The chamber remained dark for a long, suffocating stretch of moments.
With the central crystal dormant, the ambient hum of the Ark had vanished, leaving a silence so profound it felt heavy, pressing against their eardrums like deep water. The "nutritious" quality of the air—that vibrant, electric taste that had filled Zander's lungs moments ago—began to fade, replaced by a stagnant, creeping chill. It was a stark reminder that this environment was artificial, a preserved bubble of a dead world.
Even Aethros began to shift impatiently, his massive silhouette restless in the gloom. His claws tapped against the resonant floor, the sharp click-click-click echoing too loudly in the dead air.
Zander's quantum watch lay quiet on his wrist. The screen was black, its usual soft, rhythmic blinking extinguished. It felt like a dead weight, a piece of cold metal rather than a lifeline.
Silence. Absolute and unnerving.
Then—
A tremor of blinding blue light rippled through the watch face.
It wasn't a simple screen activation; it was a surge. Zander felt a subtle, high-frequency vibration crawl up his forearm, bypassing his nerves and resonating directly in his marrow. A split second later, a faint, sympathetic hum resonated through his chest, as if the chamber itself were a vast instrument that had just been plucked.
The crystal embedded in the wall flickered… once… twice… struggling against the inertia of forty millennia.
And then, with a sound like a thunderclap trapped in a bottle, it burst into a steady, deep azure glow.
The light flooded the room, chasing the shadows back into the etched crevices of the walls. The air filtration systems cycled up with a powerful whoosh, and that sweet, metallic, energizing taste flooded back into Zander's mouth, instantly clearing the fog from his mind.
Aethros bristled, his wings half-flaring in reflex, a low growl rumbling in his throat as the pressure in the room spiked.
Zander took a step back, shielding his eyes.
The crystal spoke.
But the voice was different. The hollowness was gone. The static was gone. It was richer. Deeper. Sharper. It was no longer just a recording; it was a presence.
It was alive.
"System reboot complete… Synchronization of external and internal chronometers achieved… Now accessing quantum-time logs…"
The voice paused. The blue light in the crystal swirled violently, turning a shade darker, almost bordering on violet.
Then, the voice sharpened, vibrating with a mixture of calculation and disbelief.
"…forty-one thousand… eight hundred… and twenty years…?"
A low, dissonant harmonic buzz filled the room, a sound of distress, as if the AI were trying to contain a spike of massive emotional or logical overload. The very walls seemed to vibrate with the shock of the number.
Zander frowned, sensing the distress in the machine. "Arkeon? You good?"
The light pulsed rapidly, erratic and blinding.
"I am…" The voice stuttered, processing petabytes of lost time in a nanosecond. "Reconstructing historical continuity… recalibrating planetary parameters… re-evaluating cosmic threat levels… This era is—"
Another pause. A heavy, final judgment.
"…damaged."
Aethros snorted, a plume of steam shooting from his nostrils. "Knew that already. You missed a lot of bad wars."
But Arkeon wasn't being poetic. He sounded genuinely, logically disturbed.
Zander stepped closer to the wall, feeling the heat emanating from the crystal. "What do you mean, 'damaged'? You mean the wars? The cities?"
Arkeon's glow dimmed from a blinding white to a somber, melancholic blue.
"No. I speak of the biology. Humanity… has changed. Severely. Your species is no longer Ashurim."
Zander stiffened. "Ashurim… were humans? I thought we were just descendants."
"Correct," Arkeon replied, the voice regaining its clinical composure. "But the deviation is catastrophic. Humans—as you call yourselves now—are degenerated Ashurim. You are a much smaller, weaker, and energetically starved version of the blueprint."
A hologram flickered to life in the center of the room.
It resolved into a towering figure. It was an Ashurim warrior, clad in light-weaving armor. But the scale was wrong—or rather, Zander realized with a jolt, the scale was right. The figure stood nearly three meters tall. The musculature was refined but dense, the bone structure thicker, the posture radiating a raw, effortless vitality and calm power that modern humans simply did not possess.
"This," Arkeon said quietly, "was the average height of a caste-less citizen."
The hologram shifted, showing another figure, this one wearing the robes of a scholar, yet radiating even more power. "Some elders, those deepest in the harmonic tune, reached five meters."
Aethros let out a low, impressed whistle. "Giant-kin."
Zander stared in disbelief at the projection, feeling very small in comparison. "…What happened to us? Evolution is supposed to make us better, isn't it?"
Arkeon answered without hesitation.
"Your atmosphere died."
A silence heavy enough to crush breath settled over the chamber.
Arkeon continued, his tone grave, mourning a dead world.
"During the Ashurim era, Earth's atmosphere was not merely a mix of gases. It was dense with vital frequencies—a natural, energetic lattice generated by the planet's core and amplified by the biosphere. The planet pulsed with harmonic resonance. Plants. Animals. Water. Soil. Even the wind. Everything was alive, vibrant, connected."
Another hologram appeared—the old Earth. It looked similar, yet fundamentally different. The greens were deeper, glowing with bioluminescence. The oceans were a vibrant, electric teal. The clouds shimmered with iridescent energy. It looked almost celestial.
"This energy fed the body," Arkeon explained, highlighting the lungs and heart of the holographic warrior. "It was a nutrient as vital as food. It strengthened bones to the density of steel. It wove Force into the muscle fibers. It enhanced perception to a quantum level. It extended lifespans into the centuries."
The hologram shattered, replaced by a stark, grey image of modern Earth. Polluted. Thin-aired. Dimmer. Silent.
"But humanity, in the dark ages following the Drakkoryn purge, chose machinery over harmony," Arkeon said, the disappointment palpable. "Technology built without resonance. Industry without awareness. Power without balance."
His voice dropped further, a whisper of judgment.
"Your people stripped the Earth's harmonic fields. You mined the crystals. You burned the forests that sang. You injured her frequency. You did not listen—because you forgot how."
Aethros growled low, a sound of disgust. "Idiots. Breaking their own nest."
Arkeon continued gently. "The Ashurim did not extract power from the world. They conversed with it."
New holograms formed—ancient cities that defied Zander's understanding of architecture. They weren't built upon the land; they were grown into it. Towers shaped like massive crystalline trees, glowing with internal energy lines that fed back into the earth. Bridges of singing stone that spanned canyons without supports. Structures humming like tuning forks, matching the heartbeat of the planet.
"The Ashurim believed Earth had a soul—a consciousness capable of communication. Technology was a language. But only if you learned the correct frequencies."
Zander watched the beautiful, lost world with a pang of longing. "Nature-tech…" he whispered.
"Correct," Arkeon replied. "A symbiosis. Ashurim technology did not pollute. It harmonized. It was alive."
Zander clenched his fists, looking down at his own hands—hands he had fought so hard to strengthen, now revealed to be the hands of a diminished thing.
"So we lost all of that… because the atmosphere changed? Because we broke the world?"
"In part," Arkeon said. "But also because your species forgot. Without the nutritious atmosphere to sustain the Ashurim physiology, your bodies adapted to survive on less. You shrank. Your bones became brittle. Your perception dulled. The frequencies you once felt naturally—the song of the earth, the shift of the tectonic plates—are now inaudible to you. You are deaf to the world you live in."
Zander exhaled, a long, shaky breath.
"So you're saying… humans used to be giants with superhuman perception because the world itself was stronger."
"And because you were stronger," Arkeon corrected. "The Ashurim were the peak of natural-cosmic synergy. The world elevated them—and they elevated the world."
Aethros nudged Zander's shoulder with his snout, nearly knocking him over. "Means you've got a lot of catching up to do, little runt."
Zander smirked weakly, patting the beast's nose. "Yeah. No pressure. Just forty thousand years of evolution to reverse."
The crystal brightened, refocusing.
"And that," Arkeon said, his voice hardening, "is why your request for my martial archives must not be taken lightly. You seek to inherit a legacy forged by bodies and minds far beyond your current biological state. Techniques meant for an Ashurim physiology could tear a modern human apart."
Zander nodded solemnly. "I understand. But I'm not just a modern human anymore. I've been tempered."
"True," Arkeon conceded. "But you also possess something the ancient Ashurim did not."
Zander blinked. "What's that? Ignorance?"
"Adaptability," Arkeon said. "Creativity. Unpredictability. The Ashurim were perfectionists, rigid in their harmony. When the Drakkoryn came, they struggled to adapt to the chaos. You… you are a survivor of the famine. You are weaker—but you are more flexible. You are willing to evolve rather than preserve."
Aethros grinned, revealing his rows of teeth. "He's saying you're scrawny but clever. And hard to kill."
Zander shoved him lightly. "Thanks, bud."
Arkeon's tone warmed slightly.
"And… something else. You and Aethros carry a harmonic compatibility unprecedented in my databanks. A bond between a descendant of Ashur and a beast of the Primal Deep. This symbiosis may allow you to surpass Ashurim limits in ways the Council never anticipated."
Zander felt a quiet fire kindle in his chest. It wasn't just about reclaiming the past. It was about building something new.
"So what now?"
The chamber lights flickered, shifting from the soft blue of the library to a harsh, combat-ready amber.
A deep, structural rumble shook the floor, vibrating through the soles of Zander's boots.
In the center of the room, the floor plates retracted. A circular platform of obsidian-black Ashurim alloy rose from the ground, inscribed with glowing, burning geometric lines that pulsed like veins of lava.
Arkeon spoke with ceremonial weight:
"Now, Zander, you undertake the Trial of Resonant Dominion."
"If you succeed, you will claim me fully. I will bond to your neural architecture. You will inherit the martial knowledge of the Ashurim High Council."
Zander stepped toward the platform, his heart pounding against his ribs—a rhythm of fear and excitement.
Aethros roared approvingly, his wings flaring wide, filling the space with shadow and heat. "Finally! A real challenge! No more talking!"
Arkeon's final words echoed through the chamber, ominous and thrilling:
"Prepare yourself, Zander. Your opponent has awakened."
Below the platform, something enormous began to shift—the sound of stone grinding against ancient metal, of heavy, hydraulic breathing. Blue light spilled through the cracks in the platform like lightning trapped under rock.
The Trial had begun.