The rain had stopped, but the sanctuary still breathed with the ache of thunder.
Fragments of morning light broke through the cracks in the ancient roof, falling across scattered relics—burnt training scrolls, shattered fragments of the old Outfit insignia, and three silhouettes breathing in unison.
The trio had made this ruin their home.
Once a monastery drowned by centuries of silence, now a cradle for rebirth.
Scars and Sparks
Abhi's blade clanged against stone. A small flare of ember burst from the edge, fizzling into blue smoke. He exhaled sharply, lowering the half-melted sword, his wrists trembling.
"Too much channeling," Ahan muttered from the corner, wiping oil from his hands. "You're overheating the alloy again."
Abhi smirked, tired but defiant.
"Maybe the alloy's weak. Or maybe my fire's stronger than you think."
Aryan rolled his eyes, standing by the cracked pillars, spear spinning in a lazy circle. The Aether glow along its spine pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat too uncertain to believe in itself.
"Your fire," Aryan said, "burns only till it runs out of patience. Balance it—or you'll melt that blade and your hand along with it."
Ahan chuckled softly.
"And here we go, Zen Master Aryan preaching again."
It wasn't tension. Not anymore.
The bickering was their rhythm—the first signs of life returning.
The Weight of Siddharth's Absence
At night, when exhaustion replaced their noise, silence returned like a shadow that remembered them too well.
Ahan sat beside the old altar—now converted into a desk. The projector hummed weakly, replaying the flickering holograms from Siddharth's logs.
"Aether isn't fire or light. It's the memory of creation itself," Siddharth's voice echoed, glitching mid-sentence.
"Harness it, and you don't wield power—you borrow balance."
The log cut.
Abhi swallowed hard.
"He always made it sound easy."
Aryan turned toward him.
"Because for him, it was."
No one replied.
For a brief moment, the storm outside returned in their minds—the sight of Siddharth falling, the flash of Virag's eyes, the sound of things breaking that weren't meant to.
They trained harder the next day.
Learning the Pulse
Training wasn't elegant.
It was chaos sculpted by purpose.
Aether reacted differently to each of them. Abhi's blade fed on emotion—every surge of frustration made it flare like molten breath. Aryan's spear required stillness; even his heartbeat affected the spin. Ahan's Modulizer refused to settle—every time he activated it, the thing reshaped, morphing from dagger to bow to claw before collapsing into sparks.
"It's not supposed to decide what it wants to be," Ahan grumbled.
"Maybe it's reflecting your mind," Aryan offered with a grin.
"Then I'm officially doomed."
Abhi laughed—an actual laugh, the first in weeks. It echoed through the ruin, brighter than the torches.
But the Aether wasn't done teaching.
That night, during synchrony training—when the three stood within the sigil circle Siddharth had carved—their energies intertwined for the first time.
Blue, gold, crimson.
Three pulses converging.
And then—
A fracture.
Light ruptured through the circle. The ground cracked open, air splitting with a scream of energy. All three were thrown back, breathless, weapons ringing with impossible resonance.
The pulse faded as quickly as it had come.
"What the hell was that?" Abhi whispered.
"That," Ahan said slowly, clutching his Modulizer as it hummed in his palm, "was us. Out of sync… or maybe just too in sync."
Aryan didn't speak. His eyes had turned toward the altar—where the sigil had burned itself into the stone.
A mark none of them recognized, glowing faintly like veins of light.
The Unknown Resonance
Days passed.
The sigil remained—its light dimming but never dying.
Sometimes it pulsed faintly, almost in rhythm with their breathing, as if Aether itself was waiting for them to understand something deeper.
"It feels alive," Abhi murmured one night, touching the edge of the mark.
"Maybe it is," Ahan replied. "Maybe we just woke something that's been asleep for a thousand years."
Aryan looked beyond the circle, to the old carvings on the walls—forgotten inscriptions of deities and astral fire.
"No," he said quietly. "Something woke us."
Outside, thunder rumbled again, faint and distant—as if answering him.
The sanctuary felt smaller after that.
As though the world beyond its stone walls had just started to notice them.
Rain returns.
Three figures stand beneath its silver veil, weapons glowing faintly in the dark.
Siddharth's old journal rests on the altar, page fluttering open by itself—
a single handwritten line underlined twice.
"When the heart fractures, creation remembers its pulse."
The light of the sigil answers, pulsing once—
three beats, one after another.
Fade to black