Elder Lysara's voice filled the crystal chamber, steady and commanding yet somehow soothing. "Close your eyes," she instructed, her words echoing softly against the glowing walls. "Empty your mind of all distractions. Think only of what you stand for, what you believe in. Let these core truths anchor you as we begin."
The group settled deeper into their lotus positions. The floor—smooth, living wood coaxed to the coolness of stone—held them the way a mountain holds old snow. Above, crystals breathed in slow radiance; their pulse washed over the curved walls in shifting patterns that resembled tide and heartbeat at once. Sound thinned to breath and the faint susur of the world-tree's sap pulling quiet songs through its veins.
"Don't think of anything else," Lysara continued. Her hand rose, then she pointed to a spot at the base of her own spine. "Keep only your deepest convictions in mind as you try to circulate the energy through your body. Direct it here—to the Muladhara chakra."
She did not simply indicate; she demonstrated the exact angle, the precise measure of focus, the patience hidden inside the gesture. "Root," she said. "Home. Foundation."
Amara's lashes lowered. Her core truths gathered without bidding: the faces of children behind glass; Tian's silhouette against blast doors; Elena's fingers counting her pulse; the orb's soft hum when darkness pressed hardest. The divine current that had been flowing chaotically through her for weeks seemed to pause, listening. When she invited it—careful, deliberate—it answered.
Warmth pooled at the base of her spine, delicate at first, then steady, like sunlight held through a lens on winter bark. Her breathing deepened by its own will, ribs expanding in slow waves, the exhale smoothing into silence. What had been a river in flood became a spring learning the shape of a basin.
Meanwhile, Tian held the glowing orb between his palms. Its light wasn't bright; it was alive—pulsing like a distant lighthouse through fog. He looked down at it one final time—the divine gift that had followed them into abyss and wonder—and the weight of the choice gathered in his mouth before the orb did.
He thought of the ledger of lives he carried. He thought of Zivan's cough and the way the stars had listened. He thought of the word guide and how much he hated it when it meant walking first into dark. Then he took a breath that felt like a promise and placed the orb in his mouth.
He swallowed it like a large pill. It slid, not like stone, but like a seed passing into soil.
The transformation was instantaneous and violent.
Radiant energy exploded through Tian's body like liquid fire racing veins it had just decided to name. Every nerve screamed as divine power sought to remake him from the inside out—not violent for its own sake, but relentless, as if the body must be scoured of its smallness to fit what came next. His back arched, muscles seizing into crescendos that had no music. The orb's essence spread through every cell, every fiber—covering nothing, replacing nothing, but rewriting everything.
The energy felt too vast, too pure for his mortal frame—like trying to contain an ocean in a teacup.
"AHHH!" Tian's scream tore through the chamber. He began to fall backward, consciousness thinning to threads under the assault of transformation. Golden light erupted from his skin in waves, rolling off him like a star remembering itself, heat surging hard enough to punch the air.
Elena shot to her feet, terror cracking her composure. "Tian!" She reached toward him—but the heat lifted the hairs on her arm like a warning and pushed her back.
Kai scrambled away from his meditation, eyes blown wide. "What's happening to him? Is he dying?"
Around them, chairs scraped softly against wood; boots dragged; the team's disciplined stillness broke. The sight of their leader writhing under a rain of light shook training loose from bone.
But Elder Lysara remained perfectly calm. She rose like a bell note struck true, arm cut through the hot, shimmering air; she raised her hand—and the chaotic energy bucked against something that was not there a heartbeat before. The flood met a shore.
Her power moved without spectacle, a silver current interposing itself between golden shockwaves and everything breakable. The light bowed, not extinguished, not denied—contained. "Rudhas," she said, and the syllable carried the finality of a latch sliding into place.
Energy obeyed. Panic did, too.
Moving with practiced precision, Lysara began weaving her own force around Tian's convulsing form. Silver light spiraled from her fingertips—not rope, not chain, but thread. It wrapped him in a cocoon that pulsed in rhythm with his hammering heart, the pattern adjusting with each beat as if reading a score and correcting it mid-song. Wild divinity writhed, reared, and then settled into guided channels under her touch.
The scream became a hoarse exhale. Through the silver, Tian's silhouette slackened, joints unhooking from agony's grip. The golden flare softened to a steady aureole. His chest rose and fell—rough, then less so, then steady.
Only Amara remained unmoved, as if her body remembered the exact shape of this storm. She had crawled through a similar fire and come out with stars in her eyes. Pain, she knew, was not always the enemy; sometimes it was the gatekeeper.
Lysara turned to the startled group, patience in her gaze, instruction in her posture. "You may begin again," she said. "Nothing will happen to him, I assure you. Don't worry—this is just a small residue of energy displacement when divine essence first enters the body. It is completely normal."
Elena hesitated, throat working, eyes locked on the cocoon. "Are you certain he's safe?"
"I have guided this process many times," Lysara replied, gentle confidence braided with steel. "His body is adapting. The worst is over. Now he will sleep while the energy settles into his chakra system. This is why we train together—so I can contain and guide the transformation safely."
The room exhaled. One by one, the team lowered themselves, the skitter of fear still moving through their muscles but obeying the elder's han0d. The cocoon of silver light pulsed like a living shell; behind it, Tian's breathing evened enough to be seen, not guessed. The golden glow no longer threatened. It kept vigil.
"Focus on your own awakening now," Lysara instructed, reseating herself with the grace of a tree bending to wind. "Feel for any warmth or tingling at the base of your spine. Even without orbs, you can begin to sense the energy that Tian and Amara are generating. It will be subtle at first—like feeling sunlight through closed eyelids."
Elena closed her eyes. She unclenched her hands finger by finger, fighting the habit of fixing, of standing, of moving toward hurt with tools. She placed those habits at the chamber's threshold and sat with what remained. Slowly, she began to detect something—a faint warmth that hadn't been there before, as if a small hearth had been lit behind the bones at her tail.
Kai let his breath fall into the room's rhythm. His mind tried to inventory sensation, to categorize it into knowns and estimates. The attempt failed, but the effort quieted him. At the base of his spine, a gentle stirring answered—the first hint of spring after a long winter, a seed deciding on root.
Around the circle, others felt echoes: a hum beneath skin, a weight that wasn't heavy, a pressure that wasn't pain. The chamber took note. The crystals' pulse knit itself to the group's breath, and a low resonance thrummed in the floorboards like a choir of bones learning a new hymn.
"Muladhara," Lysara said softly. "Breathe into the word even if you do not understand it. Imagine red—not bright, not violent. Ember. The kind a careful hand hides in bark to carry fire through rain."
Amara's warmth stabilized into a roundness that did not wobble, a fullness that did not leak. The urge to rise, to fly, to split herself from flesh, quieted under that anchored glow. She felt, for the first time since the gift broke her open, the relief of gravity as ally.
Tian slept. Inside the silver, the golden seep threaded into him like a river choosing a thousand capillaries. It found points Lysara had named—root, bones, belly—and lingered, mapping him to itself and itself to him. A muscle in his cheek twitched once, then smoothed. He dreamed—not of darkness, not of battle—of a long hallway opening into light.
"Good," Lysara murmured, whether to them or the room or the tree it was impossible to tell. "If the mind wanders, remind it: foundation. If fear rises, give it a stool and let it sit. It will tire."
Elena's worry did not vanish. It took a different seat. In its place, a small warmth became a language she might one day learn to speak. Kai's analysis did not stop; it learned stillness as a variable. The scout who had never trusted silence discovered that this kind had no teeth.
The chamber filled with focused quiet as the awakening truly began for them all.
Minutes lost their sharpness. The world outside the circle paused, then resumed, then forgot to intrude. Somewhere above, a crane called once, and the sound arced down through wood as a reminder that beyond breath and bone, life went on, insistent and ordinary.
The silver cocoon dimmed by a degree, not failing but settling into a watch that did not need to declare itself. Tian's glow lowered to a halo as if the sun had tucked clouds around itself for sleep. Amara's ember held. Lysara's hands rested on her knees, but light continued to ribbon from her in threads thin as thought.
"Remember," she said at last, voice low. "We climb slowly because the body is a temple built one stone at a time. Root. Then root again. Then everything else."
In the hush that followed, core truths held, and the first foundations were laid.