The land changed beneath his feet.
Not gradually — not like a biome shift, or a change in terrain. It shifted between breaths. One moment, Dren walked through a crag of glassy stone and fractured bones, and the next, he stood ankle-deep in grass that shimmered with color like fire through oil. The wind changed tone. The sky flickered, white to black to bruise-purple. The world became a smear of layers stacked atop one another — moments buried in the dirt, memories stitched to air.
He stood perfectly still.
Around him, shapes began to move.
Not ghosts, not exactly. Echoes. Half-light figures replaying acts of long-forgotten conflict — shimmering outlines of armored warriors clashing with beasts that didn't make sense. One had too many joints in its arms, bending backward with a howl of flame. Another looked like it was stitched from multiple species — a centaur of jagged bone and flame, dragging a burning jaw behind it.
They didn't notice him.
At least, not at first.
Dren moved slowly, weaving between the replays of the past. Each step kicked up dust from one layer of history and laid footprints in another. A momentary flicker — a castle intact, a garden blooming, a sky full of soaring machines — then gone. Blown out like a candle by time.
Then came the howl.
It wasn't part of the echo.
This sound wasn't memory.
It was present.
He turned, blade sliding free in silence.
From the center of the broken field, the echoes twisted inward. They folded like cloth, collapsing into a spiral that bled sparks at the edges. And from that rift, something emerged.
Something real.
The beast stood twelve feet tall, draped in a veil of flickering projections — bits of old warriors, snarls of Titans, fractured shadows of things that had been. Its skin wasn't skin. It was filmstriped time — sequences from a hundred moments projected over muscle and bone. Its eyes were constantly shifting. Sometimes red. Sometimes human. Sometimes empty.
It locked onto him.
And it charged.
Dren didn't think. He moved.
Volt Dash — sideways.
The creature tore through the spot he had been, its jaws snapping open to reveal teeth that flickered between obsidian and polished steel. The echoes followed it — trailing like a cloak, or maybe a curse. As it spun and struck again, Dren ducked low, drove his blade up—
It passed through.
The beast rewound.
It wasn't wounded. It reverted.
"You're not real," Dren whispered.
The beast screamed — a cacophony of voices speaking the same name.
Not his.
Not any he knew.
It lunged again, and he met it mid-stride.
This time, he charged not the body — but the moment between moments.
He let the lightning in his veins read the rhythm of its flickers.
Snap. Snap. Blur. Pause.
Strike.
He launched forward, crackling yellow arcs across his blade, and drove the point into the split-second where its form failed — when the timelines hadn't caught up. There was resistance. Then give. Then heat.
The beast shrieked.
Time fractured.
Every echo around him stopped.
Then scattered like dust.
The beast fell back, its body collapsing into a spiral of broken light. It didn't die — it expired. Like a film reel burned at the edges and discarded by the projector.
Dren dropped to one knee, panting. Sparks still danced off his arms.
He looked around.
Silence.
No more echoes.
The air was still again. The real world, fully settled back into place.
But the earth beneath him hummed with ancient memory.
He rose.
He wasn't walking through ruins anymore.
He was walking through burial grounds of reality.
And deeper still… lay the storm.
The land sharpened as he climbed.
Jagged stone outcroppings jutted from the slopes like broken teeth. The wind howled louder here — not as air, but as pressure. Every step closer to the Meridian was like dragging his body through a rising tide of invisible static. Sparks skittered along his forearms without command. His nerves twitched even when he stood still. And overhead…
The sky bled.
A constant spiral of lightning churned in slow, vicious circles — too perfect to be natural, too chaotic to be controlled. The storm didn't move across the world. It hovered, ancient and wrathful, like a wound that refused to close.
Dren scaled the black slope with care. Every ledge threatened to collapse beneath him. Each foothold could become a blade. The planet didn't want him here.
And he didn't care.
As he climbed, the lightning grew louder — not in sound, but in presence. It was aware. A current of something watching. Waiting.
A ridge of stone arced above him, forming a near-vertical wall of carved obsidian. Etched across its face were burned runes, melted lines that hadn't been chiseled but scorched into place. The wind screamed past them.
Dren took a breath.
Then leapt.
Volt Dash — upward.
The lightning in his chest ignited, slamming his body into the side of the cliff. His boots struck a ledge. Hands caught a crack. He climbed without stopping, without questioning. The mountain groaned with every motion.
Halfway up — it happened.
The Judgment Strike.
It wasn't lightning from the storm.
It was from the sky itself.
A spear of silver fire erupted from the clouds, striking him in the center of his spine. He didn't scream. He didn't fall.
He froze.
Because the world disappeared.
⸻
He was somewhere else.
Standing in a black field.
No ground beneath his feet. No sky. Just an endless void of flickering images suspended around him like shattered glass.
They all showed him.
Dren.
But different.
One stood as a conqueror, leading armies of steel across ruined planets. Lightning crowned him like a halo. Another sat alone in a cave, wild-eyed, muttering, clawing at his own skin. Another was dead — impaled through the chest, broken and forgotten. One more stood in silence atop a tower, surrounded by corpses of his enemies.
"Which are you?" came a voice.
It wasn't the storm.
It was himself.
His own voice — detached, cold, analytical.
"You were not built for fate. You were made for endurance. But endurance without purpose is rust."
The versions closed in.
They circled.
They accused.
"You waste the gift."
"You burn when you should cut."
"You're scared of what you could become."
He clenched his fists.
Lightning surged along his arms — chaotic, primal.
And in that moment, he screamed:
"I choose neither!"
He shattered the reflections.
Electric arcs burst from his chest in a perfect sphere, reducing the false paths to ash. The field tore open — and he fell.
⸻
He crashed back into his body — wind in his face, storm behind his eyes.
Dren hung in midair, freefalling toward a crumbling ledge.
He twisted mid-descent and drove a Volt Dash upward again — screaming through the last few meters of the climb.
The storm wall pulsed.
For a breath, it parted.
The clouds above opened like petals of an angry flower, and in that moment, Dren stood at the rim of the Meridian.
The valley beyond was silent.
Flat.
Smooth as obsidian glass.
And at its center — a bloom of metal petals, closed tight, humming with energy.
Dren didn't smile.
But he understood.
The climb was never about ascent.
It was about rejection.
And he'd rejected everything — even himself.
The silence was so deep it rang.
Dren stepped onto the smooth obsidian surface of the Meridian valley. The ground was flat, circular, and polished like a mirror reflecting a darker sky. Every footstep echoed outward, not just in sound—but in energy. Each step caused a ripple of silver current across the glass floor, vanishing into the distance like breath across water.
The structure at the center loomed like a sealed bloom—twelve curling metal petals locked together, glowing faintly with inner veins of soft cobalt and gold. It wasn't just mechanical. It pulsed—like it had a heartbeat. The deeper he walked, the more he felt it in his bones.
Not electricity. Not magic.
A resonance.
He drew closer.
The petals twitched.
And the guardian awoke.
A hiss of steam cracked the air, and a shimmer took form between Dren and the chamber. It rose from the floor—layered limbs forming from crystallized filaments of metal and mirrored current. No eyes. No mouth. A body like a mannequin carved from plasma and alloy. Only a small, circular eye in its chest, which blinked once with a sound like a tuning fork struck in stone.
It moved.
Fast.
Faster than anything Dren had seen since bonding with the Vow.
The construct closed the distance with a blur, its limbs extending into blades of mirrored lightning. Dren ducked under the first slash, but the second—his own move, Volt Dash, copied perfectly—caught him in the ribs and sent him skidding.
He tumbled, rolled, landed in a crouch.
The guardian didn't pursue.
It studied.
It had learned his style instantly. Every feint. Every trick.
He struck again, blade arcing with raw charge—and it parried with exact rhythm, like a dancer reflecting its partner in reverse. Blow for blow. Dash for dash.
Every technique he used, it copied cleaner.
Sharper.
It's mimicking me. But cleaner… no flaws…
He backed off.
Then it advanced with his own footwork. The same pivot. The same flick.
It wasn't just copying moves.
It was reflecting him.
Dren gritted his teeth.
Then he did something he hadn't done in years.
He fought wrong.
He staggered forward with wild, jagged slashes. He moved off-rhythm. He faked a stumble and lashed upward with a palm instead of a blade.
The guardian twitched—uncertain.
Its response was slower.
Imperfect.
Dren slammed an EMP Veil around them both.
For a second—silence.
No power. No mimicry.
Only grit.
He drove his elbow into its core-eye, then wrapped his arm around the construct's neck and willed the current through his entire body. Not a clean blast—raw voltage. Screaming arcs of yellow and white tore through the guardian's joints. Its mirrored limbs sparked violently.
It staggered.
He didn't give it time.
He leapt, shoved both fists into its chest, and screamed as he forced everything into the strike.
"This is me. Flawed. Wild. Alive."
The construct's core shattered.
Its body locked—flickered—then exploded into threads of silent light, falling like ash.
Dren collapsed to one knee, panting, body smoking with residual charge. His chest mark glowed hot, pulsing.
The petals of the bloom opened.
Softly.
Slowly.
Inside, a smooth chamber of light and sound. Conduits hummed with energy that didn't buzz, but sang. Floating at the center was a crystalline shape—like a seed carved from lightning and thought. The light it gave off wasn't blinding. It was welcoming.
He stepped forward.
The core in his chest warmed—not reacting, but recognizing.
His fingers hovered over the seed.
He expected resistance. Pressure. Maybe pain.
There was none.
Only stillness.
And then, as his fingertips brushed the edge of the seed, a voice echoed—not from around him, but within him.
Not a recording.
Not a guardian.
But the system itself.
"You were not chosen to wield it."
"But you came anyway."
Dren didn't flinch.
He reached forward, wrapped his hand around the seed.