The compressed sanctuary drifted like a prayer too small for the mouth that made it, a speck of hope crossing an endless sea of rot. Its opalescent skin caught the sick light leaking through poisoned clouds and threw it back as tiny rainbows—mocking, maybe, but still beautiful, defiant points of color stitched across a sky that had forgotten how to be kind. From a distance it would have looked like dust. From up close, if anything could get close enough and survive, it was a world tucked inside a bead of wonder.
Something else moved.
It did not slither as much as rearrange geography. It was a serpent of impossible scale, so long its body could have been mistaken for broken ridges left behind by a continent dragging its nails. Its scales were darker than shadow, darker than absence—matte and light-drinking, a fabric sewn from night. Its bulk lay coiled within a collapsed mountain line, tucked into the ruin as if mountains had been designed as its cradle, as if epochs had made room for its patience. It had eyes like cauterized suns: yellow slits burning with an intelligence not cruel by accident, but by design—patient as famine, sure as a debt.
It had been waiting.
Years, perhaps. Longer. A creature like this measured time with its bones, not with minutes. It had felt the sanctuary's tremors through the deep—unmistakable signatures of a city folding, a world unhooked and lifted. It had tasted the flare of the ritual, the way elder power churned the air into a storm only things like it could smell. It had settled into the perfect angle to intercept something no one had ever tried in open air: migration by miracle.
When the seed came within reach, patience let go of restraint.
It struck with a speed that made the sky look slow. The jaws opened—hinge no hinge should have, a mouth not just wide but deep, depth that clutched at the eye and made perspective into a liar. In a single, ghastly clean motion, it swallowed the speck whole. A civilization disappeared like grit washed down a throat. The seed slid into dark that felt like the ocean saying yes.
Amara opened her mouth to scream across a distance that did not care about voices—
BAM.
Tian's eyes snapped open inside a silver cocoon, the jolt of awareness like lightning slamming down a rod. Golden energy threaded his vision, revealing streams of colored light that belonged to every living being around him. The chamber glowed with Grand Elder Zivan's familiar pulse, that steady river of power he'd come to recognize—air thick with borrowed life, crystals floating in courteous orbits overhead. Every contour was knife-sharp.
Something was wrong.
It wasn't a sensation. It was a verdict. Wrong, because his entire body knew where this moment belonged on the timeline—and it did not belong here. The shape of the room, the angle of the light slanting across Elder Lysara's cheekbone, the precise slouch of Kai's shoulders as he sat cross-legged in mild frustration—all of it had already happened.
"How do you feel?" Elder Lysara asked, careful hands moving to dissolve the cocoon, voice warm, exactly as he remembered—same cadence, same dip of breath before the last word, same concern wrapped around iron like velvet around a blade.
Tian stared, confusion rising from gut to throat like nausea. A wave of déjà vu broke over him hard enough to stagger a man standing; he was seated and silver-still, and still it almost pushed him out of himself. Every detail was identical: crystals with faint inner halos, teammates in positions that made a map he could have drawn with his eyes closed, shadows laid down by the chamber's glow like the ink of a page reprinted from the same plate. He had lived this moment. He could have mouthed Lysara's next sentence and not missed a syllable.
"Where am I, Elder Lysara?" he heard himself ask. The words fell out of his mouth as if greased by fate, hollow and prewritten, like lines a tongue has already learned while the mind still argues with the script.
His gaze swept again—the floating luminescent stones; the ring of faces in meditation; the stillness at the center of the circle that meant Amara's spirit had stepped out again. The realization hit with physical force.
Was it a dream? The battle, the elders' choreography, the seed born from a city, the impossible compression and the wind carrying a world—had that been nothing but an elaborate vision embroidered by exhaustion and power? But how could a dream carry heat like that, the stink of Hasura ichor, the hoarse shouts that had scraped throats raw? How could a dream return to him the precise weight of a spear handle in Yavia's palm? Dreams did not teach you the taste of fear drying on the back of your tongue.
Elder Lysara's study of his face felt like a hand pressed to a fever. Patient, thorough. She had guided dozens through this, maybe hundreds. "You need time to settle the energy within yourself. Rest for now," she said, exactly as she had said before, the words laying down rails for events already on their way.
Something clicked in the room. The scene unspooled.
Dr. Sarah Chen straightened in her meditation pose with the same small, excited jerk of shoulders he remembered, the same brightness snapping through her eyes like a lamp turned up. "Elder Lysara," she began, voice trembling at the edges with that familiar blend of scientific curiosity and child's wonder, "with this newfound learning, if we practice diligently like this, can we also develop superpowers? I'm really excited about what abilities we might gain! Will we be able to do the incredible things we've seen Yavia and her team accomplish?"
The question hung perfectly, in the same space it had hung before. Tian watched the air accept it as if the room itself had been waiting for the exact weight and shape of that sentence again. Faces tilted, eager and wary—Kai leaning in a fraction, interest softer because he had been humbled by meditation but not extinguished.
Elder Lysara's expression shifted into thoughtfulness with the same measured pause. "You must understand," she said, and Tian mouthed the words in the privacy of his mind as they arrived, "that you will need to train diligently, and it will require much more time than you might imagine. This is because you do not carry divine blessings like Tian and Amara now do. A human bonded with a divine orb experiences a fundamentally different process than those of us who must cultivate energy naturally."
Word for word. Gesture for gesture. If destiny was a play, then it had a very strict stage manager.
Marcus lifted his hand, practical as always, and asked about surface travel, darkness, immunity. Lysara shook her head, the same gentle denial, explaining the necessity of reaching and stabilizing the second chakra, the Svadhisthana, before the miasma could be navigated without suicide. Elena asked, voice a careful bridging of respect and need, how high the elder had climbed. Lysara's shoulders held the same angle of pride and humility; the number, one hundred and forty-two years, landed with the same mineral weight, the third chakra measured out like a boundary she had been pushing against for decades. The ripple of admiration and fear that passed through the team moved them in the same order—Sarah's eyes widening first, Marcus's mouth thinned second, Kai's gaze dropping, Elena's jaw setting in that way that meant she would rewrite the odds with stubbornness if math refused.
The overlapping questions about Zivan's level fell from tongues like marbles spilled again. Lysara raised her hand for quiet, palm cut from the same halo of light, and spoke with the same respect about the fourth chakra, the Anahata, and the gulf that grew monstrous between each ascent. She could not say if anyone had mastered the fifth in this broken age. She said it again, and the room believed it again.
Tian did not interrupt. If this was prophecy, he would not shake it loose with panic. If this was a loop, he would not tear at it like a trapped animal and make the net cinch tighter. He watched with the focus of a surgeon deciding where to cut.
It happened then, just as before. Amara's body did not move, but something in the air shifted—the subtle cooling he had learned to recognize, the way the chamber's light seemed to refocus around a vacancy that was not absence but departure. Her consciousness unhooked with the grace of a lantern being lifted by a careful hand. In his enhanced state, he could see her projection: a slim, bright silhouette sliding out through skin and ward, moving through the room's golden streams like a fish through water. The sanctuary's glowing web was as magnificent as it had been—the Grand Elder's life force connecting all things in quiet loops, a radiant net of belonging that made nonsense of the surface world's famine. She swam it like a mapmaker who had fallen in love with the river she charted.
Tian sat very still. The room carried on with its script. Questions and answers. Hopes and cautions. The architecture of a future built carefully on the floor of a room that was starting to feel like a record skipping back to the same groove.
He thought of the seed sliding like a tear into a mouth that had been waiting. He thought of the way his heart had clenched when the serpent's jaws closed, the absurdity of protesting physics to a nightmare that had made its own. He thought of the word dream and tasted how thin it was against what he had seen.
If the scene played the same today, the alarm would come again, a mental bell striking every bone. The assembly would race. The horde would approach. The parasites would be found and cut from the ground. The sanctuary would turn tree into seed and seed into dust, and the wind would lift them—and the serpent would be there at the perfect angle where hope had to pass.
He sat within déjà vu until it felt like a rope in his hands. He did not pull. He held it. He breathed and made a quiet decision behind his teeth: when the script turned toward alarm, he would test time with a single word out of place—not to break the world, but to see if the world could bend.
For now he watched as if watching would teach him how to win at a game he had not agreed to play. Amara's spirit traced the golden rivers above as if love alone could draw better routes into the dark.
And far away, in the memory of one version of the future—or the certainty of the next—something the size of a mountain listened for the tremor of a seed.