Kade felt as if he'd been dropped into a vat of freezing water.
The city on the other side of the rift had looked close enough to touch. But the moment he leaped through after his father, the distance stretched impossibly wide. He was falling through a corridor of bent space, weightless, his ears popping as pressure shifted around him. He craned his neck and saw Trent ahead, folded arms glowing with a thin green sheen, obviously accustomed to the passage.
Kade tried to right himself. Couldn't. He tumbled backward, arms flailing, the purple sky of Davros spiraling above him like a target he couldn't reach.
Trent glanced back. His expression wasn't cruel—just clinical. A researcher watching a subject experience something necessary for the first time.
Before Kade could curse him, the corridor spat them out.
Trent touched down lightly, still buoyed by his Ala. Kade tumbled after him, head rushing toward the stone ground. He braced for impact—
And stopped.
A green tether had wrapped around his ankle. Trent's Ala, extending from his father's hand like a lifeline. Kade hung upside down for a moment, blood rushing to his face, before Trent lowered him gently to his knees.
Immediately, Kade felt the change.
It was like breathing dirty city air his entire life and suddenly inhaling pure oxygen. The Ala in his body surged, circulating faster than it ever had, eager and responsive. The density of the atmosphere here was no joke—Ala pressed against his skin like a physical weight, thick and charged and alive.
When Trent retracted his tether, Kade nearly pitched forward. His own body compensated instinctively, drawing the ambient Ala into his Ori and pushing back against the pressure, creating a pocket of equilibrium around himself. He could breathe. He could stand.
Through all of this, Trent stood by, observing. He didn't help. Not because he was unwilling, but because every new Enlightened had to adapt to an Enlightened city alone. The body had to learn to swim before it could be taught.
Kade adjusted in under a minute.
Trent's eyebrows lifted slightly—just barely—but Kade caught it. That was surprise.
"Fastest I've ever seen," Trent said quietly. Not to Kade. To himself.
Kade got to his feet and looked around.
He and Trent stood before a massive gate of pale stone, the word "Davros" carved above it in letters that seemed to shift if stared at too long. On either side of the gate stood two statues—one of a man, one of a woman—facing each other across the entrance. They were carved from different stone: the man from white marble that caught the purple light and seemed to glow, the woman from black obsidian that drank it in.
Kade squinted at them. They looked vaguely familiar, like faces he'd seen on magazine covers or news broadcasts, but he couldn't place them.
A sharp pain lanced through his eyes.
Not a normal ache. Something deeper, like the statues were pushing back against his gaze, recognizing something in him that shouldn't exist. He winced and looked away.
"Don't stare at the Founders," Trent said, his voice carrying a weight Kade hadn't heard before. "The Architects. They went beyond Tempered. What remains of them in those statues... doesn't like being examined too closely."
"Who are they?" Kade asked, rubbing his eyes.
Trent's jaw tightened. He looked at the white marble figure with something close to reverence, then at the black obsidian one with flat neutrality.
"The two who carved this place out of Nox. Working together." He paused. "You will learn the stages soon enough. Come."
Kade followed, unsettled. As they walked across the bridge toward the gate, he glanced over the edge.
There was no ground. No water. No support of any kind. The city simply ended, and beyond it stretched an endless void—not black, but a deep, bruised purple that seemed to breathe. Davros was floating in the space between worlds, suspended by nothing he could see.
"We're not on Earth anymore," Kade said. It wasn't a question.
"Indeed," a voice boomed from above.
A figure dropped from the top of the gate, wrapped in a blue sheen of Ala that flared bright before extinguishing as he landed. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with a buzz cut, a well-trimmed beard, and deep blue eyes that matched the energy surrounding him. He wore a simple white shirt and jorts paired with Timberlands—a peculiar combination for a grown man. But considering they were standing on a floating rock in who knew where, he might just be the least strange thing there.
Ryan threw his hands up as if he wanted to embrace the world and exclaimed in his boisterous voice, "Trent Moren! As I live and breathe, it's been a long time since I saw you around here. I thought normie life had caught you for good!"
He leaned in with a sly grin. "Of course, if I had a wife like yours to go back to, I might just say goodbye to this rock as well."
Trent's expression didn't change. But something in his posture shifted—a slight squaring of the shoulders, a tightening of the jaw. Beside him, Kade felt his own hands curl into fists.
Ryan saw it. The smile froze on his face, and he coughed, holding up a placating hand. "Right. Sorry. Touchy subject."
He turned to Kade, and a different kind of energy entered his eyes—not the performative warmth of before, but something sharper. Assessing.
"This must be little Kade," Ryan said, his voice dropping to a murmur that still carried. "Our very own Dual Gaze survivor."
Kade felt the words like a physical blow. His knees locked. His head snapped toward Trent, eyes wide with accusation—but Trent looked just as shocked. His mouth had gone tight, his green eyes fixed on Ryan with an expression Kade had never seen there before.
Fear.
Ryan watched them both, and the last of his boisterous energy drained away. The blue light around him dimmed to a faint shimmer. His shoulders dropped, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its boom. It was cold. Precise. The voice of someone who had been ordered to deliver a message.
"You didn't think your pitiful skills could hide something this monumental from the Council, did you?" Ryan said. "Those oldies probably knew before you did."
He took a step closer to Trent, and Kade felt the temperature drop.
"By not reporting this matter, you're in violation of the law. The laws put in place to protect us all." Ryan's eyes flicked to the statues behind them. "By the Founders. It's a good thing you came. If someone had had to come get you, they wouldn't have been gentle."
The gates groaned open behind him, massive stone doors parting to reveal the glowing avenue beyond.
Ryan turned and walked into the city without looking back. "The Council wants to see you both."
Trent stood motionless for a long moment, his face a mask of bitter resignation. He had expected this, Kade realized. Not the specifics, not Ryan's ambush—but the loss of control. The discovery.
"Let's go," Trent said quietly. "Don't speak unless asked. Don't volunteer anything. Let me handle this."
He walked after Ryan. Kade followed, his heart hammering against his ribs, the word survivor echoing in his ears as he stepped through the gates of Davros for the first time.
The gates of Davros closed behind them with a sound like stone grinding against stone.
__
Deep within the heart of the city, in a chamber that existed behind walls of solid silence, eight figures sat in judgment.
The room was vast and circular, its ceiling lost to shadow far above. The walls were bare stone, unadorned except for a single emblem carved above the entrance: an orb split down the middle, one half a blazing sun, the other a swallowing eclipse.
Four figures sat to the right. They wore white cloaks that seemed to generate their own soft luminescence, the fabric shifting like liquid starlight. Four sat to the left, wrapped in black that drank the chamber's faint light and gave nothing back. All eight had their hoods drawn forward, their faces lost in darkness deeper than the room itself.
Between them, hovering at the center of the circle, a fog coalesced.
It was not mist. It was something denser, more deliberate—a suspended breath of Nox itself, shaped and held by the combined will of the eight. Within its grey depths, an image formed: the gates of Davros closing, and beyond them, three figures standing in the avenue. Trent, rigid and controlled. Ryan, swaggering ahead. And between them, a boy with green eyes that caught the purple light of the sky like embers.
The eight did not speak. They did not move. They simply watched.
Then an aged voice rang out, dry and precise, impossible to trace to any single hooded figure.
"Tell the enforcer team to stand down. It seems Trent had the good sense to come quietly with the boy."
Silence followed. The fog rippled, the image within it sharpening as the gates sealed shut.
Movement stirred at the corner of the chamber.
A feminine figure stepped from the shadows, materializing as if she had been part of the architecture all along. She was slight, dressed in grey that belonged to neither faction, her face smooth and unreadable. She did not bow. She simply inclined her head, her voice flat and passive.
"Yes, Councilman."
Then she vanished.
Not a step. Not a turn. One moment she was there, solid and present, and the next the space she occupied was empty, as if the room itself had exhaled and removed her from existence.
The eight figures remained motionless.
In the fog, the image of the sealed gates remained, but the eight hidden faces had already turned their attention inward. Somewhere in the silence between them, a decision was being made about a boy who should not have survived.
They watched.
They waited.
__
Kade stepped onto the avenue and felt the city breathe around him.
It was not a metaphor. The air moved here—not with wind, but with currents of Ala so dense they created pressure against his skin. He could feel it flowing past him, through him, circulating in patterns that followed the architecture itself. The Ori at the base of his skull had stopped being cold. Now it felt warm, almost eager, drinking in the ambient energy that saturated every stone of this place.
He followed Ryan and Trent down the central avenue, and the scale of Davros unfolded before him.
The street was wide enough to accommodate six lanes of traffic, though no cars moved here. Instead, figures walked in both directions—some alone, some in pairs, some surrounded by faint auras of colored light that marked their Ala affinity. Kade saw a woman in a business suit glide past on a cushion of pale gold radiance, her heels never touching the ground. He saw a man in construction gear lift a beam of steel with one hand, his fingers wrapped in a sheen of deep amber. He saw teenagers in school uniforms arguing on a street corner, their gestures leaving trails of light in the air that faded slowly, like afterimages.
None of them looked at him. They were all Enlightened, all accustomed to the impossible. A boy with glowing green eyes was barely worth a glance.
But Kade looked at everything.
The buildings rose on either side in a unified aesthetic, each one a blend of pale stone and cultivated technology. Crystalline panels grew from carved rock like mineral formations, their surfaces threaded with circuitry that pulsed in rhythm with the Ala currents. Geometric towers spiraled upward, stone frames fused with glass that seemed to have been grown rather than installed. Balconies of carved granite supported gardens that hung above the street, while shop windows displayed goods illuminated by light that emanated from the stone itself. The purple sky of Davros caught every surface and refracted it into muted, bruised hues.
Ryan led them down the central avenue without looking back, his Timberlands clicking against the stone with a sound that was aggressively normal in a place that defied normality.
Kade walked between his father and the man who had just threatened them, and he felt the weight of a hundred eyes. Not all of them were looking at him, but enough were. He caught glances from passersby, quick assessments that lingered on his face, his eyes, the way he moved. They knew. Word had spread faster than Trent could drive.
A Dual Gaze survivor. In their city. Walking their streets.
Kade kept his expression blank and his shoulders loose, but his senses were stretched to their limit. The Ala here was so dense that his enhanced perception was nearly overwhelmed. He could hear conversations from blocks away, could smell the individual components of the city's scent—stone dust, ozone, cooking meat from somewhere distant, the chemical sharpness of Ala itself. He could feel the heartbeats of the people around him, dozens of them, each one a distinct rhythm that pressed against his awareness like fingers against a drumhead.
He forced himself to pull back. To narrow his focus. Trent had warned him about this—the danger of sensory overload in a place where the Veil didn't suppress anything. Kade imagined a wall around his mind, brick by brick, and slowly the noise receded. Not gone, but manageable. He could still hear the footsteps behind him, the whispered conversations from a nearby café, the hum of Ala moving through the city's infrastructure like blood through veins. But it was background now. He was swimming instead of drowning.
Trent walked beside him, saying nothing. His father's posture was rigid, his eyes fixed ahead, but Kade could see the micro-movements—the slight turn of his head as he scanned rooftops, the tension in his hands that never quite relaxed. Trent was afraid. Not of Ryan. Not of the Council. Of the city itself. Of what it would do to his son. Of what it would reveal about his own failures.
Kade filed that away.
The avenue ended at a circular plaza dominated by a building that rose higher than any other structure in the city. It was a tower of grey stone threaded with crystalline veins, its surface carved with the same sun-and-eclipse emblem that Kade had seen above the city gates. The building did not glow. It did not absorb light. It simply existed, solid and unyielding, a declaration of authority that needed no supernatural enhancement. The crystalline circuitry in its facade pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light that matched the Ala currents in the air.
Ryan stopped at the base of the tower's steps and turned around. The boisterous energy was still gone, replaced by a professional neutrality that was somehow more unsettling than his earlier threats.
"The Council Hall," Ryan said. "You're expected."
He gestured toward the doors, which were already opening, and stepped aside to let them pass.
Trent hesitated for just a fraction of a second. Then he climbed the steps, his back straight, his face a mask of scholarly composure. Kade followed, and as he passed Ryan, the man leaned in close enough to whisper.
"Watch your step in there, kid. They don't ask questions twice."
Kade didn't respond. He kept walking, up the steps and through the doors, into the grey tower where eight figures waited to decide his fate.
The doors closed behind them with a sound like a final breath.