The concept of a "year" was a ghost. It had no meaning here, no orbit, no harvest moon to mark its passing. Time was measured in cycles of agony and exhaustion, in the slow, grinding erosion of everything they had once been.
Breathing was the foundation. Feeding was the next, violent lesson in their unmaking.
"You think you run on food? Water?" K's voice was a dry rasp, the first words he'd spoken in what felt like weeks. He watched them, a predator observing wounded prey. "Primitive. Inefficient. Here, you run on that." A casual wave of his hand took in the swirling, luminous currents. "You learn to metabolize raw potential. Or you starve to death in a sea of infinite energy."
He demonstrated. It was a subtle, almost invisible thing. A faint, thread-like stream of gold light detached from the ambient glow and flowed into his parted lips. There was no swallow, no convulsion. He simply… absorbed it. A faint, warm radiance pulsed under his skin for a moment before fading. "Your bodies are ghosts of a denser reality. Here, you must become more real. Feed."
Deo's first attempt was a study in catastrophic failure. Driven by a gnawing emptiness that was more spiritual than physical, he drew in a thread of energy the way K had. But his control was a brittle thing, shattered by exhaustion. It wasn't a sip; it was a drowning man's gasp.
The energy hit his system not like food, but like a white-hot wire. It seared through his meridians, a violent, alien invasion. His nerves shrieked in unison. His vision whited out, replaced by a fireworks display of pure pain. He convulsed on the warm pearlescent floor, his body arching as it tried to reject a form of sustenance it had no framework to process. His muscles locked, his teeth grinding, a silent scream trapped in his throat.
Anya cried out, lurching toward him, but K's arm shot out, a bar of iron blocking her path.
"Let him cook," K said, his tone utterly dispassionate. "His biology is rewriting its own source code. Interfere, and you might get a half-formed creature that can't survive anywhere, inside this chamber or out."
She was forced to watch, her own hands clenched into fists so tight her nails drew blood from her palms. She watched the veins on Deo's neck and temples bulge, glowing with a sickly inner light. It lasted for an eternity of minutes, his body shuddering through the violent conversion. When it finally subsided, he was left curled on his side, hollow-eyed and trembling, gasping for air that was no longer his to breathe. But he was alive. More than alive. The world seemed sharper, the hum of the chamber a clearer, more distinct note. He had been violently unmade, just a little.
Sleep was a more insidious torture.
True, unconscious sleep was a fantasy. The energy surrounding them was too potent, too stimulating to the soul. The chamber did not allow for such vulnerability. Rest was a state of hyper-aware, meditative trance a conscious, deliberate lowering of their metabolic and neural activity while maintaining a perfect, controlled draw of energy to sustain the body in stasis.
Deo failed, again and again. His mind, pushed beyond its limits, would finally short-circuit, plunging him into the blessed oblivion of true sleep. The moment his conscious control vanished, the chamber's energy would flood into his undefended form. He would wake screaming, not from nightmares, but from the visceral sensation of being dissolved, unmade, his identity washed away by a torrent of pure, undifferentiated power. He'd spend what felt like days recovering, gaunt and shivering, his sense of self feeling thin and frayed, before the cycle of exhaustion would force him to try again.
Anya mastered it first. Her connection to the energy was quieter, less of a battle and more of a negotiation. She found a quiet corner of her mind the memory of the orphanage's sun-warmed roof, the feel of a well-worn book and built a fortress around it. She could sink into that stillness, a state of waking rest where she was both deeply relaxed and acutely aware of the ebb and flow of every energy current around them. She became their silent sentinel.
She watched over Deo during his brutal failures. She couldn't stop the pain, but her presence, the soft, steady rhythm of her own controlled breath, became a lifeline for him, a pattern to latch onto in the storm of his own unraveling.
The breaking point came during a "rest" cycle.
Deo was closer than he had ever been. He was balanced on that knife's edge of awareness, his consciousness tethered to the rhythm of Anya's breathing nearby. He could almost touch the stillness.
Then, the chamber shifted. A rogue current, a violent eddy in the normally placid flow of energy, brushed against their platform.
For Deo, it was a jolt, a surge he could absorb with a grunt of effort, a spike of pain quickly mastered.
For Anya, it was a sledgehammer to the soul.
It shattered her carefully constructed meditation. The memory of the sun-warmed roof exploded into a million shards. The energy she had been gently, consciously guiding into herself became a raging flood, obliterating her fragile control. It wasn't the violent rejection Deo suffered; it was a silent, horrific dissolution. Her eyes flew open, wide with a terror beyond pain. It was the terror of erasure. She couldn't move. She could feel the chamber's essence trying to overwrite her own, to dissolve the memory of Anya and replace it with the serene, indifferent logic of the chamber itself. She was fading, becoming a ghost, a whisper in the machine.
"Deo..." It was less a name and more a final, desperate signal from a dissolving star.
Deo's eyes snapped open. He saw her. She was glowing with a soft, terrifying light, her form becoming translucent, insubstantial. The world narrowed to that single, horrifying image. The council's cold calculus echoed in his head. One life against all creation?
His answer was a raw, guttural roar that tore from a place deeper than thought, deeper than training.
"NO!"
He didn't breathe. He didn't try to control. He reached. With the raw, stubborn, apocalyptic will that had let him stare into the face of a Prime Mover and live, he wrapped that will around her like a fortress wall. He wasn't drawing energy in; he was violently expelling it, forcing it out, away from her, creating a desperate, unstable bubble of dead space around her dissolving form.
It was brute force. Ugly. A spectacularly inefficient conflagration of power that burned through his hard-won reserves in a single, desperate act.
But it worked.
The invasive energy receded, repelled by the sheer, undirected force of his defiance. Anya gasped, a raw, sucking sound, her form solidifying, color rushing back to her cheeks in a painful-looking flood. She collapsed forward, her body wracked with silent, relief-filled sobs.
Deo stood over her, panting, sparks of wildly wasted power dying on his skin like fading embers. The chamber seemed to watch him, its eternal hum now holding a new, curious note.
K, who had been a silent observer throughout the entire crisis, finally spoke.
"Stubborn," he said, and for the first time, there was a faint, undeniable hint of something that might have been approval in his flat tone. "A stupid, wasteful, brutish expenditure of energy. You burned a subjective year's worth of cultivation in three seconds. But…" He paused, his head tilting. "You moved the immovable object through sheer, pig-headed refusal. A flawed tool is still a tool."
He walked over and looked down at Anya, who was still shaking, curled on the floor. "You reached for the energy like it was a friend. It is not. It is a tool. A wild animal. You must dominate it, or it will dominate you." His gaze, sharp and assessing, shifted to Deo. "And you. You just tried to beat it into submission with a club. Also stupid. Effective, but stupid."
He let the lesson hang in the air between them, the first real teaching that went beyond simple critique.
"Tomorrow," K said, the word a promise and a threat. "We learn the difference."