The vision folded back on itself.
It carried Marcus outside Taryn's experience again. The tight fusion loosened, and he watched from outside, no longer inhabiting Taryn's senses. The perspective carried the disorientation of a double exposure: he still held the tactile memory of Taryn's bleeding palms and the weight of the crystal beneath them, but those sensations faded, replaced by the cooler register of observation.
The memory showed him what came after the first shock: a girl sitting at the edge of a fifty-yard fragment of the world that had just ended, her face raised toward a sky that offered nothing back.
She had already done the immediate work. The vials were counted. The broken sigil-focus was secured at her belt. The first involuntary cry had entered the void and gone unanswered. What remained was harder, the decision about what came next, made in the silence after a person has nothing left to distract them from themselves.
She called for her mentor once more. The word came from deep in her chest and barely reached her lips. Only wind answered, whistling through broken crystal.
Marcus watched her grieve as a detective watches the aftermath of a crime he arrived at too late to prevent. He had known grief from inside during the collapse and had lived the instant it became irreversible. Watching from outside carried a different difficulty, the helplessness of an observer with all the context and no ability to intervene.
Then grief changed.
Taryn's shoulders settled into a new resolve. Tears still fell, but her grief hardened into purpose. Despair became fuel.
Taryn stood. Her movements were no longer sluggish. They were sharp, driven by a focus born of having nothing left to lose and nowhere to direct her grief except forward.
She began to scavenge.
Marcus watched her catalogue the wreckage with the analytical precision he recognized from his own crime-scene work. She catalogued what remained: leather from a fallen warden's armor, unspent Luminaris crystals, a cracked alchemical mortar, and scorched starpetal silk.
Taryn was made here, on a fifty-yard fragment of dead world. She took inventory and decided to survive it.
Using a shard of crystal as a makeshift needle, she pierced the leather scraps and bound them to the silk with threads of silver wire stripped from the broken shrine. Patchwork armor, made from salvage.
As the sunless hours passed, Taryn Sol transformed. Salvaged hide and repurposed steel remade the idealistic defender of Luminaris. She filled the new pouches with alchemical dust and the few vials she had managed to clean and reseal.
She looked out into the dark void. Her storm-gray eyes no longer held tears. They held a hard, cold resolve that Marcus recognized as the thing Taryn had carried ever since he met her on the Shattered Threshold.
Now he knew where she had found it.
The vision folded inward, then shattered. Marcus dropped back onto the ink-black plaza floor with a jarring physical thud.
The air thickened as the Nameless Choir began a heavy-frequency chant. The overlapping, mournful chorus struck the enormous ribcage-like pillars and shook the enamel of Marcus's teeth. Sound waves weighted the air above the dark floor.
Through the jaundiced light seeping from the fissures, Marcus's investigator brain locked onto the Void-Kin Scout tracking them from the fog. The Shattering-Sigil on his left palm burned with cold intensity, tuning its vibration to the creature's location.
Based on the forensic layout of the plaza, Marcus made a tactical calculation. He incorrectly deduced that the riddle's instruction, "stars fall," meant they had to hunt the creature stalking them to force the next gate open. He believed the Scout's death was the literal key to clearing the spatial barrier.
"Taryn, Lysara, hold your ground." Marcus commanded. His voice sharpened into dangerous investigative focus. He shifted into his practiced southpaw guard, twin daggers catching the pale green glare. "The sequence requires an execution. The Scout's trail ends here; watch the fog behind it."
The Scout emerged between two pillars, its broken silhouette dragging through the mist. Marcus advanced before it could withdraw. The creature turned, raising one dark limb, but the blue sigil pulled his hand through the opening in its guard.
The first dagger cut across the Scout's arm. It recoiled, and Marcus stepped inside the motion. The second blade rose toward its throat.
Marcus's dagger stopped an inch from the Scout's throat, while footprints appeared behind him.