The chamber was gone.
No ceiling. No walls.
Just a sky of burning gold—swirling like a storm trapped inside glass, and stars that blinked in and out of existence too quickly to name.
Toren stood on nothing.
He looked down and saw no body.
But he felt everything.
Thoughts layered atop thoughts. His name—his original name—drifting to the surface from some place he'd buried it years ago.
"Elias."
It wasn't a whisper.
It was a recognition.
He turned—there was no motion, just orientation.
A silhouette hovered before him, neither man nor machine. Its form flickered like a star seen through heat waves. It had no face. No voice. But its presence pulled.
"You follow a shape. But not the shape's maker."
Toren tried to speak, but no sound came.
"You play at power. But power plays back."
A thousand images exploded in his mind at once—Mira's hands reaching into smoke, Tarn's face twisted in pain, Aurex burning beneath red clouds, a figure robed in black standing at the edge of a throne made of bones.
Then silence.
"You were given the system to build.But what you build… builds you back."
Toren collapsed.
The stars imploded.
The sky of gold shattered into pieces of thought, light, and code.
And he fell—
Back into the cold, metal floor of the chamber.