Kael returned to the den alone.
The wards still hummed faint golden veins threading through the stone like fossilized lightning but their rhythm was wrong. Too slow. Too shallow. Like a heart continuing to beat long after the mind has accepted death.
The den had always been alive.
Not sentient, aware.
Darius's presence had anchored it. The Guardian's bond had kept the ancient stone alert, responsive, watchful.
Now the den felt hollow.
A monument that no longer remembered what it had been built to protect.
Kael stepped inside and stopped.
A rune near the entrance had slipped out of alignment by the width of a finger.
That was all.
A mistake so small most would never see it. The outer ward flickered, corrected itself imperfectly, then stabilized, hesitant, uncertain, like a system unsure whether it was still allowed to exist.
Darius would have fixed it immediately.
Without comment. Without ceremony.
Kael noticed it.
And walked past.
He hadn't survived because he was stronger.
He had survived because something had decided he was still useful.
And usefulness, he was learning, was just another word for permission not yet revoked.
Tessa Wyn was already awake.
She hadn't slept.
Holographic projections hovered around her like a storm held in permanent suspension. Aether scans layered over Dominion grids, probability spirals collapsing and reforming faster than her eyes could comfortably follow. Diagnostic glyphs screamed failure in a dozen symbolic languages.
Her eyes were bloodshot.
Her hands shook not from fear, but from the strain of refusing to stop.
She looked up the instant Kael crossed the threshold.
Her smile never formed.
"I can't find them," she said.
Not who.
Them.
"Darius. Iria. Rai. Veyla. Lyria." Her voice tightened despite her effort to keep it level. "No signal. No residual trails. No temporal displacement. No combat echo. No Primal Aether resonance from Darius at all."
Kael felt the words strike his chest before his mind allowed them meaning.
"It's like" Tessa stopped herself. Jaw clenched. Breath held.
"like they never existed," Kael finished.
She nodded once.
That frightened her more than panic ever could have.
Kael reached into his coat and withdrew the map.
It pulsed faintly in his hands. warm, almost aware. Veins of Void-light crawled beneath its surface, rearranging themselves when he wasn't looking directly at them, as if the artifact resented observation.
He placed it on the table between them.
"This is all I got out," he said.
Tessa stared at it the way one looks at a weapon that has already chosen its next victim.
"I can't send you back," she said quietly. "Not now. Solis is dead. The Dominion will have flooded the tower with specialists. Phase-hunters. Aether suppressors. Counter-diviners. If you go back alone"
"I know," Kael said.
And he did.
So he waited.
Tessa worked without rest.
Hours bled into each other until time itself seemed embarrassed to announce its passage. Screens layered into screens. City schematics bled into Dominion military grids. Probability trees collapsed into inevitability.
Kael sat nearby, unmoving.
Listening to the den breathe wrong.
Somewhere, Darius should have been correcting his stance.
Somewhere, Rai should have been laughing at his own pain, calling it "character development."
Somewhere, Iria should have been sharpening blades that didn't need sharpening, eyes distant, already preparing for a fight she pretended not to want.
Somewhere, Veyla should have been pacing, daggers spinning idly between her fingers, measuring exits.
Somewhere, Lyria's voice should have been stabilizing the wards just by existing.
None of that happened.
The den endured without them.
That felt worse than losing them outright.
Miles away, Eve-03 moved through ash and broken stone.
The battlefield still radiated solar scars, glass melted into warped black mirrors, steel sagged like wax. Dominion bodies lay where they had fallen, expressions frozen in awe, terror, or absolute disbelief.
She laid the survivors down in a narrow ravine shielded from patrol vectors and orbital sensors.
Her movements were precise.
Gentle.
Careful in a way her combat protocols did not require.
Vital signs: critical.
Structural damage: catastrophic.
Survival probability: unacceptable.
She knelt beside Lyria Feyne.
Her systems hesitated.
That should not have happened.
Eve-03 placed two fingers against Lyria's throat and drew in a fragment of resonance not copying it fully, not understanding it completely. The harmonic pattern fractured inside her Core, unstable, incomplete.
Enough.
She redirected it.
Burns sealed halfway. Lungs cleared just enough. Hearts stabilized just above failure thresholds.
Life.
Not recovery.
"Excessive healing increases survival probability beyond mission parameters," Eve-03 said to the empty air.
She still did it.
Something in her Core rewrote itself in silence.
The next day, Kael went searching.
He walked until his legs shook and his lungs burned. He circled the Dominion tower from every angle, stopping at barricades where scorched glass still glimmered with residual solar heat.
He couldn't go in.
Elite patrols were everywhere now. Phase-sensors hummed beneath layered armor. Aether suppressors made the air heavy,wrong,like breathing through a memory that didn't belong to you.
In the lower districts, whispers followed him.
"They say the sun fell."
"They say gods fought."
"They say the Dominion bled."
Kael listened.
And kept walking.
By nightfall, his boots were heavy with dust and nothing else.
He returned to the den empty-handed.
The third sunrise bled weakly through cracked stone.
The third round of scans failed.
The third silence pressed harder than the first two combined.
Then Tessa froze mid-motion.
"Signal," she whispered.
Kael was on his feet instantly.
"It's… wrong," she said. "Encrypted. Dominion tech but not hostile."
Coordinates flared into existence.
And a signature she could not classify.
Kael arrived alone.
Eve-03 stood at the edge of the clearing, just beyond effective weapon range. Her posture was neutral. Her sensors tracked everything heart rate, breath cadence, Void fluctuations clinging to him like an afterimage.
She did not approach.
She did not explain.
They watched each other.
Kael moved first.
He carried them back one by one.
Iria.
Rai.
Veyla.
Lyria.
Darius last.
Eve-03 watched him struggle.
She did not help.
Recovery was slow.
Incomplete.
Cruel.
Rai could move one arm.
Veyla could stand only with support.
Iria's phasing misfired unpredictably, tearing skin when it failed.
Lyria couldn't sing without coughing blood. Without her voice, her gift turned inward harmful, corrosive.
Darius did not wake.
Scans showed nothing.
No Primal Aether.
No beast resonance.
No response from the den itself.
The ancient wards ignored him.
"The Guardian's body remains," Tessa said quietly.
"The bond does not."
Days passed.
The map never stayed still.
Routes folded into themselves. Coordinates contradicted reality. When touched too long, the surface burned cold.
Tessa reached out to Cipher.
The response arrived hours later, fragmented, degraded, ancient.
THE MAP IS NOT READ.
THE PATH CAN ONLY BE SEEN BY THE FORGOTTEN ONE.
Cipher continued:
THE MAP IS NOT A GUIDE.
IT IS A RECORD OF AETHER MOVEMENT ACROSS HISTORY.
Most routes glow, twist, rewrite themselves because:
• Aether still flows there
• Reality is still being forced
VOID VISION SEES ALL AETHER PATHS.
"I've seen it once," Kael said slowly. "Void Vision. I didn't choose it."
"That's the problem," Tessa replied hoarsely. "You can't."
Kael reached for the map and closed his eyes.
Pain succeeded where meditation failed.
Migraines split his skull. Time fractured minutes vanished, then hours. He heard his sister call his name, wrong every time. He tasted ash that wasn't there.
And then
For half a second
The Void opened fully.
VOID VISIONThe world peeled.
Not forward.
Not backward.
Underneath.
Aether did not vanish, it slowed, stretched, revealed its paths like veins beneath translucent skin. Kael saw pressure before power. Direction before motion. Every living thing dragging intent behind it like a wake.
The map changed.
Not visually.
Conceptually.
All the glowing routes became noise.
The absence sharpened.
Kael saw it clearly now. not a path of travel, but a path Aether refused to enter. Where it bent away. Where reality still remembered how the world existed before it was rewritten.
He staggered.
Tessa caught him.
Blood ran from his nose.
"You're seeing it," she breathed.
Kael nodded, gasping.
"The map doesn't guide," he said. "It resists."
He looked back at the emptiness.
"This," he whispered, "is where it hasn't."
There was one route that showed no glow, no movement, no pressure, no signature.
It was empty.
And that emptiness was not random.
It was the world before the Aetherial Shift.
Before gods rewrote reality.
Before power replaced truth.
The Void does not answer commands.
It answers pressure.
And it had begun to notice him.
That was why:
• The Dominion can't find it
• Sensors miss it
• Maps contradict themselves
They track energy.
This path has none.
And now it was clear why Lord Veylith had allowed the infiltration.
Why he had allowed Kael to succeed.
Only the one with the Eyes of the God, the Forgotten One could ever follow it.
And now team The Forgotten understood.
What remains is recovery.
A solution for Darius.
And the journey down the path of no Aether.
places where abilities weaken, flicker, or fail
Because beyond it
Gods are waiting at Aetherium.
And this
This was only permission.