Kael appeared in his inner realm beside Syleena and Aven, and instantly tried to pull his consciousness back to his physical body. No matter how he tried it was like being locked out entirely.
Thin streams of crimson Will ran down from the river, carrying countless Thoughts with them as they drained into the monstrous black cracks splitting the ground beneath.
He stumbled forward onto all three.
His consciousness wasn't even split but his mind was dull enough that he wasn't entirely sure where he was anymore. He grabbed Syleena's coat and pulled himself upright, looking straight ahead.
"What's happening?"
Syleena looked at him, brows drawing together.
She had never seen him this… Vulnerable. It was almost unsettling.
"Kael. That's your name, isn't it?"
Kael straightened and met her eyes.
"Yes." A pause. "Where are we?"
Syleena retracted her Will and walked over, brushing down his coat gently.
"It's an inner realm." She smiled. "My friend Aven and I are looking for something important actually. Think you can help?"
Kael looked at her for a moment, then turned away without answering.
"Well?" Syleena pressed.
"No."
Her eyebrow twitched.
"Why not?" she asked, turning to study the river beside him.
"I'm not sure. It just feels wrong."
She could hardly believe it. When someone's Thoughts dropped to a critical level the body shifted into something close to a survival state, drastically reducing consumption in a desperate attempt to keep the mind alive as long as possible. It often reduced a person to something almost childlike in their responses. And yet even now, even here, Kael's instincts and wariness were cut so deeply into him that he was more cautious than most people would be at full capacity.
"Trust me, Kael. It's dangerous if it's left untouched."
White hair swayed as he shook his head.
"No. Something isn't right. I can't tell what it is, but something isn't right." He tilted his head toward her and dropped his voice. "Do you trust him?"
Syleena glanced past him at Aven.
"Come."
She took his arm and walked a dozen steps away, then turned and flashed another smile.
"There we go. Can you help me now?"
He stayed quiet.
She wanted to use her mote on him, but she had never seen anyone this close to the edge. By now it had to be survival instinct alone, combined with an unfathomable depth of perseverance, that was keeping him upright at all. Interfering with his Thoughts in this state carried a real risk of simply finishing what the refinement had started.
'I don't have a choice.'
It wasn't impatience. It was the simple reality that he could collapse at any moment and not get back up.
"What is your soul-bound mote called?" she asked, and activated her own.
The Thoughts moved against his will through the Current.
"Obsidian Shard." He began. "It's a refinement mote. It lets me increase the fixed success rate of a mote passing through its final stage."
Syleena's eyes gleamed with something close to greed.
For the next ten minutes Kael went through everything he knew about refinement and the mote without a trace of hesitation. The failures, the recipes, the theories he had been working toward. All of it, offered freely, as though none of it belonged to him anymore.
When he finished the greed coming off Syleena was almost blinding.
"Summon it. Now." She ordered.
Kael nodded and raised his hand toward the river of Will. A small metallic sphere appeared and dropped into her palm.
She turned it over.
"This isn't Obsidian Shard."
He said nothing.
Once again he had done something he shouldn't have been capable of. His inner realm in shambles, his Thoughts so dangerously low he had entered survival state, and yet somehow he had managed not only to summon the wrong mote but to resist her soul-bound mote while doing it.
She tossed the mote to Aven.
'This shouldn't be possible.'
Syleena studied him with a deep expression.
Had he consumed a mote capable of suppressing her rank three soul-bound mote? Or was his mind so fundamentally disciplined that even his Thoughts refused to drift completely when ordered to?
"Summon another."
A small stone coffin appeared in Kael's palm, careful engravings running across its surface. He held it out to her.
She scoffed.
Again. He had summoned something completely different from what she had guided his Thoughts toward.
She took the Stone Coffin and passed it to Aven.
She would have kept the motes herself under normal circumstances, but it wasn't worth the risk of losing Obsidian Shard in the process. From everything she understood about that mote its potential was so immense that every noble family she knew of would slaughter each other for even the rumour of it.
"Summon again."
Kael stretched out his hand. A mote resembling a pine cone rested in his palm.
Syleena let her fingers move along its surface.
"What's this?"
"Lure mote. It lets me control beasts to some extent. I suspect it's from the mind pathway."
She flicked it to Aven.
It was becoming annoying. How many motes did he have? Could he keep doing this until he died?
"Again."
Syleena's eyes widened.
A dark shard rested in his palm this time, unlike anything he had produced before. She reached out toward it. Her fingers were almost there when Kael pulled his hand back.
"Wha—" Her hand stilled. "What are you doing, Kael?"
"I." He took a step back. "I don't know." His eyes dropped to the shard. "It's like everything is screaming at me not to hand it over."
"Please." She held out her hand.
With a fractured mind and the constant pressure of Syleena's mote bearing down on him, Kael glanced at it one last time before placing it in her palm.
Syleena curled her fingers around it.
"How long do you have left?"
Kael's eyes moved to hers as though she had said the strangest thing in the world.
"Not long then." she murmured.
Syleena sat down and patted the ground beside her.
Kael settled next to her, watching the crimson pour through the cracks below.
She began guiding her Will toward the mote but stopped just before it made contact. She glanced at him sitting beside her.
"Who are you, really?"
Kael rested his chin in his palm and continued watching in silence.
She shook her head and extended her Will again.
He had been the greatest variable in everything. He had also been someone she had spent almost an entire year beside, through the worst of it. She wouldn't mourn him, not exactly, but there were feelings she couldn't quite name either. And when he was gone, the last person in the world she could talk to about any of it would be gone with him.
"You've been of great help." Syleena said, and meant it.
For almost an hour the two sat in silence, shoulder to shoulder.
The strain on Syleena was visible. Her breathing had grown uneven, her Will moving in irregular waves that betrayed the effort underneath the composure.
But the blessing that came with a considered prodigy was that she had managed to replace Kael's Will in less than half the time a normal Luminaire would have needed. She reached out with her senses around the mote.
A smile found her lips.
She was confident now. At this stage it didn't matter what happened. The mote was hers. It was like reaching the summit after the climb, when all that remains is to walk forward. Even if someone tried to push her Will away she could hold and claim it regardless. Nothing could stop her here.
Syleena moved her Will to remove the last of Kael's when a shudder ran through her entire body.
Her head snapped toward his crimson river of Will.
It had stopped moving entirely. Even the streams that had been pouring through the cracks hung suspended mid air, frozen as though space itself had seized around them.
A slow exhale came from beside her.
Then Kael collapsed forward and hit the ground hard.
"What's happening?"
Before the words had fully left her, violent waves erupted across the surface of the river. It began moving against its own current, pulling back every spill of Will that hadn't already disappeared into the void, drawing it upward like someone gathering used rope.
And finally, the entire river began going upstream, as if time itself had been reversed.
Syleena sharpened her focus and pushed more of her Will toward the mote. Kael's river shook in response, violently, as though rejecting the intrusion.
Then, like rain falling upward, gold-white tendrils began rising from the river, moving away from it toward some undefined point in the inner realm.
Syleena pressed harder against the mote. She didn't know what was happening but she didn't need to. Whatever it was, it was not good news.
The moment the last remaining streams re-entered the river its current surged back to life towards the right direction, but with a violence that bore no resemblance to any rank three current she had ever seen.
She raised a finger and flicked it down.
'Faster. I must be faster.'
She moved with desperation she had never felt before. Frantic. Unravelling.
Cold sweat soaked through her entirely. Her hands shook beyond her control.
Above the river the tendrils continued their ascent, fragments of something ancient peeling away from where they had no business existing, condensing into a mass that dwarfed the river beneath it. It hung there like a small moon, vast and wrong, and if one could have looked closer they would have seen thousands of tendrils slithering and coiling across its surface, moving with such density they made it appear solid. Like flesh, the flesh of something that breathed.
Syleena watched it begin to pulse.
It took everything she had to hold her focus. Her Will trembled at the edges. Then it happened.
Something cold. Not cold like winter or stone or the void between thoughts. Something older than any of those. A cold that had no interest in temperature, that moved through her as though she were made of nothing at all, and left her bones feeling like they had forgotten what warmth was.
The colossal mass went still.
Completely, absolutely still.
Then it turned.
Not with urgency, but with the terrible patience of something that had never needed to hurry.
An eye opened.
The pupil alone was large enough that her mind refused to give it a proper size, gold and depthless and utterly without recognition, and it found her the way a mountain finds a stone at its base. Without effort. Without interest. Simply because she was there.
Her Will stopped.
Not by choice. It just ceased, the way a candle ceases when something vast and airless passes over it.
What was looking at her was not a rank three mote. Not a rank four. Not even a rank five.
It was a Primordial.
She didn't dare retract her consciousness from beneath its gaze, and for the first time in her life she wanted Kael to wake up. Anything. Any sign at all.
The Obsidian Shard rested in her shaking palm. One last touch. That was all she needed. One last push of her Will and she would hold a mote powerful enough to shake nations.
But.
She swallowed hard. She couldn't move. Didn't want to.
That's when it happened.
A dull echo vibrated through the inner realm.
"Ahahah. Finally. DIE. DIE."
All colour drained from her face.
When the eye had appeared she had frozen completely and killed every mote she had running. Even the Aether mote, afraid that any active Will might provoke it further. But in doing so she had lost control of Aven entirely. And in that small window he had brought his foot down on every mote she had tossed to him.
One by one.
Like glass shattering across stone, enormous cracks spread through the inner realm in every direction, threading into a web of black.
She had no words for what the eye did next. Only that it changed.
Like a star coming apart, countless tendrils bloomed outward in every direction at once. They drove straight into Kael's soul, deeper than she had known a soul could be pierced, into some place beyond it that she had no name for and no framework to understand.
They punched through into the black void beyond. Then turned, the way a strand of hair catches in wind, and drove back in.
And then they coiled. An endless spring of tendrils wrapping themselves around every crack in Kael's soul, tightening. With wet, sickening and disgusting sounds that should not exist, it drew the fractures together.
It was holding his soul, refusing to let it shatter.
Syleena watched Kael's soul grow more golden with each tear sealed. Then another crack split open and more tendrils shot from the eye, closing it before it could spread. Again and again, every time his soul should have shattered and taken him with it, the eye was there first.
With every thread it spent the eye grew smaller. By now it had shrunk to match the river of Will in size.
She hesitated.
The primordial eye was occupied. Was this her last chance?
Syleena clenched her teeth and moved her Will toward the Obsidian Shard once more.
A rustle echoed through the inner realm as Kael's body twitched on the ground. She couldn't afford to look at him.
Inside the hollow mountain a gasp cut through the silence.
Kael's eyes moved from one thing to the next, unable to make sense of any of it.
Chunks of dirt rattled down from the javelins when he pushed himself upright. He tilted his head and watched blood pour from his mouth onto the shafts buried in him. Without thinking he raised what remained of his arm toward them.
His hand was gone entirely. Every bone had been reduced to fine splinters. What moved was only the shoulder muscle, dragging the wreckage of what had been an arm toward the spear.
Then the tendrils came.
Gold and white, emerging first from the flesh itself, a few, then dozens, then hundreds, then more than he could have counted. They moved where the arm should have been, guiding flesh and bone back into alignment. Even the fragments scattered across the ground were found, pierced, lifted, and carried back to where they belonged.
By the time his hand reached the spear it was no longer a ruin.
It was a hand.
None of this registered for Kael.
He grabbed the spear and pulled it free without so much as a grimace. It clattered somewhere far away in the drained riverbed. The lung tissue and skin it left behind drew closed as the tendrils followed, sealing the path the spear had made as though it had never been there.