Barachas had been sitting at the edge of the Sanctum's upper terrace, a silent monolith against the whipping wind. Clouds moved beneath the mountain spire like great, slow rivers of mist, parting and folding over each other in endless motion. He had been watching them for days—perhaps weeks—through the eyes of the earthen bird he'd formed earlier. It roamed far below the veiled skies, carrying fragments of sight from the world that had forgotten them.
But then—
The bird froze mid-flight, its body shuddering. Barachas felt it at once. The tether between him and the construct quivered like a plucked string, the air within the Sanctum thickened, and the mountain itself gave a low, hollow groan that vibrated through the stone beneath him.
The feeling came not from the world below, but from within.
Barachas turned, his expression sharpening. Behind the sealed doors of the inner sanctum—behind layers of runic metal, sigils, and unbroken silence—something vast and alien had stirred. The kind of presence that did not move through space but reshaped it by existing.
A tremor ran through his body before his mind could give it meaning. His first instinct was disbelief. Then came recognition—and unease.
"…No," he murmured to himself, voice low and uneven. "That… cannot be."
The air inside the sanctum had always been still, held under the restraint of countless wards. Now, however, those wards whispered, their symbols flickering faintly like nerves reacting to pain. Something within was rewriting them—not destroying, but recalibrating, as though asserting a higher authority.
A pulse spread outward. Not heat, not light, not any simple element—but presence. It was like watching reality adjust its posture to accommodate something that had always belonged here but had been asleep.
Barachas stood slowly. He did not breathe for a long time.
Through all the ages of his existence, he had encountered only fragments of such phenomena—Primordial Eyes. The ancient texts whispered of them as the last remnants of pre-creation beings: sensory organs that did not see matter or soul, but truth itself. There were twelve recorded in myth, each bound to a forgotten sovereign who had once ruled the spaces between time and void. None were supposed to exist in this world anymore.
And yet, in the deep quiet of the Sanctum's training chamber, one had just awakened.
Barachas's mind moved rapidly—he recalled the first days after his reawakening, when Alatar had freed him from the long slumber of the Malakors. The boy had been frail, trembling, but sharp. Driven. There had been hints—subtle flares of power that never aligned with any known discipline—but nothing of this magnitude. Nothing that could command the bones of existence.
Now, what he felt coming from below was unmistakable.
The air hummed in tones only beings of his nature could hear—a harmonic resonance that vibrated in the teeth and behind the eyes. It was the voice of reality acknowledging an ancient authority.
He took one step toward the sealed chamber doors.
The runes guarding them shivered as though reacting to his proximity. His instincts screamed to enter, to see what had changed—but centuries of discipline held him still. He knew better than to interrupt what might be a convergence.
Instead, Barachas extended his consciousness, a subtle wave of perception that seeped through the seals without breaking them. The moment his awareness touched the edge of the inner chamber, it was struck by a sensation that nearly made his knees buckle.
An eye was open inside.
Not a physical organ, but an aperture in the weave of being—a slit that drank light and exhaled meaning. It looked back at him without truly seeing him, its regard calm yet absolute.
The feeling was like being weighed by the universe itself.
For a fraction of a moment, he was nowhere and everywhere. He glimpsed—no, he remembered—something vast and ancient: the twelve eyes floating in the void before the first dawn, watching over the architects of order and chaos alike. Each had a name that had not been spoken in epochs. Each carried with it the right to perceive some facet of existence denied to the lesser races.
He staggered back, breath catching. "He's awakened one of them."
The mountain responded to his voice with a deep, resonant echo, as if agreeing.
Barachas's mind spun through possibilities. Which one? Which Eye had chosen Alatar?
The Eye of Waking Flame? Impossible—it would have burned the chamber to glass.
The Eye of Threnody? No, the air was too still, not mournful.
The Eye of Glass Veins? Unlikely—the sound of cracking would have filled the spire.
But this… this sensation was sharper. Controlled. Analytical. It peeled back layers of the world without breaking them. A seeing that built as it destroyed.
Barachas clenched a fist, feeling the faint tremor of power settle through the mountain. "What have you become, Alatar?"
For the first time in millennia, Barachas felt uncertainty—an emotion he thought long buried with the fall of the Malakors. He had guided the boy, trained him, believed him a prodigy of the ash—a savant with the patience to reshape matter and meaning. But now…
Now, the child carried a Primordial Eye.
He glanced toward the distant horizon, where the clouds began to fracture under unseen pressure. Light from some deeper spectrum bled faintly through the mist, not bright, but knowing.
"An Eye…" he whispered. "A fragment of the first sight. I thought them lost."
The realization was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Because such eyes did not merely enhance perception—they rewrote it. The bearer of a Primordial Eye saw not as mortals did, but as creation once did: by understanding what ought to be, rather than what simply was.
And yet… Barachas could sense restraint in the flow. Alatar was containing it, not letting it spiral. The control spoke of immense discipline—of years spent refining thought and motion until the awakening did not consume him.
Pride and dread warred within Barachas's chest.
He looked back toward the chamber, feeling the hum of the Eye like a heartbeat through the stone. He could tell that Alatar was still seated—still meditating—and that whatever had awakened was not malicious. But the mere existence of such a thing would draw attention if the world below ever learned of it.
Whispers would spread. Old powers would stir. And not all who recognized that resonance would welcome it.
Barachas inhaled, slow and deliberate.
"Of all the paths you could have taken…" he muttered, "…you chose the one that even gods fear to tread."
His words dissolved into the wind.
He turned his gaze once more toward the horizon, the world hidden beneath the sea of clouds. He could almost feel the faint vibration of the sanctum's ancient heart syncing with Alatar's pulse. Something was shifting—not just within his pupil, but across the entire mountain.
And yet, beneath the storm of thought, a strange emotion crept into Barachas's ancient mind.
Hope.
For the first time since the fall of the Malakors, he felt it stir—a tiny ember among the ashes of eternity.
He closed his eyes and let his power settle again, suppressing the visible tremors, binding the sanctum in silence. The mountain calmed, but deep within its bones the echo of the Eye still hummed—a promise, or a warning, he could not tell.
Barachas finally spoke, a quiet murmur to the unseen chamber below.
"Whatever it is you've awakened, Alatar… may it not consume you."
He turned back toward the edge of the spire and sat down, watching the veiled horizon with the same patient stillness as before. But his gaze was sharper now, haunted by what he had felt.
A primordial eye had opened beneath his roof.
And the world—though it did not yet know—had begun to turn once more.
The wind over the Sanctum howled like a living memory.
Barachas rose slowly from his meditative seat upon the ledge, the old stone groaning beneath the weight of his motion. For the first time in a millennium, he felt the mountain itself tremble—not from storm, not from the restless sky, but from something within the Sanctum's core.
A single pulse of power, too ancient to name, rippled through every ley vein that coiled beneath the spire. The storm barrier above split momentarily, spilling threads of crimson light into the clouds before sealing again.
Barachas's breath stilled.
> "No," he murmured. "That… that cannot be."
He extended a hand toward the air, and the mists obeyed.
They wove themselves into patterns of resonance—spherical ripples expanding outward, forming an image of the chamber far below. For a heartbeat, he saw Alatar: still, centered, wreathed in motes of ash and red illumination. A slit of light gleamed upon his brow. Then the vision collapsed, burned away by the force emanating from that same point.
Barachas staggered. His body—the body that had endured eras and suns—trembled under the weight of that recognition.
He remembered the old words, carved into the vaults of the First Sanctum:
> "When the sight of Elarion opens, the fabric sees itself."
That phrase had been dismissed as myth even among the Malakors, a poetic metaphor for awakening. But this… this was no allegory. He could feel the world bending toward that single point, as if every element of existence had suddenly remembered its origin.
Barachas clutched the railing, his knuckles whitening, eyes wide with something between reverence and dread.
> "A Primordial Eye… within him?"
The words escaped him again, this time not as disbelief, but as warning.
---
The mountain's wind shifted.
Below, clouds spiraled outward in perfect symmetry—three concentric rings forming across the horizon, echoing the structure of the Eye itself. It was as if the world answered its awakening, mirroring its geometry in the very weather.
Barachas's senses expanded involuntarily. He felt the leylines of the planet sing, harmonizing with the pulse that came from the Sanctum's heart. The rhythm was wrong—beautiful, but wrong. It was the song of something forgotten trying to remember itself through mortal flesh.
He spoke to the storm as though to an old comrade.
> "You feel it too, don't you? The echo of the First Vision."
Silence.
Only the low hum of the Sanctum's pulse, threading through the marrow of the mountain.
Barachas straightened, his expression hardening. The initial awe was giving way to calculation. He could not yet know whether this awakening would destroy Alatar or transform him utterly—but he knew one truth: this was beyond his stewardship.
---
He turned back toward the inner gates.
The runes along the arch flickered alive, responding to his approach, translating the pulse of the Eye into soft tremors in the stone. Each step he took carried both reverence and hesitation.
For the first time since his reawakening, he felt fear.
> "You were meant to learn the Ash, not to summon what sleeps beneath it," he whispered, though the words were meant as much for himself as for his pupil.
"If it truly is Elarion's gaze… then even the Ash will kneel."
He paused before the chamber doors. A faint light seeped through the cracks—dark crimson at its core, edged in pure white, like blood burning through snow.
Barachas did not enter.
Instead, he closed his eyes and extended his consciousness inward, attempting to touch the flow of Alatar's essence without intruding. What he felt there unsettled him: three interlocking currents of will—control, surrender, and something entirely foreign—something that watched back.
He recoiled instantly.
> "It sees me," he breathed. "He does not yet command it—it commands him."
The realization was a quiet thunder in his chest.
The Eye of Elarion was not merely an instrument—it was a consciousness, a fragment of the Original Witness that once peered across creation before the division of realms. It had found a vessel again.
Barachas turned from the chamber, unwilling to test the balance between reverence and madness that such power demanded. The mountain's wind carried his voice away as he spoke, almost in prayer:
> "If you survive this, Alatar… you will no longer walk among men, nor Malakor, nor even gods. You will walk the path of those who remember the First Light."
> "And I—perhaps I was never your master at all."