The light faded slowly, leaving Clara gasping in darkness. She was lying on cold stone, but it was not the temple floor of Aether's heart—this place was different. The air hummed with power, and far above, stars she did not recognize wheeled across a purple-black sky.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she flinched, drawing the dagger she kept hidden in her boot. Alessandro caught her wrist before she could strike, his face pale but calm in the strange light.
"Easy," he said, his voice echoing in the vast space around them. "We're not where we were. We're not even when we were."
Clara pulled her arm free, pushing herself to her feet. They stood in what looked like the ruins of a great city—towers of crystal and steel lay broken around them, half-buried in red sand that shifted like water beneath their feet. In the distance, a single spire rose toward the alien stars, its top glowing with the same silver light as the Keystone of Aether.
"The Keystone didn't destroy us," she said, staring at the spire. "It cast us out. Sent us somewhere beyond the Order's reach."
Alessandro nodded, running his fingers over a carved symbol on one of the broken towers. It was identical to the one on the Keystone—same lines, same curve, same sense of ancient power. "This was their home," he said quietly. "The ones who built the artifacts. The ones the Order has been trying to emulate for centuries."
Clara remembered the texts she'd studied as a young initiate—whispers of a civilization that had mastered time and space, that had vanished without a trace millennia ago. She'd always thought them myths. Now she stood in their graveyard.
"We have to find a way back," she said, though even as she spoke, she felt the pull of this place. The power here was unlike anything she'd ever experienced—clean, pure, and waiting to be claimed.
"Back to what?" Alessandro asked. "The Order is shattered. Our forces were buried beneath the mountain. Kai and Mara have sealed away the last of the artifacts on our world. There's nothing left for us there."
He was right, and they both knew it. For years, Clara had devoted herself to the Order's cause—to gathering the ancient power that would allow them to reshape reality into something better, something controlled. But in the end, her ambition had destroyed everything she'd worked for.
A sound echoed across the sand—footsteps, steady and deliberate. A figure emerged from behind one of the broken towers, tall and wrapped in robes the color of starlight. Their face was hidden by a hood, but when they spoke, their voice was both young and impossibly old.
"Welcome, seekers," they said. "We have been waiting for you."