Silence stretched across the Skyshard Plateau like the final note of a song no one had meant to play.
The others were gone.
One by one, the seven chosen had vanished, swallowed by their Codices, drawn into their Trials. Even their glowing circles had dimmed, as though the earth had closed its eyes and moved on.
Only one circle remained lit.
Only one figure remained standing.
Kairos.
Alone.
He couldn't move at first. His breath came slow, shallow, like pulling air through water.
They disappeared… and I didn't.
The thought curled around his chest and squeezed.
He wasn't chosen to succeed.
He wasn't even chosen.
And yet something ancient—something forgotten—had stirred beneath his skin and opened its eye.
Why?
What changed?
No one was here to ask.
And then the ground beneath his feet began to breathe.
Not shake. Not split. Just breathe.
The way something does when it wakes slowly, after too many centuries in the dark.
A low pulse echoed through his bones, soft and rhythmic, like the heartbeat of a thing older than the Codices.
Then—he was falling.
No sound.
No flash of light.
Just a blink.
And the world inverted.
He landed without landing.
His feet touched water, but didn't sink.
Ripples spread in every direction — not outward, but upward, like the sky itself was reacting to his presence.
He stood in a forest that didn't obey shape.
The trees twisted high, wrong in angles but beautiful in motion. Their bark shimmered like metal beneath the pale blue light of a moon that shouldn't exist.
Everything smelled faintly of petrichor — the memory of rain — and something deeper. Something like ash, but not ruinous.
He took a breath and instantly regretted it.
The air was honest.
There was no hiding in it.
Kairos blinked hard and tried to focus. The forest did not blur. It shifted, subtly, in response.
His heart stuttered.
This place… it reacts to me.
No… not reacts. Mirrors.
The water beneath his feet remained clear, perfectly still, and yet showed no reflection. As though the world refused to affirm him.
Or… as though it was still deciding what he was.
He turned slowly, scanning the perimeter.
No path.
No voice.
No system prompt. No guiding light.
Just stillness.
And a presence pressing in from all sides — not oppressive, but undeniable.
He moved.
Every step felt heavier than it should.
The trees breathed with him.
The air folded around him.
The world listened.
Up ahead, tucked between two weeping ash trees, stood a door.
It was old. Half-rotted. Made of gray wood veined with silver roots that pulsed faintly in rhythm with his own pulse.
It didn't stand in a frame.
It didn't lean on a wall.
It simply was.
A door that wasn't there.
He stepped toward it, drawn by the quiet certainty that it was meant for him.
Not because it welcomed him.
But because it had been waiting.
The handle was cool under his fingers, too smooth for wood, too warm for metal.
He paused, just for a breath, before turning it.
Maybe this is the moment I vanish too.
Or maybe this is where I begin.
The door opened.
And he stepped through.
There was no corridor.
No destination.
Only inwardness.
Like stepping through memory. Or through a wound.
For a long moment, he was weightless.
And then the world around him unfolded.
It was a field.
Wide. Windless. Bathed in light that didn't cast shadows.
Tall grass shimmered silver in the breeze. Monolithic stone pillars lay half-sunken in the dirt, draped in vines and etched in languages no one spoke anymore.
The sky above was fractured, like stained glass — shards of blue, violet, gray, and gold all pieced together wrong. And yet… it worked. A broken beauty.
Where is this?
The wind didn't answer.
But it moved.
Only forward.
Kairos began walking.
Every step deeper into the dream.
Or maybe a memory.
The landscape didn't shift, but his understanding of it did.
Each stone, each breeze, each bend in the grass — they felt… familiar.
Like echoes of a life never lived.
Then he saw it.
A cracked mirror, half-buried in wildflowers, leaning against a ruined pedestal.
Not full-length. Not wide. But enough to show a shape.
He knelt before it.
And looked in.
The face staring back was his.
But not.
Thinner. Sharper. Stronger. Not older, but clearer. Less clouded.
No softness where he didn't want it.
No misalignment between thought and skin.
His reflection straightened first.
Then it spoke.
"You've always known," it said. "You just didn't know it had a place."
Kairos's breath caught.
No one's voice should sound like that. Mine… but freer. Truer.
That's who I'm meant to be.
He tried to speak, but his voice snagged on the edge of realization.
The reflection smiled softly.
"You are not unfinished."
"You are unwritten."
He touched the glass.
It didn't shatter.
It dissolved.
And in the silence that followed, he felt it —
The Codex hadn't chosen him out of pity.
It had remembered something every other Codex had forgotten:
That truth is not found in perfection.
It's found in becoming.
Behind him, a low growl rose from the grass.
Not threatening.
Calling.
A shape moved through the silver weeds — long-limbed, many-eyed, translucent and flickering like heat above a forge.
Kairos didn't flinch.
He stepped toward it.
And it waited.
The Trial had not begun.
The Trial was him.
And the world inside it had only just opened its eyes.
~To be continued…~