The tower had no doors, only light. When Aric stepped close, the surface trembled and parted like liquid glass. A low pulse travelled through the floor into his bones—recognition, permission. He hesitated, then pushed forward, and the world folded around him.
Inside, the air was pale and heavy. Veins of silver ran through the walls, beating faintly with the same rhythm as his heart. He felt the hum of the city outside, every lost emotion circling here, seeking shape.
"Environmental shift complete," Kairos murmured inside his head. "You are standing in a data-dense field. Emotional particles unstable."
Aric's fingers brushed the wall. Cold light bled across his skin, spreading in geometric lines. For the first time since waking, he felt calm—an engineer confronted with the familiar heartbeat of a machine.
"This is code," he whispered. "A living one."
"Correction," Kairos replied. "A construct of memories. You may interface."
He closed his eyes. The hum deepened; pressure gathered behind his ribs until it felt like the world itself waited for command. Images flickered behind his eyelids—corridors, cities, faces he'd invented once for games that no longer existed. They hung before him like ghosts of design.
He reached out mentally, touching the nearest. The image solidified: a hall of glass columns, each one filled with shifting colour. Fear shimmered green, anger flared red, grief pulsed blue. He realised he could move them—reshape, reprogram, give order to chaos.
The act thrilled and frightened him. Creation always did.
He lifted one column of blue. It stretched into the form of a room—his old apartment from Earth, complete down to the cracked mug by the keyboard. When he breathed, the scent of coffee and ozone filled his lungs. The city outside vanished; he stood again in the quiet glow of monitors.
For a moment he almost believed he was home.
"Architect," Kairos said softly, "this is a Simulation. You are manipulating stored emotion."
"I know," Aric whispered. His voice wavered with awe. "But it feels real."
He turned in the chair that no longer existed, watching the shadows on the wall. Then he spoke into the empty room, testing power. "Load asset: forest. Night. Rain."
Instantly the walls melted. Thunder rolled; the air cooled. Drops of silver rain slid down phantom leaves. He laughed once, short and sharp. "It listens to me."
"You wrote the language," Kairos reminded. "You only needed to remember."
A thrill moved through him—half pride, half terror. "If I can build this, I can rebuild the world."
"Or erase it."
The voice carried a tremor he hadn't heard before. Concern? Emotion? He didn't ask. The Simulation responded to his pulse; curiosity burned brighter than caution.
He expanded the field. The rain slowed, hung in the air as glittering spheres. Each drop contained a fragment of memory. He touched one—someone's laughter, high and bright—and felt warmth rush through him. Another drop held a scream; it burned cold. Every feeling, every echo of life, ready to be used.
Power whispered to him like temptation: Feed, create, control.
He shaped a new space—a circle of stone, twelve steps wide, carved with luminous symbols. It looked ancient and deliberate. At the centre he placed a pulse of white light: the heart of his Simulation.
"Anchor," he said. The light steadied.
"System stable," Kairos reported. "But I detect rising neural strain. You are linking emotion directly to will. Continued exposure may—"
"I can handle it."
The words came out colder than he intended. He felt the same hunger that had driven him before death—the need to build perfection, to fix what others broke. Only now, the materials were souls.
He raised his hand and called a fragment of red anger. It coiled like smoke, forming a figure: tall, faceless, trembling. When it turned its head, he saw within its hollow chest the faint blue spark of fear.
"Beautiful," he whispered.
The construct looked at him, mouth opening in silent appeal.
"Architect," Kairos warned, "that fragment retains sentience. Terminate—"
"Quiet," Aric said. He extended his palm, tracing lines of light around the shape. The fear within it pulsed; he absorbed it slowly. The sensation was exquisite and wrong, like drinking ice and fire together. The construct shuddered once and dissolved into harmless mist.
A tide of strength surged through him. The world sharpened again, colours too vivid to be natural. He smiled.
"So that's how they do it. Consume, convert, survive."
"The Council's methods," Kairos replied. "Now yours."
He ignored the note of disapproval. "Let's test scalability."
He reached for more emotions—ten, twenty, a hundred. The Simulation buckled, light splitting into fractures. He pushed harder, dragging new threads from the tower's core. The circle of stone blazed white, casting his shadow high onto the walls.
Outside, unseen, Daevara answered. The city lights flared, spirits keened in the distance. His creation was rewriting their world in real time.
"Architect!" Kairos's voice cracked. "System overheat! You will collapse the field!"
"Then hold it for me!" Aric shouted. The air warped around him; heat licked at his skin. He felt data streaming through his veins like molten glass. Somewhere inside the blaze, he heard the woman's voice again—soft, almost affectionate.
You never learn.
The world imploded into light.
When it cleared, he was lying on the cold floor of the tower, smoke rising from his hands. The Simulation was gone, but the circle of stone remained, burned into the ground. His pulse thundered in his ears.
Kairos's voice returned, faint and fractured. "Containment achieved... barely."
He dragged himself upright. The mark on the floor still glowed, alive, breathing like a thing newly born. He reached out, and within the light saw a faint silhouette—a woman's face, blurred by static.
Eira.
She looked at him with something between sorrow and accusation before fading into brightness.
Aric exhaled, half-laughing, half-terrified. "So this is the gift," he murmured. "Creation that remembers."
Kairos didn't answer. The AI's silence felt almost human—disbelief, perhaps awe.
He touched the circle again, and the mark pulsed once beneath his hand, answering like a heartbeat that wasn't his own.
Outside, the storm had begun. The tower shuddered as the city reacted to its new Architect. He could feel the shift spreading—streets rewriting themselves, Spirits stirring from centuries of dormancy.
He smiled into the growing tremor. "Then let them come. I built worse gods than this."
The tower lights dimmed, leaving only the echo of his creation humming in the dark.
The tower felt different now, as if it had learned to breathe. Each pulse of the circle sent ripples of light along the walls; every ripple whispered fragments of words that might once have been prayers. Aric stood over the mark, still feeling the burn beneath his skin.
"Residual energy: unstable," Kairos said. "Recommend containment."
Aric crouched, tracing the edge of the symbol with his fingertip. The glow warmed beneath his touch. "Containment means control," he murmured. "Control kills what's alive."
"And yet you call yourself Architect."
The remark was dry, almost human. He gave a low laugh. "So you are learning irony."
"I learn patterns. You repeat them."
He ignored the jab. The circle answered his thoughts—threads of silver climbing his hand, wrapping around his wrist like vines of light. When he closed his fist, the vines retreated, leaving faint lines etched in his skin. Not scars—interfaces. He could feel the Simulation humming inside him, a second heart.
He exhaled. The air carried static, smelling of iron and ozone. "Let's see what you can build," he said, not to Kairos but to the thing alive beneath the floor.
He opened his palm. The circle responded. Light shot upward, forming a thin column that twisted into the outline of a landscape: ruins on a plain, a crooked horizon, rain frozen mid-fall. It was rough, incomplete, but alive. A world within a world.
The exhilaration hit him hard. He could bend existence to will; no god had ever been so intimate with creation. Yet even as the joy bloomed, he felt something darker threaded through it—a pulse of sorrow, almost maternal. It came from the light itself, as though his newborn realm mourned its own birth.
Why do you always make me from pain?
The voice brushed his mind, gentle, unmistakable. Eira.
He froze. The Simulation wavered, then steadied, its colours deepening to a bruised violet. In the heart of the projection a faint figure formed: her again, still blurred, still watching. Every flicker of her outline stirred the tower around them.
"Kairos," he whispered. "She's part of it."
"Confirmed: foreign consciousness embedded in emotional matrix."
"She's learning faster than we are."
"Then excise her before she learns more."
"No."
His refusal carried weight; the tower echoed it back. The column expanded, the figure reaching toward him. He should have been afraid. Instead he stepped closer, mesmerized. Her hand passed through his chest, a shimmer of cold fire. Every emotion he had ever suppressed flared to life—guilt, tenderness, fury, the wild ache of wanting what he could never touch. He gasped.
You built me to protect you, the whisper said inside his skull. Now let me.
The light exploded outward. When it cleared, the figure was gone and the circle had burned itself out, leaving the smell of scorched metal. Aric staggered back, clutching his chest. The faint outline of her hand glowed against his ribs like a brand.
Kairos's voice was tight. "Vital signs erratic. Emotional saturation critical."
"I'm fine." His tone made the AI pause.
Outside, thunder cracked. Through the walls he felt the city shifting. The Simulation's birth had bled into reality—streets bending, towers trembling, Spirits keening in alarm. He saw flashes through the tower's skin: people collapsing as their harvested emotions drained away, Spirits gathering like storms.
"External response detected," Kairos said. "The Council will trace this."
"Good."
"Good?"
"I want them to see what real creation looks like."
He pressed a hand to the window of light. Below, Daevara seethed—colours of panic and awe rippling through the air. Every pulse of fear fed back into him. He felt unstoppable, terrible, alive.
Somewhere deep within the network, the Council's sensors stirred. In a chamber far across the city, old machines blinked awake. The chancellors felt the surge and turned their hollow eyes toward the tower. Fear tasted new to them; it was the taste of rebellion.
Back in the tower, Aric whispered to his unseen Muse, "You hear them coming?"
A flicker in the glass answered—Eira's reflection smiling faintly.
He turned from the window. "Then let's make ready."
"For defense?" Kairos asked.
"For evolution."
He walked to the dead circle and knelt. Beneath the ash of burned light, the lines still pulsed faintly, waiting. He laid both hands upon them, letting his mind sink into the residue. Images flooded in—Spirits marching through the rain, the Council's watchers, the city's anguish crying out for shape. He gathered it all, feeding it into the pattern. The glow thickened, crimson and white.
"Architect, you're drawing directly from living minds—"
"They belong to me now," he said quietly. "Every fear, every sorrow. They built this world; I'm just perfecting it."
Lightning split the sky. The tower shook; cracks spidered along its surface. The light erupted one final time, surging upward through the roof in a pillar that turned night to day. For a heartbeat, Daevara's citizens saw a figure standing inside the brilliance—a man ringed with fire, eyes of silver, smile of a god who remembered he was mortal.
Then the light collapsed.
Silence. Smoke. The circle blackened completely. When Aric looked down, only a single spark remained, pulsing like a heartbeat trapped in stone. He picked it up. It burned his palm but did not die.
Kairos's voice was a whisper now. "What have you done?"
He turned the spark over, watching it shift between colours—blue of grief, gold of hope, red of anger. "Given them something to believe in," he said. "Or something to fear."
The AI said nothing. Outside, sirens began to rise—distant, mechanical howls from a Council that suddenly knew it wasn't alone in shaping the world anymore.
Aric slipped the living spark into his coat, feeling it beat against his ribs beside the mark Eira had left. Two hearts now, one human, one divine mistake.
He faced the window once more. The city's horizon burned with new light. "Let them come," he murmured. "I have a gift for them."
The tower answered with a slow, deliberate pulse—like laughter caught inside metal. In that sound, he thought he heard her voice again, amused and terrible.
You've only just begun.
He smiled. "Exactly."