The eye closed. The Rootspire sealed around them, silent once more.
Joe stood, breath ragged, hands trembling. Lightning still danced across his skin, but it felt less like a weapon and more like a question waiting to be asked. Kaelen and Wren moved closer. Riven kept his back to the wall, scanning the darkness ahead.
Then the Rootspire shifted.
Not physically. Reality around them stuttered like frames missing in a broken film. The roots beneath their feet pulsed and withdrew. Light, red and static-laced, flickered across the walls.
[SYSTEM INTERVENTION INITIATED]
Protocol: Partitioning.
Entity pathways detected. Assimilation begins.
Optimal sequences established.
"Storm boy," Wren started, stepping toward him.
Too late.
The floor split beneath them, not with violence but with intention. The Rootspire swallowed the ground in seams of light. Each of them fell in different directions, pulled sideways through corridors that had not existed moments before. Joe reached out, his storm reacting, but it passed harmlessly through Kaelen's fading form.
Riven cursed. Wren vanished in a blink.
Joe spun as the system washed over him.
[Subject Assigned: Path of Recursive Combat Memory]
Designating Trial Space...
Then there was silence.
And the trial began.
Riven landed on one knee, sword already half drawn. His breathing slowed. He did not call on the Light. Not here. He could feel its absence already. The Rootspire offered no grace.
The walls surrounding him pulsed like veins of dark stone, slick with moisture and memory. As he stood, the floor shifted beneath his boots. Each step echoed through the space like a whisper across ancient stone.
A voice followed him, low and metallic, embedded in the air.
[Subject: RIVEN]
Designation: Oathsworn
System Analysis: Devotion fractured
Initiating Trial One: The Field Where No One Returned
He closed his eyes.
He had known this would come.
The corridor widened into a battlefield. It was not the real one, but a recreation drawn from memory and shaped by cruelty. The sky hung low with choking clouds. Blades jutted from the scorched earth like accusations. Ash drifted through the air, clinging to the broken.
He had stood here once. Not alone then. Never alone. A dozen men and women had fought beside him, clad in oath-forged armor. Their hands had been steady with conviction. They had trusted him to lead. Trusted the Light to protect them.
Now they were bones.
Some still knelt in prayer, half sunken into the ground. Others reached upward as if pleading with gods that never came. The wind carried the scent of scorched metal and broken oaths.
"Forgive me," Riven whispered.
A figure stood among the fallen.
It wore his armor. His insignia. His face.
The double turned toward him. Its eyes were dull, not with blindness, but with knowledge too old to forget. Its voice came soft and absolute.
"You broke your vow."
"I didn't run," Riven said. His voice cracked with restraint.
"You led them here. You knew the order was wrong."
"I tried to stop it."
"You obeyed anyway."
Riven drew his sword. The metal felt heavier than it should have. Thunder growled above, but the sky held its tears.
The ground beneath him stirred.
The bodies began to rise. Not with life, but with command. They moved like marionettes pulled by memory's wires. Limbs jerked at sharp angles. Hollow eyes glowed faint with systemic fire.
One still wore a charm. A small sun etched into steel.
"Brother Haran," Riven whispered.
He remembered the night before the siege. The crude jokes. The promise he made to Haran in the quiet hour before dawn.
Now Haran's face was split in a silent scream.
[Assessment: Devotion nullified]
Oath Functionality: Unlinked
They charged.
Riven met them. His blade rose and fell, guided by pain, not faith. He struck them down one by one, and still they reformed. The battlefield became an engine of failure, cycling through death without end.
His sword arm burned.
His grip faltered.
He lost count of how many times he cut them down.
The double stood at the edge of the carnage, watching.
"You fought to protect," it said, stepping forward without raising a hand. "But you never knew who needed it most."
"I did everything I could."
"You begged the Light to forgive you."
"I still stand."
"For now."
The dead froze. The battlefield fell still. The sky collapsed inward like a wound closing.
[System Instability Detected]
Reforming Sequence. Initiate Trial Two
Riven staggered forward and caught himself.
He now stood in a ruined chapel.
Light filtered through a broken ceiling, but it offered no warmth. It was sterile and sharp, like observation. The pews lay in splinters. The altar had been reduced to rubble. Across the back wall, someone had carved his order's crest, now inverted and bleeding.
A child stood beneath it.
She looked no older than ten, her eyes empty but aware. In her hands she held Riven's sword. The blade was nearly as tall as she was.
"Will you take it back?" she asked.
Riven said nothing.
"Will you carry it again, even knowing what it cost?"
He stepped forward.
"I still believe in what we were," he said. "Even if no one else remembers."
The child tilted her head.
"That is not enough."
The sword vanished from her hands. The chapel shattered.
[Subject resisted collapse]
Transferring to next floor
Light surged around him.
And Riven was gone.
Far above, the Rootspire adjusted.
The trial moved on.
In a place untouched by stone or distance, the flame mage watched.
He stood beside a molten pool of vision, its surface painted in moments that had not yet settled into history. Riven's descent flickered across it. A ruined field. The mirror self. The chapel's broken seal.
The fire around the mage's fingers danced in quiet rhythm.
"He held," the mage said.
His companion, wrapped in layered bone and cloth, stirred.
"He was meant to break. The field was calibrated to pierce the oathbound mind."
"He carries shame like armor. It does not crack easily."
The figure tilted its head.
"He still clings to the Light."
The mage narrowed his eyes.
"No. He clings to the memory of it. There's a difference."
The pool flickered again. Riven was ascending. Slower now. Wounded, but upright.
"One floor conquered," the flame mage murmured. "Let us see what burns in the next."
The Rootspire pulsed.
And the watchers waited.