The third floor's grand foyer held its beauty the way a blade held an edge. Gold and marble gleamed beneath lantern light, and the elven arches overhead felt too graceful to belong to a ruin that had swallowed goblins and secrets.
Yet the ritual circle in the center was the true heart of the room—nine layered rings of ancient geometry humming like a living mechanism. The air tasted faintly of ozone and old incense, as if time itself had been peeled back and folded neatly beside the walls.
Alanor stood within the circle as if he had never left it, older now, weathered by years that had not been kind. His laugh lines looked honest, but the stress marks on his brow told a harsher story: a lifetime spent holding back storms. Grey and silver threaded through what had once been gold hair, tied neatly as if he refused to allow age the final insult of disorder.
The knights held their formation at the edges of the foyer, Gallant steel angled toward any threat. Dawn clung lightly to Alaric's sleeve, her fingers trembling. Asimi stood forward of the soldiers, her metallic eyes fixed on Alanor with the calm scrutiny of a woman used to negotiating with men who thought power made them unanswerable.
"I will help them unlock their second sphere," Alanor said, his voice resonant. "Not by forcing them until their channels tear, but by opening it in a controlled way. I will use the tower's mana reserves as a battery so their bodies do not pay the price."
The Theurge leader shifted her stance, her eyes narrowed at the circle's layered geometry. "That risks mana shock, channel collapse... soul displacement." She looked at Asimi, waiting for the word.
Asimi did not look away from Alanor. "And if you harm them," she said softly, her voice carrying a weight that made the knights shift uncomfortably, "there is nowhere you can hide in this world or the next that I will not find you."
It wasn't a threat. It was a statement of fact.
Alanor nodded, accepting the condition. "I do not ask you to trust me. I ask you to calculate. If they stay as they are, they will spend years crawling toward the second sphere while their enemies already sprint."
Finally, Asimi exhaled. "You will do it. But you will do it with me watching." She looked at Alaric. "Do you understand the risk?"
Alaric swallowed. He felt James Silver's fear, the rational, adult instinct that screamed about the dangers of soul-tampering. But he also felt the weight of the goblins in the dark, the taste of helplessness, and the cold, unblinking eyes of the Palace.
"I understand," he said quietly. "And I accept."
"Me too," Dawn added, her voice small but firm.
Alanor planted his staff against the circle's center. The nine layers brightened, lines sharpening until the geometry looked like it could cut. Luminous threads wove themselves from the circle, sliding into Alaric with an intimacy that made his skin prickle.
Then the world narrowed.
Alaric felt his mana reservoir—the pool in his chest he had been stubbornly training for weeks. He felt the boundary of the second sphere, that locked door in the dark, and for the first time, it didn't resist. It yielded like a lock finally finding its key.
The tower's mana poured into him, a controlled stream guided by Alanor's will. The second sphere opened with a quiet click that echoed through his bones.
Beside him, Dawn gasped. Her Lune-attuned mana flared cold and sharp, then smoothed into a structured rhythm. But Alaric's experience was different. He wasn't one thing; he was two.
Do not resist yourself, Alanor's voice whispered in his mind. Let both truths exist. Let them stop competing and begin sharing the weight.
The tension he'd carried since his reincarnation, the friction between James Silver and Alaric Voss, began to dissolve. The agility of his mother's Lune blood and the durability of his father's Aurora blood ceased their internal war. They integrated.
Alaric inhaled, and for the first time, the breath didn't hurt.
Heat rippled over his scalp. His hair, once a mix of dirty-blonde and silver, began to melt and shift. The silver didn't vanish, but it warmed. The gold deepened. When the light finally settled, his hair was a rich, striking red-gold—like sunlight filtered through autumn leaves and blood. It wasn't the Emperor's gold, nor his mother's silver.
It was something entirely new.
"Your hair," Dawn whispered, her eyes wide.
Alaric lifted a hand, feeling the warm strands. A laugh nearly escaped him—half disbelief, half relief. Somewhere inside, James Silver was screaming about biological impossibility, but Alaric simply accepted the magic.
"How do you feel?" Asimi asked, her voice rare in its softness.
"Whole," Alaric replied.
Alanor didn't stop there. He lifted his staff again, and the ritual threads extended into the very walls of the tower.
"The tower has slept underground long enough," Alanor said, his older face looking peaceful for the first time. "We will bring it back to the surface."
The floor trembled. It wasn't the shake of falling rocks; it was a living movement. The foyer brightened. Dust lifted in spirals.
Inside the hill, the tower began to rise like a giant drawing breath. It was a slow, deliberate lift—an elevator built of ancient pride. Alaric felt the motion through the soles of his boots. Dawn's hand found his sleeve again, not in fear, but in shared, breathless wonder.
Asimi watched the Archmage with her unblinking metallic eyes. She saw the change in her son—the red-gold hair that signaled his harmonization—and she understood that whatever fate had chosen for Alaric, it had finally begun to speak out loud.
The tower rose, forcing the earth to make room for it, drawing itself toward the winter sky. And Alaric, with his second sphere awakened and his two souls finally in harmony, stood at the center of it all. He was no longer just a boy hiding in the mud. He was the master of the rising star.