Marcus's eyes snapped open.
The ash and dissolving towers of proto-Aetheris vanished, replaced by the pale green light seeping from the obsidian fissures of Floor One. He was back in his borrowed shell, boots anchored to the ink-black plaza. His left palm throbbed with residual heat where the blue Shattering-Sigil had finally gone quiet.
His attention locked onto the two women standing before him.
Taryn was wiping soot from her forehead, her chest heaving with exhaustion. The memory of Luminaris's fall had changed what Marcus saw in her. Her recklessness was not a lack of discipline. It was the mask of someone still trying to stabilize a world that had already been unmade.
Marcus straightened and settled into Marcus Reed's left-forward guard.
"There was a fourth," he said, his voice flat and level. "In the memory fragments, I saw a figure who moved like a living shadow. Who was he?"
Taryn flinched.
Her hand went to her alchemical bandolier, and the glass tubes clinked together. Her storm-gray eyes darkened with sudden grief.
"You remember him?" she asked. "Even if it was only a shadow?"
Lysara went rigid. Her light-green staff struck the obsidian with a heavy thud. Its violet glow reflected across her face.
"His stance," Lysara said softly. "He once held the right flank while Marcus led from the left. Without him, the formation was broken."
Taryn swallowed hard. Her fingers tightened around a spent vial.
"His name was Voren," she whispered. "He stood with us before the fall. We thought he was gone."
The name struck something in the borrowed body. Not a memory, not yet. Only a pressure behind Marcus's eyes and a brief tightening in his chest.
"Voren," he repeated. "What happened to him?"
Taryn looked toward the shifting green gloom instead of answering. "The last time we saw him, he was also at the edge of the Sea of Frozen Voices. Then the sky opened, and everything broke apart. We searched for him, but the rifts took the ground beneath us."
Lysara's expression hardened. "We never saw him die. That is not the same as knowing he survived."
Marcus filed away the distinction. His vision had shown a tall silhouette near the flawed nodes, moving with the Keeper's frequency close around him. Taryn and Lysara remembered a missing comrade, not a betrayer. Neither account proved the truth.
But the timing was wrong. The figure had been near the network before the Architect's power turned the fractures into wounds. If that figure was Voren, then he had been present at the beginning of the Shattering.
And if the vision had lied, Marcus needed to know why.
He adjusted the grips of his twin daggers and tracked the shifting green gloom.
"Then we keep climbing," Marcus said. "If Voren left a trail, we'll find it."