Ruins in the Scorched Barrens
Days later, Cael and Mireth travel into the Scorched Barrens, a deadland where mana storms once raged unchecked. They're hunting a rumored seal site—but find something far more organized.
A great structure rises from the dust—an obsidian spire shaped like a spiral, humming with engineered Essentia fields.
"This isn't a ruin," Mireth says.
"It's a laboratory."
Enter Lysara
Inside the tower waits Lysara, a former arcanist from the Aetherian Empire. Tall, unblinking, and clad in a mantle of woven glass-fiber, she recognizes Cael instantly.
"Void-touched. I knew one would come eventually."
Her shard glows amber—not violet like Cael's. Stabilized. Chained.
"You try to close the wounds," she says. "I try to reshape them."
Cael: "You're using a seal for research?"
"For architecture. For design. For rebirth."
The Argument
Lysara explains:
She found her shard five years ago and immediately sealed it inside an artificial array.
Instead of rejecting the Void, she channeled it into a fractal logic engine.
She believes the seals were never meant to be locks… but foundations for a new form of reality.
"What you call corruption, I call evolution."
Mireth bristles. "You're building a bomb."
Lysara: "No. I'm building a second world, within this one."
Combat of Minds and Mana
When Cael tries to destabilize her tower's anchor, Lysara attacks—not with weapons, but mathematical incantations that warp local Essentia flows.
Gravity flickers sideways.
Time speeds up and slows in pockets.
Mireth is trapped in a stasis ring mid-leap.
Cael has to use Voidshift to move through her recursive fields—bypassing her logic gates by refusing to obey cause and effect.
He touches the shard-reactor.
And screams.
Recoil and Fallout
Lysara's core doesn't break, but shudders violently. A wave of warped time bursts outward.
Cael collapses.
Mireth barely drags him away before the tower auto-seals.
Lysara remains inside, whispering to a hidden schematic:
"It's not ready.
But he's close. I need more threads. More sealbearers.
The Great Equation must be solved."
Aftershock
Cael wakes the next day, disoriented.
"She thinks she can rewrite reality.
She might be right."
Mireth: "Are you going to stop her?"
Cael stares at the sky.
"If I don't… she might finish what I started."