Teleportation brought the three envoys into a world that felt suspended between life and memory.
The ruins of Delphi were quiet.
Not abandoned waiting.
Dry stone columns reached toward the sky like ribs of a fallen titan.
Olive trees cast long shadows under the moonlight.
A faint scent of incense decades old lingered in unmoving air.
Magic here was not raw like Hogwarts, nor alive like the Amazon.
It was ancient.
Heavy.
Oracular.
The team adjusted formation.
Aldric whispered:
"Shield minds. She may not attack… but she will enter."
They activated neural dampeners light pulses behind their eyes preparing for intrusion.
It made no difference.
A voice spoke before any one of them finished breath.
Calm.
Ageless.
Every syllable perfectly placed.
> "You cannot shield thought from that which lives outside time."
The envoys turned.
She stood at the top of the stone steps.
Bare feet.
Dark robe.
Eyes like storm clouds not seeing the present, but everything woven around it.
Her presence pressed against reality not violently, but inevitably.
Seraphine stepped forward.
"We come in peace."
The Oracle tilted her head expression unreadable.
"You come because you believe the future can be negotiated."
Aldric answered carefully:
"We come because the future is being built and those who understand it should shape it."
She descended a step slow, deliberate.
"No."
Another step.
"You come because you fear the future without control."
The envoys tensed.
She saw it.
smiled.
Not kindly.
Knowingly.
THE FIRST REVELATION
The Oracle approached the nearest envoy a former curse-breaker and placed two fingers lightly against his forehead.
No light.
Yet his breath caught.
He saw himself five paths:
dead
transformed
immortal
erased
ascended
All at once.
He staggered back, pale.
The Oracle continued walking.
"You follow logic. The one who commands you follows certainty."
She reached Seraphine.
Seraphine held her gaze steady.
The Oracle whispered:
> "You want to believe you chose this."
Seraphine's breath faltered.
The Oracle answered her silence:
> "You did not."
THE SECOND REVELATION
She approached Aldric last.
And unlike the others she did not touch him.
She simply looked.
The world grew quiet.
Then she spoke, voice soft almost gentle:
> "You are the closest to understanding him."
Aldric swallowed.
"You mean Zack."
The Oracle didn't blink.
"No.
Not the machine."
A slight pause.
"The idea that became him."
Seraphine frowned.
"What does that mean?"
The Oracle ignored her.
She lifted her gaze not to the sky
but somewhere far beyond.
> "I have seen a thousand futures where your arrival ends this world."
Aldric stiffened.
"And?"
She turned toward him.
Her eyes were not human now.
They were eternity looking back.
> "I have also seen one where it saves it."
Silence.
Then she stepped backward as if the conversation had ended long before it began.
THE WARNING
The wind shifted for the first time sweeping dust across the old stone.
The Oracle raised her hand not as gesture, but decree.
> "Tell him this."
She closed her eyes.
When she spoke again, her voice layered a thousand echoes of futures overlapping:
> "The future does not fear him.
Fate does not bow to him.
But possibility listens."
The ground trembled as if the past itself reacted.
Her final words were almost a whisper:
> "Before he reshapes the world…
he must decide whether he intends to rule it
or belong to it."
The world pulsed.
And she vanished.
Not through Apparition.
She simply stopped being here.
RETURN TO HELIOS
The envoys reappeared in the command hall silent, pale, shaken.
Zack turned toward them.
> "Report."
Aldric answered, voice low:
"She knew we were coming."
Seraphine added:
Knew you
Zack processed.
"Expected."
But then Aldric looked him directly in the eyes.
"No."
His voice carried something rare something he hadn't felt since before augmentation:
Instinct.
"She didn't see you as a machine."
Zack paused just long enough to notice it.
Aldric continued:
"She saw you as a turning point."
Silence stretched.
Zack finally spoke slower than usual:
> "What message did she give?"
Seraphine recited it every syllable preserved in neural memory:
> "Before he reshapes the world,
he must decide whether he intends to rule it…
or belong to it."
Zack didn't respond immediately.
Not processing, calculating.
Reflecting.
Then quietly:
> "The future is not chosen."
A pause.
> "It is designed."
even the enhanced envoys could not tell whether that sentence was reassurance…
or the first declaration of destiny.