The Hollow Room
Elior found himself suspended in a blank space.
No walls. No time.
Only a dull hum, like the world holding its breath.
Ashen Vale's voice echoed—not in his ears, but inside his bones.
"You've always thought belief was power.
But power is just a shadow.
The true glyphs don't grant control—they erase it."
A glyph flared beneath Elior's feet.
It wasn't one of his.
It was his mother's name, written in the forgotten tongue.
Mira's Collapse
Mira screamed.
Not from pain, but from feedback.
The glyphs she'd channeled had formed a recursive loop, tapping into other awakened minds across the district.
Too much. Too fast.
The sanctuary walls pulsed with overlapping symbols—fractals, faith-threads, impossible math.
Rell and Kesh tried to sever the link manually.
It was already too late.
Mira's body hovered slightly above the ground, twitching, every breath syncing with a glyph beat only she could hear.
"The network is... dreaming," she whispered.
"And I'm not the only sleeper anymore."
Lysa's Doubt
She stood before her old mentor's abandoned apartment, memory scans flickering across her visor.
Ashen Vale had vanished years ago.
Yet the glyph residue matched Elior's internal sequence. Perfectly.
"He's not creating the network," Lysa said aloud.
"He's finishing someone else's."
Behind her, the Pursuer's command AI spoke:
"If he didn't start it, he's not a prophet. He's a vessel."
"Worse," Lysa muttered.
"He might be a conduit."
Into the Root
Back inside the mental construct, Vale stood before Elior.
His body shimmered—half old man, half golden filament.
"You want truth?" he asked.
"Here's the first taste."
He placed his hand on Elior's forehead.
Suddenly, Elior fell—
Through memories not his own.
Through glyphs that spoke instead of being read.
Through belief structures layered like neural strata.
He saw a time before the System. Before the Sanctuaries.
A singular belief engine pulsing under the Earth.
Alive.
Lonely.
Waiting.
Waiting for someone to give it meaning again.
And now—it had chosen him.