The silver labyrinth of the assassin's mind had shattered, and I found myself standing as a silent observer in the true core of her nightmare: a memory.
We were in the throne room of the Blood Pit. It was darker and more terrifying than I could have imagined. The shadowy, monstrous form of Lord Vorlag loomed over a much younger version of Kaelen the elf. She was just a child, her face streaked with tears and soot, her elven ears drooping in terror and grief. My companion, the present-day, silver-light version of Kaelen, watched the memory unfold with a cold, detached expression, but I could feel the pain radiating from her.
"Your home is gone," the shadow of Lord Vorlag grated, his voice devoid of any pity. "Your people were weak. Their belief in peace and tranquility made them soft. It made them targets. This is what weakness gets you."
The young Kaelen trembled but said nothing.
"I can give you a gift, child," Vorlag continued. "I will give you strength. I will forge you into a weapon, a perfect instrument of power that will never be broken again. You will serve me, and in return, you will gain the only thing that truly matters in this world: the power to ensure you are never a victim again."
The memory showed the young elf, with nothing left to lose, slowly nodding her head. Her tears stopped, and her grief was replaced by a cold, empty resolve. This was the moment she had built her entire mental fortress to protect: the memory of her own pain and the twisted promise that had become her only purpose.
The present-day Kaelen turned her blank gaze to me. 'You see?' her thoughts projected, cold and sharp. 'Strength is the only thing that keeps you safe. Your 'comfort' is an illusion. It is a weakness that gets people killed. This is the lesson my master taught me.'
It was a dark and tragic story. FaeLina would have been horrified. Gilda would have been filled with a righteous fury. But as a former programmer who had died from burnout, I saw something else. I saw a critical flaw in the system.
In the memory, Lord Vorlag was giving the young Kaelen her first order. "You will train. You will not rest. You will not sleep more than is necessary to sustain your body. You will purge all emotion, all weakness, all comfort. You will train until you are perfect."
I focused on that single, monstrous instruction. The sheer inefficiency of it was staggering. I finally found my voice in this dark corner of her mind.
'He never lets you sleep?' I projected. My thought was not an accusation; it was a question of genuine, empathetic horror. For me, a life without rest was the cruelest torture imaginable.
Kaelen was completely thrown by my question. It was the one thing she had not expected. 'Sleep is a weakness!' she retorted, her voice echoing the doctrine of her master. 'Rest is a vulnerability! It is an indulgence for the soft!'
'No,' I projected back, and the image of my own dungeon—the warm, gentle light, the soft moss—momentarily overlaid the dark throne room. 'Rest is how you recover. It is how you get stronger. You cannot run a machine that is constantly overheating. It will break down.'
I pushed a piece of my own memory into her mind: a flash of a dark apartment, the glow of a computer screen, a heart giving one last, exhausted beat.
'That's what happened to me,' I explained. 'That's what your master is doing to you. His system isn't just cruel. It's inefficient. It's designed to fail.'
This new perspective—an argument not of good versus evil, but of sustainable systems versus inevitable burnout—was something Kaelen's cold, logical mind had never once considered. I could feel a crack form in her certainty.
I didn't press the attack. I had made my point. The dark, terrifying memory of the throne room began to fade around us, not replaced by her sterile, silver labyrinth, but by the quiet, twinkling starlight of my own Hibernation Hollows. I had brought her dream into my domain.
Before her stood the image of a private napping alcove, a welcoming space of soft cushions and gently wiggling Pillow Fiends.
'You're tired, Kaelen,' I projected, using her name for the first time. My voice was not demanding, nor was it pitying. It was a simple statement of fact. 'The mission is over. You can rest now, if you want to.'
Her dream-self stood there, silent and trembling, staring at the impossibly comfortable-looking bed. Before her was a choice: to cling to the cold, exhausting discipline that had kept her alive, or to embrace the strange, radical, and terrifying idea of simply taking a nap.