The air seemed to shift, heavy and cold. Tanya could see Davidson stiffen, one hand half-raised, while the guards at his flanks instinctively touched their sidearms. Tanya's throat clenched. Every instinct told her something was about to go wrong.
Then Sage's voice rang in her mind like a warning alarm. It was the first time she had heard them talk in anything but a neutral tone.
//MENTAL INTRUSION DETECTED. TSU'S GARDENER IS ATTEMPTING TO HACK OUR CONNECTION.//
Pain lanced through Tanya's skull as the area behind her ear started to heat up. She staggered, leaning against the wall for balance. The lights blurred, voices fading into static. The observation room blurred before dissolving into nothing.
When the world re-formed, she was no longer in any room at all.
She stood on a white plane that stretched infinitely in every direction. No floor, no ceiling, no horizon, but her feet felt anchored as though gravity had agreed to humour her. She wrapped her arms around herself, breath sharp and shallow.
"This… this isn't real," she whispered. "Am I dead?"
//No. This is a Gardener's information dimension,// Sage said, his voice steady even as pressure gnawed at the edges of her mind. //We must defend ourselves here, or risk complete system compromise.//
Shapes solidified out of the void. Tanya blinked, realising with fascination that Sage stood beside her, they had manifested as a sphere of golden light, warm and steady. Across from them, something darker coalesced. Tsu's body flickered faintly at its core but wrapped around him was a pulsing storm of black flame veined with crimson fire. She could tell there was no partnership there.
"I am Archon," the thing declared, its voice vibrating through Tanya's bones. "And you, little shipwright, are trespassing in realms beyond comprehension."
It hurled a fireball the size of a shuttle. Roots erupted from the blank ground, weaving into a barrier that drank in the flames and sprouted new green shoots from the ashes. Tanya could sense that it was Sage's doing.
The white plane convulsed and transformed. It felt like a battle of wills. Sage vs Archon and Tanya couldn't tell who was winning.
The emptiness was filled with a sky of burning light. Colossal beams lanced down from unseen ships in orbit, striking a planetary shield that flickered under the assault. The ground shook, scorched and broken, strewn with collapsed structures.
Tanya's breath caught. One structure she recognised immediately: the workshop. Half-buried in rubble, exactly as she had found it. She looked around and quickly saw the familiar silhouettes of buildings.
"Oh my god," she whispered. "This was your bonded world."
//Accurate. I remember this.// Sage confirmed.
Archon gestured at the devastation with mockery. "The day your Custodians learned that pacifism has limits."
Tanya picked up just a slight flinch from Sage's sphere at the name, but they recovered quickly.
Large humanoid alien figures fled through collapsing dimensional rifts, their screams echoing across the battlefield. She could tell that this was a memory of an evacuation of a dying world. It seemed Archon was trying to manipulate them; she wasn't sure if the target was Sage or herself. If they were trying to create a rift between them, it wasn't working. Tanya felt nothing but awe as she watched Sage and his previous bonded partner try to rescue an entire settlement.
Fury flared in Tanya's chest at the injustice of what she was seeing. She clenched her fists, and something in this strange space responded. Out of memory and stubborn will, crude fighters blinked into existence. At first, it was only small polygonal bombers ripped from childhood simulator games. They roared overhead, their blocky edges smoothing into sharper forms as her conviction shaped them.
Archon batted one aside with a spear of plasma. "Not very peaceful for a Custodian bonded, are you?"
Tanya glared. "I'm not here to be peaceful. I'm here to stop you."
Hearing the word 'Custodian' for a second time seemed to trigger something fundamental in Sage, who repeated it several times as if the term was awakening memories that had been buried for millennia. His golden light pulsed brighter with each repetition, and the roots around him began to grow with renewed purpose.
Archon's amusement shifted to confusion, then to a deeper understanding that made his energy spike with excitement. "Oh, how delicious," he taunted, his form writhing with malevolent joy. "The great Sage has forgotten what he truly is. You don't even remember the price your precious Custodians paid to cage us, do you? Shall I remind you of what you sacrificed to build our prison?"
Above them, the bombardment of fire continued its relentless assault on them.
But the battle was far from over. As the conflict intensified, Tanya watched in horror as Archon began to draw more heavily from Tsu's consciousness. With each attack the dark entity launched, Tsu's human form grew more translucent, more hollow, as if his very essence was being consumed to fuel Archon's power.
"What happens if we lose here?" Tanya asked, dodging a fireball while summoning another squadron of fighters. "Do we die in the real world?"
//Do not think about consequences now,// Sage replied, his forest spreading to intercept another volley of plasma lances. //Focus on the battle. Maintain your defences.//
Tanya took that as a yes and doubled her efforts. More ships flickered into being, swarming the battlefield. Archon shifted, forced to divide their focus between Sage's forest of roots and Tanya's conjured swarm. They were slowly pushing them back.
But Tsu was paying the price. His human outline flickered, growing hollow. Words spilled from his mouth, broken fragments of memory.
"…sister's name… fire… always fire…"
He had been eaten; there was nothing left of him. There was no time to mourn him, or even to think about him.
Archon began another taunt about the fall of the custodians —"pacifists who thought they could control the garden through cooperation rather than conquest"—but Tanya had heard and seen enough
Tanya shut her eyes and reached deeper. The swarm of videogame fighters sharpened into vessels of her own design. Old ships she had drawn in university notebooks, projects that had lived only in sketches. Hulls gleamed with precision; thrusters roared with purpose.
From somewhere older still, from the memory of tractors and harvesters back on Eden-Five, she conjured something new: a massive hammerhead-shaped warship, its prow nothing but reinforced shield plating.
"Push him back!" she shouted.
The hammerhead vessel thundered forward. Archon hurled torrents of fire and plasma, but the reinforced prow absorbed it, turning destruction into momentum. The dark entity faltered, forced to give ground, its black flames rippling under the impact.
But then it shifted.
With a hiss like tearing metal, Archon's form split into multiple shards of burning shadow, each one darting away from the hammerhead's path. The hulking ship ploughed straight through the space where he had been, while the fragments swirled back together behind it.
"Did you think brute force would be enough?" Archon sneered, his voice reverberating from every direction at once.
He struck back with precision. A whip of searing crimson energy lashed across the battlefield, catching one of Tanya's fighters mid-dive. The vessel shattered instantly, exploding into shards. She grabbed her head in pain. A second lash followed, taking down a bomber she'd been particularly proud of. Tanya staggered as pain grew for each ship that was hit by the whip.
Sage's roots surged to shield her, but Archon pressed harder, sending waves of corrosive flame that blackened the forest itself. Branches twisted, crumbling to ash as the darkness spread, and Sage's golden glow dimmed under the onslaught.
For a terrible moment, Tanya realised Archon was pushing them both back.
Screaming in frustration, Tanya forced more of her will into the battlefield, conjuring new ships a whole school of smaller hammerhead ships. Sage rallied, his roots burning but not broken, fresh growth rising stubbornly from the ashes.
Together, they struck again with her ships forming a perfect sphere around Archon, hammering him with coordinated ramming attacks, while Sage's seeds erupted into towering trees, their branches knitting into a living cage.
"Now!" Tanya cried, and everything hit at once.
The battlefield shook under the combined assault. But instead of dying, Archon laughed. His form cracked, light spilling out like shards of broken glass.
"You've beaten nothing but a projection," he sneered. "A fragment. When the seal breaks, we are legion."
His voice lingered even as his body dissolved, echoing across the collapsing white plane. "And you, Custodian, will fall as easily as the rest."
Reality snapped back.
Tanya slumped against the wall of the observation room, chest heaving, hair plastered to her forehead. Davidson steadied her with one arm. The guards looked shaken but unhurt.
On the floor, Tsu lay unconscious, his chest rising shallowly. His lips moved, muttering broken syllables. His face was drawn, hollowed. She could tell there was no Tsu left behind, something essential had been drained from him. It was a breathing corpse.
"Sage, you ok?" Tanya croaked.
//Some memories have been unlocked,// Sage replied, his mental voice carrying both steadiness and confusion. //But they remain incomplete. Archon spoke truth wrapped in lies. He was only a scout. The real danger lies ahead.//
Davidson's expression was grim. "What did you learn?"
Tanya looked at Tsu. The ruin of a man who had once carried the same gift she did, now reduced to a warning in flesh.
"Sadly, not a lot," she replied. She would need some time to process what had just happened before she could give Davidson the answers he craved.