Getting the five broken prisoners back to the Sanctuary was a tense, silent journey. The Gravorg carried the fungal being. Leyla supported the beast-kin. Mira and Ryn helped the Luminari and the human Keeper. Echo walked point, his senses stretched to their limit for any sign of a double-cross.
Back in the safety of their hidden base, the prisoners broke down. The human Keeper, named Elara, was the most coherent. "They… they showed us things," she wept. "Visions of the multiverse's birth. It wasn't a beautiful creation. It was a violent schism. A single, perfect reality that… cracked. Order and Corruption are the two largest pieces, but there are others. Smaller fragments. Lost reflections. They called them the Splinter Realms."
She looked at Echo with desperate eyes. "They said a force older than either is trying to put the pieces back together. To restore the original, perfect whole. And to do that… all the broken pieces, all the life that has evolved in them… must be unmade."
The Grand Design. Not a war to win, but a reset to survive.
The weight of it settled on Echo's shoulders. He had thought he was fighting for survival, for home, for his bonded. Now, the scale was terrifyingly cosmic.
He had the prisoners rest, the Sanctuary tending to their wounds. He gathered his team in the grove, by the now-sprouting Starlight Pomegranate sapling.
"Vespera," he said. "We have to go."
"It's obviously a trap," Leyla stated.
"Yes," Echo agreed. "But it's a trap baited with the only thing we need: the truth. About me. About this war. About what we're really fighting for. We can't build a future on lies."
Mira touched his arm. "Then we go. But not blindly. We use the time we have. We grow stronger. We finish forming your Core."
Ryn nodded. "And we plan. If the Heartwell is a place of power, it'll be defended. Not just by the Court. By whatever's left on a dead world."
They had a new, monumental goal. And the path led through a graveyard of secrets.