaos. It was weak, a single ember in a sea of ash, but it was alive.
He moved toward it, his form cutting silently through the necrotic gas. He found the source nestled in the wreckage of a Vash'tari temple-ship, its elegant spires sheared in half. It was a stasis pod, its surface scarred and pitted, glowing with a faint, dying light. Inside, suspended in a gel of liquid light, was a being.
It was vaguely humanoid, but made of crystallized thought, its form shifting and shimmering. It was horrifically wounded; great chunks of its body were simply missing, dissolved into nothingness. This was the Last Witness, the final survivor of the Vash'tari Dominion.
As Elias drew near, the being's single remaining eye opened. It did not hold fear. It held a profound, weary curiosity.
A thought, smooth as polished stone, slid directly into Elias's mind. You are not one of the Devourers. Your song is different. It is… a single, sustained note of refusal. What are you?
Elias, unsure how to respond, simply thought back, projecting his intent, his purpose. I am looking for the ones who survived. The ones the Universe spared. The Keepers.
The Vash'tari's form flickered, a psychic wince. The Keepers… at the Core. They guard the memory. They wait for a sign. Its eye focused on Elias, seeing through his flesh, into the swirling paradox of his soul. You are the sign. The fragment of the Fragment. The question that seeks its own answer.
It was dying. Elias could feel its consciousness unraveling, its billion-year-old mind returning to the cosmic background noise.
Why did the Universe spare them? Elias asked, pressing forward. The five?
The Universe does not deal in mercy, the being thought, its light dimming. It deals in balance. The five were… anchors. A stable paradox within the unstable one. They were kept to complete a cycle. Your cycle.
With its last vestige of strength, the Vash'tari projected a complex, four-dimensional data-crystal of pure emotion and location—a psychic key. It was a map, a key, and a warning, all in one.
Take this. It will allow you to pass the Gate of Logic. Find the Keepers. They will show you the wound in time… the wound you must now tear open wider.
The light in the stasis pod faded. The crystalline form dissolved into motes of shimmering dust, which then scattered into the nebula, becoming one with the graveyard.
Elias was alone again, the psychic key burning in his mind like a new star.
He turned from the wreckage, his gaze hardening, looking toward the Galactic Core. The first step was over. The pilgrimage was just beginning.
He had found the map. Now, he had to walk the road.
And at the end of it, he would not just find answers.
He would find the architect of his own ruin.