Once the decision was made, Prism Base became a grim, precise machine running beyond its limits.
Leighton's faction—filled with suspicion and dread—hurled every available material at structural reinforcement, obsessively buttressing the cavern, the fractures, the ring of rock around the wound. They tried to hold back the hungry dark with bolts and plates and brute force.
Dr. Dane's team, hand-in-hand with the engineering corps, worked on the other front. They took the partly intact Hades conduits and, risking everything, began to rewire a wildly unstable, never-tested return path—an improvised channel meant to guide the stolen blue energy back to the Relic.
The Dominator insisted that Prism feed the scattered azure energy back into the Primordial Relic—and physically open a path so it could touch the artifact itself. It insisted it must make direct contact to perform some calibration or healing. The demand was lunacy: bring that colossal aberration into the heart of the base?
Evelyn Kane's fingernails dug so deep into her palms she could feel the pain. It was a gamble more insane than activating Hades had been.
But staring at the widening wound outside, feeling the mounting psychic pressure and the space itself twist, she had no choice.
"Agree to it." Her voice was hoarse.
"But tell it," she added, hard as steel, "any hostile move and we blow the core. We burn with you."
Neo relayed that grim consent. He felt the Dominator's awareness give a pulse of acknowledgement.
Thus the cooperation began.
At the Dominator's command, the swarming abominations parted. A corridor opened through the tide of beasts. The Dominator itself—huge as a mountain, a grotesque fusion of organism and salvaged machine—walked, each step shaking the ground, toward the breach where Prism's main gate had been shattered.
Soldiers watching the feeds felt breathless terror press against their ribs.
At the same time, the return flow was started. The remaining azure energy was painstakingly gathered and, through the jury-rigged conduit, poured back like a slow stream into the keening heart of the Primordial Relic.
The Relic's light shuddered, becoming wildly unstable—now as bright as a star, now guttering like a candle. The Dominator did not heed the tense ranks of guards as it moved. It had a singular aim: the core chamber.
It exuded something impossible to name—an ancient weight, a sorrow threaded through its presence.
Behind thick observation glass, Evelyn, Neo, Dr. Dane and others watched, holding their breath.
When the Dominator reached the core, it touched the pulsing blue skin with appendages that were part limb, part manipulator. In an instant the chamber flooded with incomprehensible radiance. Neo felt a wave of raw information crash into his mind—not the stuttering whispers now, but clean, horrible visions and knowledge.
He saw a civilization once great beyond imagining. They had found the Relic, revered it as a gateway to higher dimensions. They attempted a reckless experiment to tap boundless power. It failed catastrophically. The Relic's stability was broken; its outputs warped reality and tore space—triggering the Dark Tide.
And the Dominator—whatever it had been before—had been the chief safety officer of that experiment. In the final moments it had tried to stop the collapse and failed. It too had been ripped and transformed by the catastrophe, its body mangled by aberrant energies. Miraculously, a shard of its consciousness and mission had remained: to guard and try to heal the Relic, to prevent the Devourer from fully descending.
Many of the abominations were once-kin, warped and twisted, drawn by that residue of purpose. They gathered around the Relic, both as guardians and as drawn congregants.
Repair began. The Dominator used its vast, tainted essence and the return current from Prism as a strange, terrible counterpoint to calm the Relic's internal turbulence. Light within the chamber flickered violently; space folded and then eased in fits. Outside, the ravenous Void's expansion slowed, then jittered in unstable fits.
But cost rose like a bill called due.
As the Dominator poured its own being into the act, its monstrous frame visibly withered—dimming, drying, collapsing as if burning itself to fuel the repair. Prism's energy reserves teetered on depletion: lights guttered, life-supports threw warning alarms.
"It's not enough… just a bit more…" Neo murmured, feeling the mutual exhaustion of Relic and Dominator.
Evelyn made a decision as desperate as it was absolute. She ordered every reserve—the emergency stores, even the power reserved for the deepest shelters' life support—poured into the return.
"Commander! The bunkers—people—" her officer stammered.
"If we fail, they all die," Evelyn said without flinch. "This is the only chance."
The final surge flowed like sacramental rain. The Dominator released a soundless roar, fusing its last strength with the Relic.
For a heartbeat the chamber blossomed in steady blue, a soft halo rippling outward, washing the entire base and even reaching across bedrock into the wasteland beyond.
The Void slit—like an invisible hand's smear across the sky—fell away. The sky resumed its oppressive gray-yellow, and the strangling warp and psychic pressure abated.
Silence followed. Then the base erupted in sobs and screams—ragged, delirious relief.
Inside the core, light dimmed. The Primordial Relic stood, its blue patterns still, but gently pulsing now like someone breathing in a deep, exhausted sleep.
There was no Dominator to see it. Where that living mass had been, only dark, crystalline dust lay—dull, crystalline shards that flaked and began to crumble, whitening as they weathered. The Dominator had burned away to nothing.
Neo collapsed, utterly spent. Evelyn steadied him, both of them looking at the relic's calm surface with sorrow and an odd, hollow gratitude.
The repair had worked; the immediate catastrophe was averted. But everything had changed.
The price had been absolute. The monstrous guardian had given itself to mend the thing that once killed its world; the base had bled its emergency lifeblood. Prism survived, but the survival tasted of ash.
They had paid in ruin and sacrifice to sew a wound that might have been better left untouched. The Primordial Relic now slumbered—stabilized, for the moment—but the knowledge of what had been exchanged burned in the minds of everyone who watched.
Outside, the wastes were quieter. Inside, survivors tried to return to their ruined tasks—but none could ignore the truth: the future would now be bought with an awareness of debt. The cost of repair had been life and soul, and the memory of the Dominator's final, mournful salvation would linger like a wound.
They had succeeded. The disaster had been averted.