The way opened not with a door, but with a forgetting.
One moment the group walked among twisted dreamroots and floating echoes. The next, they were falling—not through space, but through chronology.
The Dreamwilds peeled away like old parchment, and the world grew still.
They landed on a plateau suspended above a vast abyss. Below them spiraled layers of time: cities frozen mid-collapse, mountains reversed into smoke, stars unraveling into thought.
"This," Pennrick whispered, "is the Sankhya Depths. Where unmanifested time goes to rest."
Fenn blinked at a city hanging sideways in the void. "So… like a divine junk drawer?"
Lys half-smiled. "Not junk. Relics of previous Yugas. Treasures too dangerous to be remembered."
The moment Eloryn's foot touched the ancient stone, she felt it.
A pulse.
And a voice—not external, but rooted in her marrow:
Tretā. Dvāpara. Kali. All passed through you. Remember them.
She gasped, staggering as visions bloomed behind her eyes.
She saw herself standing on a battlefield where gods and mortals clashed—her hand outstretched, stopping time itself as a burning wheel flew past.
Then again, in a forest, singing stars back into the sky after a divine storm drowned them.
And once more—in a desert, kneeling before Kaal Bhairav himself as he whispered something into her soul she had no tongue to recall.
Maren caught her. "You alright?"
"I've been here before," she said, trembling. "In other lives."
Lys nodded. "The Depths remember. And they remember you."
As they moved forward, the landscape began to change—less a place, more an emotion made solid. A temple rose before them, carved from obsidian and fire. Sanskrit etched itself in glowing lines across its face:
कालो न यातः। तव आत्मा यातः।
(Time has not passed. Your soul has.)
Pennrick examined the inscription, voice dry. "Uplifting."
Inside the temple, a throne sat—cracked and ancient, empty but still warm with divine presence.
At its base lay a mirror of water, perfectly still.
Eloryn knelt before it, feeling her breath sync with the pulse beneath.
Suddenly, a form appeared in the water—not hers.
A woman, draped in blue and gold, eyes glowing with fury and kindness. She looked exactly like Eloryn, but older—infinitely older.
I am you. I was you. I may become you again.
The Gloam is not a thing. It is a choice. The shadow of surrender. Of forgetting who we are when memory becomes pain.
Eloryn reached out.
Their fingertips met on the mirror's surface.
If you are to hold the weave, you must walk where no thread has been spun. You must become the Loom.
Then the water shattered.
And Eloryn stood alone, but not unchanged.
Her hands glowed faintly with golden script. Her breath carried syllables not spoken in millennia. She could feel every moment she had ever lived, stacked in spirals behind her.
She was becoming more than an Oracle.
She was becoming the axis.
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