Noctis's eyes flicker open to the cold ache of a ruined world.
His chest tightens as he drags in his first conscious breath. Every muscle feels bruised, every joint stiff, but his instincts move before fear can. He forces himself upright with a shaky push, back pressed to the same pillar he collapsed beside.
Still alive, he notes. Just barely.
The ruins around him are quiet. No flicker of monsters. No tremor of incoming threats. Only distant wind dragging dust along cracked stone. But beneath that silence, deeper than the world's sounds, he senses the steady hum of his echosystem: the living architecture of echoes and resistances nested inside him.
He blinks away the haze and, with nothing more than a focused thought, activates his Echoframe.
A translucent interface ripples into view in front of him, tinted faintly in the air. Lines of data stutter and realign as the system pulls itself together after the strain: fractured stats, several achievement slots empty or grayed out, memory chains marked with red where instability still gnaws. The external world is still, but his system is never truly asleep.
[Echoframe: Standby]
His voice is rough, strangled by dryness and fatigue.
"Open system storage."
The interface pulses once, then expands.
[Storage: items cached. Search: Specify term.]
His fingers twitch against his thigh as his mind narrows on a particular artifact. Its name is a weight all its own—spoken of more in whispers and rumors than in hopeful plans.
"Search for: Obsidian Oracle."
The system hesitates, processing. Lines flicker as it cross-references echoes, layers, inventory tags. Then:
[Obsidian Oracle: 5 match found. Status: dormant. Usage count: zero.]
A blurred image forms in the corner of his vision—a dark, geometric shape that looks less like an object and more like a piece of absence given edges. Hungry. Waiting. Noctis focuses on it, selects "retrieve," and feels the weight of the Oracle drop into his palm.
It is not cold, not warm. It feels neutral, as if it absorbs the sensation of touch rather than reflecting it. Holding it is like holding a small, quiet hole in the world.
So it's real, he thinks. Not a rumor. Not an echo-induced hallucination. The door between worlds is small enough to sit in my hand.
Caution follows quickly after awe.
Dimensional artifacts are never simple. Noctis has learned enough to know that crossing between worlds is not a thing that leaves you unchanged. There is no guarantee he is strong enough yet to survive the passage without losing more than he gains.
He steadies his mind, pushing hope and fear out to the edges of his awareness. What remains is a hollow, pragmatic logic: stagnation is another kind of death. A slow one. A quiet one.
"Activate artifact," he says. "Initiate dimensional search."
The Obsidian Oracle pulses once, and silvery-black runes light up along its facets. The Echoframe's interface jitters and then refocuses around a new prompt.
[Warning: Dimensional transition is irreversible until next stabilization. Confirm action?]
He studies the options hanging before his eyes. Stay here—half broken, half bound to a city he has already burned his strength to tame—or move on, stepping into a place where the rules might be even worse but at least different. Survival is motion; stopping is just waiting for something to catch up.
"Confirm," Noctis says. "Take me out of this world."
The Oracle drinks his intent.
Reality loosens its grip. Echoframe stats flicker and smear—health, memory integrity, soul-thread stability—all briefly exposed as numbers that mean little when the ground itself stops being certain. Stone drops away beneath him. Color washes out, then returns as streaks. The system's prompts fall silent.
Darkness surges, not the quiet night of the ruined city but something deeper, thick as ink. It feels like falling through the marrow of realms, muscles and thoughts obeying nothing but the will that told the Oracle to open.