Inside the spire was not a room, but a memory theater.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were seamless black crystal, but as they entered, it dissolved into a perfect holographic recreation of a reality that made Echo's anomaly core ache with recognition.
They stood in a place of impossible, sublime harmony. A single, unified reality where light and dark, order and chaos, logic and emotion existed not as opposites, but as notes in a perfect chord. This was the Primordial Whole.
And they watched as it shattered.
The cause was not an external force. It was an idea. A thought from within the Whole itself—the concept of "Other." The desire for separation, for individuality, for self. That single thought became a flaw, a crack, and the perfect crystal of existence fractured along a trillion lines.
The largest fragments became the Ordered and Corrupted multiverses. Smaller ones became the Splinter Realms. The violence of the schism echoed through the newborn multiverses as a wave of pure creative/destructive force—the Big Bang of every reality.
The vision zoomed in on one tiny, glittering shard, flung far from the rest. It was a sliver of the Primordial Whole that contained a spark of its original, unifying nature. That shard, after eons of drifting through the bleeding wounds of the new multiverses, eventually found its way into the nascent life of a backwater world called Earth. And there, it lay dormant in the genetic code, waiting.
Waiting for a catalyst. A summoning ritual gone wrong. A tear in space.
Waiting for Echo.
The vision faded, leaving them back in the black spire. A figure now stood in the center—not a person, but a conceptual echo, a wisp of the Primordial Whole's dying consciousness. It looked like a humanoid shape made of shifting, iridescent smoke.
"You are the Remnant," it whispered, its voice the sound of breaking glass and distant singing. "The seed of the Whole, planted in the field of broken pieces. Your purpose is not to choose a side. It is to end the war by making the war irrelevant. To heal the schism."
"How?" Echo asked, his voice hoarse.
"By achieving Synthesis. Your bloodline is the bridge. Your bonds are the anchors. You must grow powerful enough to touch the fundamental laws of the broken realities and… reweave them. But know this: the Grand Design is the will of the Schism itself—the ingrained, pathological impulse to remain separate. It will manifest to stop you. It has already begun."
The echo gestured, and new images flashed—not of the past, but of the present.
They saw the Ordered Council, secretly authorizing a project called "Cage of Light," designed to capture and neutralize "unstable transcendent variables."
They saw the Corrupted Legion, diverting entire fleets, not to attack Order, but to search for "the Unmaker's Heart."
And they saw the Shadow Court, not as a third side, but as agents of the Grand Design, fostering chaos and division to ensure no synthesis could ever take root. They had been manipulating Echo, not to use him, but to study him, to find his breaking point.
The final image was the most personal. It showed Kaelen, their Black-Ops observer, in a clandestine meeting with a Shadow Operative. Receiving a data-chip. Her face was grim, resolved.
She was the mole. The trap had been around them from the very beginning.
The echo faded, its last words hanging in the air. "The Design is everywhere. Trust no one outside your bonded circle. The path of the Synthesizer is walked alone… until the very end."
Silence. The truth was a cold, crushing weight.
Echo had his answer. He was a living bandage for a multiversal wound. Everyone wanted him dead or in chains for it. And the one person in the Ordered hierarchy he'd begun to trust had betrayed him.
He looked at Leyla, Mira, and Ryn. Their faces were pale with shock, but their eyes were on him. Steady. Unwavering.
They were all he had.
And for now, it was enough.