They emerged from the Heartwell spire into the ashen light of Vespera. The galaxy had not changed, but Echo's place in it had shattered and reassembled into something terrifying and clear.
"What do we do?" Ryn asked, her pragmatic mind already shifting to tactical planning.
"We run," Leyla said bluntly. "We hide. We get so strong that when they come, we break them."
Mira took Echo's hand. "We stay together. That is the one thing the schism cannot tolerate: perfect unity. It is our weapon."
Echo felt the Vitalis Core beating steadily within him, a sun of unified energy. He felt the perfect circuit of his bond, a fortress of trust. He had truth. He had power. He had his kingdom.
"We don't run," he said, his voice quiet but carrying the weight of his sovereignty. "And we don't just hide. We build. The Sanctuary is our foundation. We will reach out, carefully, to others the Design has cast aside—like the Keepers of the Gloom, like the prisoners we saved. We will build a Sanctuary Network, a hidden alliance of those who believe in something beyond the war."
He looked up at the dead sky, seeing not emptiness, but a battlefield of ideas. "The Grand Design thinks it's manipulating a war between Order and Corruption. We're going to start a third war. A quiet one. A war for wholeness."
It was a monumental, possibly insane goal. To heal a fundamental fracture in existence itself.
But as he felt the resolve of his bonded flow into him, amplifying his own, he knew it was the only path that made sense.
He was no longer Echo the summoned, Echo the slave, Echo the soldier, or even Echo the Sovereign.
He was Echo the Synthesizer.
And his work was just beginning.