I didn't answer. I could feel my body tense again, my hands tightening into fists.
"Before you choose a path," Echo said, quieter now, "you need to understand what you're walking into. Let me make it clear."
My vision blurred, not from light or pain, but from something Echo triggered. The ring pulsed. A pressure gripped the inside of my skull, like a hand turning a key behind my eyes.
The sanctum faded. In its place, a new scene unfolded.
A woman stood in the center of a white stone courtyard, arms bound, surrounded by robed figures chanting zealously. She had fair skin and long golden-blonde hair. Her eyes, a piercing emerald green, locked onto mine through the memory, though she couldn't have seen me.
She wore flowing priestess robes marked with silver threads and a crescent-shaped pendant around her neck, the symbol of Goddess of Light Luminis.
A soft glow shimmered around her, reacting to her breath, as if magic clung to her despite her situation. She was beautiful.
Then the sky cracked open. Flames poured down from it.
I watched her scream as fire swallowed the platform. The glow of her magic shattered.
Her robes burned. Her body twisted against the restraints as the light turned cruel.
The scene shattered.
Next came the battlefield. Smoke covered everything.
Charred bodies stretched across the horizon. Divine banners flapped from broken spears driven into the mud.
At the center of it all, a single armored figure dragged something behind them… It was a corpse.
My corpse.
I saw myself, burned, scarred, lifeless, pulled across scorched earth by a divine general wrapped in light. I couldn't see his face, only the brilliance of his armor and the trail of ash he left in his wake.
Then the battlefield burned away.
A palace rose from white marble, gleaming in perfect symmetry. People stood in its courtyard, nobles, priests, soldiers, even children, kneeling as if in worship. Light poured from the sky, washing over them in gold.
For a moment, it looked peaceful. Then the light turned harsh. It flared once, and they were gone.
Just ash where people had stood. No screams. No warnings. Just silence and dust.
I staggered. The vision snapped away, but the weight stayed with me.
I dropped to my knees, hands hitting stone. My breathing came in sharp gasps.
My head pounded. I couldn't hold it back anymore.
Tears slipped down my face before I realized I was crying. My throat ached, but I said nothing.
Something inside me was tearing, not from my death, but from something deeper. It felt like I had just lost someone important. Someone I should've protected.. Elara.
Her name carried weight now. I didn't know her, not truly, but I'd seen enough.
Her face burned into my mind, her eyes, her voice, the way she screamed when the fire took her. I didn't know what role she played in the life that came before me. But I felt the hole she left behind.
I forced myself to stand, knees unsteady, legs heavy as if the memories had settled in my bones. My breath came slow, like each one had to pass through whatever grief was stuck in my chest.
The back of the sanctum drew my attention, partly shadowed, where the rune-light didn't quite reach. I moved toward it, passing the shattered altar and scorched symbols underfoot.
Then I saw them, bodies.
Dozens of them, frozen mid-motion. Their armor was polished silver, etched with divine runes, wings folded tight like glass sculptures.
But their forms were twisted, cracked open from the inside. No flesh remained. Just bone encased in armor, hollow sockets where eyes had once been.
Angels, or whatever left of them.
Their chests had been pierced from within, like something had erupted out of them in a single violent instant. Divine backlash, maybe.
The same punishment Echo had warned me about. But this wasn't a warning. This was history.
I kept walking.
Above the remains, stained glass windows still clung to the far wall. Most of the panes were melted or shattered, but pieces remained.
One showed a woman with a radiant crown and golden robes, her hands raised toward the sky. Luminis.
The other, beside it, showed a man with silver hair and a cracked hourglass, its sands spilling through broken glass. Tempus.
Even shattered, the message was clear. This place had once belonged to them. A convergence site, where divine power met mortal hands.
I looked down at my chest. The ouroboros mark glowed faintly, reacting to something in the air. It stirred something deep in my thoughts.
This wasn't just a place the gods had abandoned. It was a site repurposed, twisted from its original purpose.
'This false convergence site... Lucian, no-' I corrected myself '- me. I was the one who made it this way.'
The angels... they weren't protectors. They were part of my experiment.
This was where the ouroboros was born. Not by accident.. by my hands.
Then Echo spoke. "Regression number six hundred and seventy-four. The first attempt at separating from the God. You called it 'Ouroboros Protocol.'"
I didn't respond. I kept staring at the symbol on my chest as it playfully spun, like it was alive.
"It was the only time you reached this point without interference. That body died minutes after activating the seal. Soul fragmentation reached irreversible levels."
"That's how he died?" I asked. "That version of me?"
"He died screaming," Echo said, with a flat, honest tone. "His body was already failing from divine backlash.
The activation burned out his core. But the regression held as the Gods didn't suspect anything. They tough he was just possessed by a wraith."
I leaned against one of the fractured support columns, trying to steady myself. "And Elara?"
"Elara first appeared in regression one-four-five as a high-ranking priestess. An enemy… she tried to kill you at first contact."
I didn't know why that hurt more than it should have.
"In regression four-nine-zero, you spared her. In regression six-one-eight, she joined you after defecting from the church. In seven-three-one, she became a companion."
Echo paused. "In eight-six-two, she almost became your lover."
I looked away from the angel bones. "What changed?"
"He did… or in this case you…"
There was no hesitation in Echo's voice now. Just certainty.
"Each version of you carried different doubts, different fears. You kept her at arm's length. You never trusted her fully, not when it mattered."
The ring dimmed slightly, then pulsed again, syncing with the mark on my chest.
"He obeyed when he should've defied.
He trusted those he shouldn't.
He feared losing his humanity more than losing himself.
And because of that, he failed."
The words sat heavy in the air between us. I wasn't sure if they were meant as judgment or warning.
"If you do not choose differently, if you continue the same path, you will walk into death once more."
I didn't answer right away. My thoughts were still scattered, memories that weren't mine, a name I barely knew, a thousand failed versions of a life I hadn't lived.
I took one more look around the sanctum. The broken glass. The dead angels. The burned-out altar and fading runes.
"First," I said slowly, "let's get out of here."
"Agreed," Echo replied. "You're marked as a heretic. The moment you activated Ouroboros, you were categorized as a threat."
"And this place?" I looked back toward the shadows behind the altar. "I experimented on angels here. Definitely not a safe place to linger."
"You could say that."
I started walking, my legs still aching, but steadier now. I didn't know where I was going yet.
Only that staying here meant waiting to die. And I had no intention of giving them that satisfaction.
As I approached the crumbled stairway on the sanctum's far side, the air changed. A chill passed through me. Just a sudden, creeping cold that settled into my skin like frost crawling under the surface.
I stopped. My breath came out slower now, visible in the air.
The temperature was dropping. I turned, behind me, the shattered altar lit up with a soft golden glow.
Runes along the base flickered to life. Light pooled across the broken floor like liquid, spreading from the altar toward the walls.
Then the ceiling split with light.
A single, massive eye opened overhead. It shimmered with divine presence.
A celestial eye, golden and vast, filled with layered circles of rune and judgment.
It didn't blink. It didn't move. It simply gazed at me.
My body locked up. Every instinct screamed to look away, but I couldn't.
Then CRACK!
A fracture split the eye down the center. A second followed, racing across the glowing surface like ice under pressure.
"Lucian," Echo said, voice tense now. "That's Tempus."
Before I could react, the eye shattered. Light exploded outward like broken glass, each fragment reflecting divine script in reverse.
A low rumble rose beneath the sanctum, shaking the marble under my feet.
The walls began to tremble. Dust fell from above, falling down in slow drifts.
Cracks spread along the edges of the chamber. Runes shorted out one by one, flickering, then dying.