The Apex of Ascension was a chamber that defied both the laws of gravity and the boundaries of human sanity. Suspended at the highest, most precarious point of the Citadel, its floor was a single, massive, translucent slab of diamond-glass, offering a terrifying and dizzying view of the churning thunderclouds swirling thousands of feet below. Above, the ceiling was open to the raw cosmos, framed by twelve massive tuning forks made of Solarium, an ancient, star-forged metal designed to capture and amplify the lethal radiation of the deep heavens.
Aurelius stood at the center of this celestial altar, his white robes billowing in an artificial, mana-charged wind. He looked less like a man and more like a translucent ghost, his very skin becoming parchment-thin from his decade-long proximity to the Solar Core. His eyes were devoid of fatherly warmth; they were merely the eyes of a craftsman looking at a masterpiece he was about to finalize.
