The gray silence of the broken world refused to lift. Marcus's awareness remained woven tightly into a younger, more desperate Taryn. He felt the rough drag of a scavenged leather strap against her shoulder. Every step across the crystalline gravel of the drifting isle felt like a small betrayal of ground that had once been whole.
Around them, bioluminescent plants had withered into gray husks. Their blue and gold glows were gone. The hollow ache in Taryn's chest, where home had been, was filled with ash and the weight of a broken crystalline focus at her hip.
They descended into a shallow crater where a small camp had gathered. A few dozen figures wrapped in scorched silk and gray rags huddled around an erratic campfire. They were Sol-clan alchemists and weavers, the family Taryn had grown up among.
"I found you," Taryn whispered, her voice cracking.
But when she stepped into the firelight, the faces turned toward her without relief. Only hard, brittle blame remained.
"You." An elder spat the word. He leaned on a staff made from a dead starpetal branch, fading amber tracings marking his skin. "The girl who fumbled the catalyst. The one who watched the Master burn while she floated away."
The accusation struck like a physical blow. Taryn tried to speak, her bloody hand reaching for her bandolier, but the words died when she saw their eyes settle on her patchwork armor. Leather bound to clan-silk with silver wire. She looked less like one of them and more like something that had survived by scavenging.
"I tried to save the wall," Taryn said. "The rifts were too hungry. Master Valerius gave himself so I could find a way to fight back."
"Fight back?" A woman pointed at the pouches on Taryn's belt. "With those? We saw what you were doing on the drift-shards. We heard the explosions. You are mixing forbidden runes with rift-energy, tainting our ancestors' alchemy with the same void that consumed them."
Since waking in the ash, Taryn had been consumed by one idea: the old rituals were useless against what was coming. Something new was needed. She had begun mixing Star-Mercury with void-ash, trying to make a compound that did not merely bind, but broke.
"The old ways failed us!" Taryn said. The words came out raw, with something hardening beneath them. "Luminaris is gone. If we do not change, we will be next."
The elder crossed the distance and struck her.
Smack!
The sound cut through the camp.
"Pathetic fool," he said. "You are exiled, Taryn Sol. Take your unholy toys and leave. We would rather perish as what we were than survive as something like you."
Before she could turn away, a low, dissonant hum rolled through the ground.
From the gray mist at the crater's edge, amorphous shapes of darkness and glowing rift-scars detached themselves. Ember eyes fixed on the huddled survivors. One survivor was caught mid-step, his form unweaving into violet sparks before he could cry out.
Panic erupted.
Taryn did not run. Her hands moved with a speed that no longer hesitated. She pulled out a flask of swirling violet liquid, unstable and entirely her own. She traced a forbidden rune onto the glass with her blood and threw it into the heart of the advancing pack.
The world did not simply explode. It tore.
The blast screamed with light and sound, shredding the shapes with the same void-energy from which they had formed. A tent at the edge of the blast burned to black ash.
When the smoke cleared, the survivors looked at her with pure terror.
"Monster," the elder whispered. "You brought that here. You wield it like a weapon."
"I saved you," Taryn said, her voice breaking.
"Go," the woman said, pulling a child away. "Before you take the rest of us with you."
Taryn turned her back on the fire. The vials at her belt clinked in a slow, lonely rhythm as she fixed her eyes on the jagged needle rising into the bruised sky, promising a wish that might undo the failure.
The memory loosened.
Marcus's consciousness snapped back into the present. The warmth of the ash died, replaced by the freezing atmosphere of the Floor One ruins. The Void-Kin Scout shifted its weight before him, its ember eyes locking onto Marcus's left-forward guard.
Marcus prepared to lunge. He still believed killing the tracker would drop the spatial barrier. Before his muscles could fire, Lysara stepped into his path.
"Stop, Marcus," she said. Her voice carried a sharp, clinical warning. "You are reading the wrong grid. You are tracking an echo."
She did not follow the creature with her eyes. Closing them, the Rift-Warden lowered the tip of her light-green staff until its violet glow skimmed the obsidian.
"The Scout is not moving across the floor," Lysara said. "It is threading through the fractures beneath it."
Violet energy surged down her forearm sigil. The floor answered with a web of brief geometric lines. For an instant, the Scout's physical outline separated from the path its presence had carved through the rifts.
The creature was using the broken architecture to create false positions. Each time Marcus prepared to strike, he was aiming at an empty echo. It was not part of the trial's pattern. It was exploiting the damage around them and waiting for him to overextend.
Lysara thrust her staff forward. Three concentric violet rings locked around a major fissure, pinning the Scout's route in place.
"Now, Marcus," she called. "Unweave the channel from the left."