The shift from watching to living was not gradual. One moment Marcus stood outside the memory; the next, ash filled his lungs and blood coated his hands. The panic belonged to Taryn, but it moved through him as if it were his own. The line between them had stopped meaning anything.
He was Taryn now.
Ash and rift-static filled his lungs. The air had become a charged mixture of pulverized crystal and the charcoal remains of Luminaris's lumivines. Taryn clung to the jagged remains of a defensive wall while the stone beneath her boots groaned like something alive being torn apart.
Luminaris was falling.
Marcus felt it through Taryn's body, with the full weight of someone who had grown up in this city, learned to weave sigil-energy in its academies, and called these crystalline towers home. The grief was not abstract. It was the physical grief of watching a known place become unrecognizable.
Taryn could not move from the wall. The red sigil at her neck, once a steady warmth, flared with rhythmic, punishing heat. Her legs felt like lead. She was anchored to this wall and this moment, forced to fight while knowing she could not stop what was coming.
She hurled an alchemical blast at the wall's foundation. In her right hand, a failing vial trembled, its glass spiderwebbed with cracks and its amber liquid sputtering inside. Her hand was bleeding, not dramatically, but from the accumulated cost of reaching into rift-energy with bare skin.
The vial struck the edge of a widening fissure and burst into amber sparks.
For a heartbeat, the tear stuttered. The dark recoiled from the heat like something touched by flame.
Then the rift grew hungry.
The violet did not extinguish the amber. It consumed it. The fissure widened with a predatory snap, swallowing the stone Taryn had tried to hold together. Marcus felt the specific horror of watching your own work undo itself faster than you can rebuild it.
"Help me!" Taryn screamed at the empty air where her teachers and kin had stood. "Lorien! Anyone!"
No one came.
The sky had settled into a bruised, permanent violet. Shapes moved through it, never seen directly. Even in Taryn's memory, the old instinct refused to let her look straight at them. She sensed them through shifting light and fractured reflections. Each time one closed around a section of the city, another part of the foundation gave way.
Taryn threw another vial, then another. The green sigil at her neck burned white-hot, blistering the skin beneath it. She did not notice. The pain had been pushed somewhere that no longer mattered.
She was the last person on this stretch of wall. Everyone else had been taken by the mist or had fled inward, hoping the inner wards would hold. Taryn had stayed because she believed her fire could close the wounds of the world.
The last vial began to leak. Amber liquid dripped onto the stone and hissed against the ash. Taryn stared at it.
The rifts were no longer confined to the foundation. They climbed the wall. The stones beneath her boots hummed with a discordant frequency as violet light seeped through the mortar, turning solid stone thin and ghostlike.
Marcus felt the exact moment when Taryn understood that nothing she did would be enough. It was not despair. It was something colder, a line beyond which fighting was no longer possible.
The bioluminescent plants along the inner wall turned black at once. Their soft glow vanished.
Taryn fell to her knees. Her bleeding hand clutched the failing vial against her chest. She looked out at the city, the towers, and the drifting gardens that had formed her entire life. Then she watched them come apart.
The end came not with a roar, but with a whisper of light.
The wall dissolved into violet sparks. It did not crumble. It simply stopped being matter, the sparks lifting into the storms like fireflies caught in a hurricane.
Taryn did not look at the shapes in the sky. Even now, the old habit held. She looked at the city instead, at the towers going dark one after another and the gardens drifting free of their moorings into the violet.
The failure settled into every line of her young face. It was the kind of guilt that could carry someone through a tower for longer than most lives lasted.
As the ground beneath her turned to violet dust, the vision loosened. Marcus felt his awareness separate from Taryn's, returning him from participant to observer.
Reality snapped back with a cold, concussive jolt.
Marcus stood in his left-forward guard within the Floor One ruins. The sky of proto-Aetheris was gone, replaced by the starless void. Beneath his boots, the dark floor pulsed with the Spire's heartbeat.
Taryn stood a few paces away, her face tight and her fingers twitching near her alchemical gear. Lysara watched the mist, her light-green staff planted against the obsidian, its violet glow faint in the sickly green light.
Then the light flickered.
The Nameless Choir's wayward chanting dropped an octave. The chaotic dirge became a tense, frozen frequency.
"The mist is changing," Lysara said.
Marcus raised his left hand. The blue Shattering-Sigil did not flare. It narrowed into a precise vibration, cutting through the background noise of the plaza.
Not a Hound.
Through the gray veil between two pillars, a new presence appeared. Unlike the feral creatures that had hunted them before, this entity moved with calculated deliberation. It paced the edge of the obsidian plain, its ember eyes narrowing as it studied their defensive layout.
Marcus felt the difference immediately. This creature was not reacting to them. It was collecting evidence.
A Void-Kin Scout stepped from the fog.
Its gaze moved from Taryn to Lysara, then to Marcus's left palm. It was not part of the trial's pattern. It had entered from somewhere above, and it was searching for something.
"Get ready," Marcus said, gripping his twin daggers. "This one is not hunting on instinct. It is reading the room."
The Scout tilted its head.
Far above, something answered through the rifts.