The room wasn't built for the living.
Kael knew that the moment he stepped inside.
Smooth stone walls curved around a glowing obsidian dais, with memory conduits stretching up like spines. The air buzzed — not with energy, but with intention. Something old. Something he had buried.
Executor Syphar stepped aside. "Sit."
Kael didn't move.
Lira did. "It's a trap," she said softly, just loud enough for Kael to hear. "But we don't have a choice."
Reluctantly, he stepped forward and placed his hand on the dais.
The moment he did—
The room pulsed.
His eyes rolled back.
And the world around him vanished.
---
He was somewhere else.
A tower — tall, impossible, woven from glass and memory threads. It hung above a sea of minds.
And he was at the top.
Not as Kael.
As something else.
His robe was marked with sigils that flickered between languages. People knelt before him — scientists, Echoes, seers.
He spoke:
> "The Cycle is broken. If we cannot control rebirth… we will drown in it."
He watched himself give the order:
To build Labyrinth Theta.
To forge the Core.
To create the Cradle.
Not for power.
For fear.
---
Kael staggered back in the chamber, gasping. Blood dripped from his nose. Lira caught him before he fell.
"What did they make you see?"
He looked at her.
And said the one thing that scared him most.
> "I created all of this…
…to stop a version of me that went too far."
Lira's eyes widened. "You weren't the first Kael."
"No," he whispered. "I was the second.
And maybe not the last."
---
Up above, a glyph flared.
Syphar tilted his head.
"He's remembering too fast," he muttered.
Matron Vohr's voice crackled through the conduit.
> "Let him remember. We need him whole before we shatter him."