The sleep that finally took Arrion was not a respite, but a descent into a deeper, more pressurized reality. The physical exhaustion of failed channeling and the mental strain of Lo's ultimatum were swept away, replaced by the familiar, charged atmosphere of the grey plain under a sky of silent lightning. But this time, the dream was more vivid, more insistent. The air hummed with repressed energy, and the two figures awaiting him seemed less like memories or echoes and more like focused presences, burning through the veil of dreams to reach him.
His father, Bunnor, stood as before—seven feet and three inches of perfected warrior form, the onyx eyes holding their patient darkness. But the expression on his face was new: a profound, weary apology. Beside him, the Lightning Giant crackled with contained storm-force, its gaze not judging, but assessing with brutal clarity.
"Son," Bunnor's voice was the first sound, softer than Arrion remembered, stripped of the distant, regal quality. It was just a father's voice, heavy with regret. "We have watched you struggle. We have felt every jarring release, every painful backlash. We… I… apologize."
Arrion, a dream-form of himself, could only stare. "For what?"
"For this," Kaelen gestured vaguely, encompassing Arrion's dream-body, but meaning the scar on his chest, the storm in his veins. "We pushed your legacy into a vessel that was not prepared. Your Ascension was born of trauma and planar feedback—a survival mechanism, not an earned rank. It elevated your body's capacity far beyond your mind's understanding. We gave you a fortress and the key to its armory, but no map of the halls, no training for its guards."
The Lightning Giant took a step forward, each footfall a muted thunderclap. "YOUR INSTINCTS ARE OF STONE AND BLOOD. THE POWER YOU HOLD IS OF LIGHTNING AND WILL. YOU TRY TO HAMMER A NAIL WITH A BOLT OF FORKED LIGHT. IT SHATTERS THE WOOD AND BURNS YOUR HAND. THE SCAR IS THE KINDEST LESSON. THE NEXT COULD BE YOUR END."
"The knowledge you should have received," Kaelen continued, his onyx eyes full of a sorrow that spanned years of absence, "the slow, careful teachings of what it means to be a Warden, to sense the thresholds, to understand the architecture of the planes… that was stolen from you. Stolen from me before I could pass it on. I left you a sword and a name, but not the wisdom to wield either. I left your mother with tales of a hero, but no manuals of a guardian. For that, I am truly sorry."
Arrion felt a surge of old, childish anger, quickly tempered by the vast, adult grief beneath it. "Why? Why was it stolen? What was this 'Great War'?"
Kaelen's form seemed to flicker, the grey plain trembling. "The war that claimed me was not against a rival nation or a rebellious lord. It was against a incursion from a… neighboring reality. A realm of pure, anti-creative hunger. We pushed it back. We sealed the major breaches. But the victory was not clean." He looked into the stormy sky, as if seeing the memory there. "The 'Glutton-From-Below' that now poisons the Marches and blights the forest… it is not the enemy. It is a consequence. A minor, weeping inconvenience left behind. A slow leak from a wound in reality we thought had scarred over. My final duty was to find and cauterize that leak. I failed. And now it falls to you."
The truth was a cold knife. The apocalyptic threat he was racing toward wasn't some ancient, awakening evil. It was his father's unfinished business. A lingering symptom of a war already fought.
"KNOWLEDGE WAS LOST. TIME IS SHORT. THE COSMOS GROWS IMPATIENT," the Lightning Giant intoned, its electric gaze locking onto Arrion's dream-self. "THEREFORE, WE ADJUST THE PARAMETERS OF YOUR EDUCATION. THE SPACE OF YOUR THOUGHT—THIS DREAM, YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS—WILL NOW SERVE AS A TRAINING GROUND."
The grey plain shifted. The featureless expanse transformed into a perfect replica of the muddy clearing behind the marsh village, complete with the murky pool. It was hyper-real, every droplet of water, every blade of soggy grass perfectly rendered, yet thrumming with potential energy.
"HERE, THE CONSEQUENCES ARE CONTAINED. HERE, YOU CAN FAIL A THOUSAND TIMES WITHOUT SCARRING YOUR FLESH OR SHAKING THE WORLD," the Giant explained. A spectral, perfect replica of Arrion's own body appeared by the pool. "YOU WILL PRACTICE THE CHANNELING. YOU WILL VISUALIZE THE FLOW. YOU WILL LEARN THE FEEL OF THE CURRENT, NOT THE EXPLOSION. YOUR WAKING HOURS ARE FOR SURVIVAL, FOR HUNTING THE BEAST. YOUR SLEEPING HOURS ARE FOR MASTERY."
Kaelen placed a hand—a solid, warm, real-feeling hand—on Arrion's dream-shoulder. "It will be exhausting. You will wake more tired than when you slept. But it is the only way. The pressure from above and below is too great. You must learn in days what should have taken decades."
The Lightning Giant's form began to merge with the dreamscape itself, its voice becoming the rumble in the sky, the charge in the air. "AND KNOW THIS, ARRION HAELEND. THE WARDEN'S LEGACY MUST NOT BE TAINTED BY IGNORANCE. IF YOU PROVE UNABLE TO LEARN… IF THE BEAST OF THE MARSH OR YOUR OWN POWER THREATENS TO CONSUME YOU AND BECOME A WEAPON FOR THE GLUTTON… I WILL INTERVENE."
The declaration hung with terrifying finality.
"I WOULD RATHER OCCUPY THIS SHELL OF FLESH AND BONE MYSELF—TO BURN OUT YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS AND USE YOUR VINDICATOR'S BODY AS A VESSEL FOR PROPER, DISCIPLINED POWER—THAN ALLOW THE LEGACY TO BE TWISTED INTO A TOOL FOR THE UNMAKING. IT WOULD MEAN YOUR DEMISE. YOUR SELF, YOUR MEMORIES, YOUR WILL… GONE. BUT THE WARDEN'S DUTY WOULD BE FULFILLED."
It was not a threat made in malice, but a statement of cold, cosmic priority. The Lightning Giant was a manifestation of the power itself, a personified principle. To it, Arrion's individual life was secondary to the correct application of the force he carried. The Warden's duty was paramount.
Arrion felt a terror deeper than any he'd known facing physical monsters. This was the threat of unbecoming. Of having his very self erased, not by an enemy, but by the very legacy he was trying to uphold.
Kaelen's grip tightened, his onyx eyes pleading. "Do not let it come to that, son. Learn. Fast. The beast in the marsh is your first true test. Not just of strength, but of control. Pass it. Prove you are more than a vessel. Prove you are a Warden."
The dream-training began instantly. The spectral copy of himself by the pool moved, and Arrion felt his consciousness split—part of him observing, the greater part inhabiting the copy, feeling every sensation. The Lightning Giant's will guided him, not with words, but with direct, neural impressions of flow, of resistance, of release.
He felt, for the first time, what a gentle current of vindicator-energy felt like as it left the core. It was not a bolt, but a stream. Not a shout, but a sigh. He guided it down the arm of the dream-copy, to the fingertip. He focused on the pool.
A single drop of water leapt from the surface, not blown, but lifted, and hung, quivering, in the air before the dream-copy's finger.
It was a minuscule victory. In the grand scale of the threats he faced, it was nothing.
But in the charged dreamscape, under the eyes of his father and the lightning-clad principle of his power, it was everything. It was the first, fragile proof that he could learn. That he might not need to be replaced.
The training intensified. Failure after dream-failure was dissected, corrected, repeated. The cost was psychic agony, a grinding exhaustion of the soul.
As the first grey light of the marsh-dawn began to seep into the real world, Arrion's consciousness was dragged back to his aching, sleeping body in the stilt-hut. He awoke not refreshed, but hollowed out, his mind throbbing with the phantom echoes of ten thousand attempted channelings. But deep within, beneath the fatigue, was a new, fragile understanding—a muscle memory of the current, not the blast.
He had five days left. The beast awaited. And in his dreams, a relentless, impersonal teacher and the ghost of his father waited too, one offering knowledge, the other offering a last chance to remain himself. The line between salvation and erasure had never been thinner.