The spatial rupture Lysara had pinned around the Scout did not simply hold. It destabilized, tearing Marcus's consciousness backward into another cascade of Taryn's memories.
Taryn stood before the Void Spire for the first time. Or the first climb she still remembered as hers, before the tower had taken enough from her that counting had stopped being possible. The Spire rose like a jagged black needle through a starless sky bleeding violet into the horizon.
Marcus recognized the plaza beneath her feet: toppled statues, leaning columns, and rift-cracks spreading across the obsidian. It was the same Floor One ruin where he had awakened.
The Nameless Choir vibrated through the stone.
"Light fractures. Stars fall."
Taryn stood still, clutching a failing vial. Her expression hardened into the resolve of someone with nowhere else to go.
"I will reach the summit," she whispered. "I will claim the Wish."
The vision shifted, compressing time.
Marcus watched Taryn's first meeting with the original Marcus Reed on a lower floor. They fought back-to-back against a swarm of Shadowborn Hounds. The original Marcus moved with lithe, silver-eyed precision, his daggers cutting through the pack.
Then Lysara Veyn stepped through a shimmering portal. A fourth member joined them later, a gaunt figure with gray skin, silver hair, and a heavy rift-blade. The four became an efficient unit, surviving trials across an unmapped labyrinth of shifting floors.
The memory reached the Sea of Frozen Voices.
Crystalline ice filled Taryn's senses. The cold turned breath to glass. Beneath it all, trapped voices hummed through the frozen sea.
The memory skipped the approach. When it returned, Marcus Reed lay dying on the ice. Lysara was down several yards away, her staff shattered. The fourth figure lay nearby, his blade out of reach. Between them stood a shadowed silhouette with a weapon stained dark red.
Taryn's memory kept the face blurred by freezing storm static.
A degraded voice echoed through her shock.
"The cycle requires a sacrifice. The Sigil-Bearer has fallen. Now you must fall too."
Taryn was shoved toward an opening rift. Darkness swallowed the scene before she could see who had pushed her.
The memory shattered.
Marcus returned to the present with a jarring physical snap. The smell of dissolved Hounds and the pale green glare of the obsidian fissures rushed back into his senses. Taryn stood beside him in a defensive stance. Lysara's violet rings still strained against the Scout's rift-route.
Marcus did not lunge blindly.
The part of him that had survived twelve years of homicide investigation surfaced quietly. He stopped treating the plaza as a battlefield and started treating it as a scene. Something had happened here, and something was still happening. A crime scene was not a place to charge into. It was a place to read.
He studied the Scout's last stable position. Four uneven drag lines radiated from the gouge, suggesting damage to its left side. Broken statue fragments formed an accidental choke point eight feet to his flank. The spreading rift-cracks brightened a half-beat before the Scout shifted phase.
The geometry was the weapon.
Not the daggers. Read the room, and the room fights for you.
The difficulty was translating a floor plan into a fight that moved in fractions of a second. His mind built the diagram quickly, but not quickly enough to swing a blade through it. Consciousness was a bottleneck. The body was not.
He stopped trying to control both at once.
Marcus let the left-dominant architecture guide his balance while the analytical half of his mind watched from behind it. His feet read the vibrations in the obsidian. His body recognized the shape of a predator about to commit.
The violet rings shattered.
The Void-Kin Scout blurred forward, obsidian spurs aimed at his throat. Marcus was already moving. His left foot drove into the stone, his hips rotated, and his body carried out the four-part lunge into the creature's blind spot, the exact gap his reading had marked.
He did not test the weapons. He followed the flow and let the evidence decide where to strike.