I don't know how much time passed in there.
The last thing I remember before waking up was that luminous crack in front of me. It wasn't aggressive or painful; on the contrary, it carried an unsettling calm, as if it had known me since before I was born.
Then… everything stopped.
Silence.
Darkness.
And then… cold.
I opened my eyes slowly. The first thing I felt was the air hitting my face. Real, physical air — not the abstract sensation from inside the Chamber. I tried moving my right hand and felt the weight of the bracelet.
It was still there.
But different.
More stable.
More… mine.
"Breathe slowly," I heard someone say.
It was Eleonor.
Her voice carried a tone I rarely heard from her: relief.
I blinked several times until my vision focused. The massive chamber door stood open behind me. Its surface still held a faint glow, as if something important had just concluded.
I was lying on the floor.
I tried to sit up, but a strong wave of dizziness forced me to stop. It wasn't exactly pain. It was overload — like my body was still reorganizing something I didn't fully understand yet.
A few steps away stood Mikhail, watching me with his usual clinical attention.
"Exactly two days," he said. "Not a minute more."
"It felt like years…" I muttered.
Eleonor offered her hand. I hesitated for a moment, then took it. This time there was no tension between us. Just natural coordination.
She helped me sit first, then stand.
My legs responded better than I expected.
That was the first thing that surprised me.
The second was the internal silence.
Before, I always felt magic like a chaotic torrent — especially since activating the relic. Now it wasn't like that. It felt more like a wide, steady river. Present, but not dragging me along.
"So?" Mikhail asked. "You survived… and did you learn anything?"
I didn't answer immediately.
Fragments came back to me:
A child in an ancient temple. Voices talking about the bearer as if he were a project, not a person. And one phrase repeated many times:
"You must forget until the moment comes."
And that persistent feeling that my story didn't begin where I always believed it had.
"Not everything," I finally said. "But enough."
Eleonor watched me carefully.
"The mark?"
"Stable."
She nodded. Only then did I notice the exhaustion on her face. She had probably waited those forty-eight hours with barely any real rest.
Sophia appeared from the side hallway, tablet in hand. From her expression, I immediately knew the news wasn't good.
"I'm glad to see you standing, Noah," she said first, sincerely. "Because we're going to need you functional."
That confirmed what I had already suspected.
"What happened now?"
Sophia hesitated briefly.
"We confirmed internal infiltration in several families. It's not recent. Probably decades."
A cold weight settled in my chest.
The visions inside the Chamber suddenly made sense.
"They've known for a long time…" I murmured.
"Who?" Eleonor asked.
I looked at her.
"The ones behind all this. They knew about the bearer long before I even understood what that meant."
No one spoke for a few seconds.
Mikhail remained silent, serious.
Sophia nodded.
"And there's something else. The families are preparing formal contact with world governments. Disclosure is no longer optional."
I took a deep breath.
Before, that idea would have paralyzed me.
Now it didn't.
Because inside the Chamber I finally understood something I had avoided for years:
I wasn't chosen for being the strongest.Not the most prepared.Not even the most worthy.
I was chosen because, somehow, I had been connected to all of this long before I remembered it.
"Alright," I finally said. "Then tell me what comes next."
Eleonor smiled faintly. It wasn't happiness — more like the expression of someone realizing she's no longer walking alone.
"Now you sound like the bearer."
I looked at the bracelet. Its surface reflected the dim hallway light calmly.
For the first time, I didn't feel like I was carrying a sentence.
I felt responsibility.
And something even more dangerous:
Determination.
Because if someone had been watching me for years…if they knew exactly when the mark would awaken…
Then none of this was improvised.
It was preparation.
And the real war hadn't even begun yet.