The bone-deep certainty of being in a place where nothing could truly harm him, where threats existed but couldn't reach the core of what he was.
A sense of belonging.
Recognition by something that had known him far longer than his sixteen years in Elysium could account for.
It remembered versions of himself he couldn't access but somehow still existed in whatever vast presence was touching his consciousness through Malakai's contact with the silver veins.
Home.
Not the Kaiser Estate with its elegant gardens and white-haired family, that had been a comfortable fantasy designed to trap him.
This was different.
The feeling of returning to a place he'd been absent from so long that conscious memory couldn't recall ever having been there, but his soul remembered with clarity, making the present feel like an extended exile.
The warmth lasted three seconds before fading, leaving confusion in its wake that Jack's mind couldn't adequately process.
