The silence of the Whisper of Dawn was absolute. It didn't travel through space so much as it politely asked reality to step aside. One moment, the ship was hanging in the void near Halfworld; the next, it was drifting in the gloomy orbit of a water-logged, desolate planet. Morag.
Rain fell in endless, grey sheets over rust-colored rock and vast, shallow seas. The ruins of a long-dead civilization dotted the landscape, their structures worn smooth by eons of wind and water. It was a tomb.
Sam stood on the bridge, the planet filling his view. He could feel it—a low, throbbing hum of pure, undiluted power calling from beneath the surface. The Power Stone. It was like a gravitational anomaly that only he could perceive.
"The temple is buried beneath the main ocean," AetherLink's voice was a soft chime in the stillness.
"Unnecessary," Sam replied.
He didn't move from the bridge. He simply focused, his consciousness expanding through the ship and into the planet below. He sought not a door, but the absence the Stone created—a hole in reality where power pooled so thickly it warped the fabric of space around it.
He found it. A chamber deep beneath the planet's crust, hidden behind layers of rock and forgotten engineering.
On the surface, the water over a particular patch of ocean began to churn. It didn't part so much as it unfolded. A perfect, dry shaft opened from the ocean floor down through the rock, a tunnel that ignored geology, leading straight to the hidden temple's inner sanctum. It was a doorway made not by moving earth, but by redefining the space between here and there.
Sam took a single step on the bridge of the Whisper of Dawn.
And took his next step onto the cold, dry stone of the temple floor.
The air was stale and ancient. The chamber was circular, dominated by a central dais. Upon it rested a simple, metallic orb, humming with a malevolent violet light that pulsed in time with the heartbeat of the universe. The Power Stone.
As Sam approached, ancient security measures, dormant for millennia, flared to life. Energy fields shimmered into existence, and automated defense turrets emerged from the walls, their targeting lasers painting his chest.
They were irrelevant.
Sam didn't raise a hand in defense. He simply continued walking. The energy fields dissolved as he neared, not because he broke them, but because the space they occupied ceased to be a barrier. The turrets swiveled, but the lasers bent away from him, refusing to acknowledge his location. He was a null point in their programming, a walking hole in causality.
He stood before the dais and reached for the Orb.
The moment his fingers made contact, the Stone reacted. It was not a test of worthiness. It was an assault. A wave of pure, destructive force erupted, a psychic scream that sought to atomize his will and incinerate his soul. It was the raw, untamed concept of power, and it rejected any master.
It washed over Sam and found nothing to burn.
His will was not something to be overpowered. It was the framework that contained power. The violet energy raged against the edges of his consciousness, a star going supernova inside a box it could not break. It was immense, terrifying, and utterly contained.
He held the Orb in his hand, the Stone's violent light reflecting in his calm eyes.
"Your chaos ends now," he said, his voice quiet in the raging storm.
He willed it, and the storm ceased. The Power Stone, for the first time in its existence, was silent. Contained. Tamed.
He opened the Orb. The Stone floated above his palm, pulsing with subdued might. He didn't store it in a pocket. He opened a fold in space, a perfect, timeless vault next to the one holding the Reality Stone, and placed it inside.
Two Stones.
As the vault sealed, the hidden temple on Morag, its purpose fulfilled, began to crumble. Without the Stone's energy to sustain its hidden geometry, the ancient structures succumbed to entropy.
Sam stood amidst the collapsing ruins, untouched by the falling rock and dust. He looked up, through the layers of crumbling stone and the shaft he had created, to where his ship waited in orbit.
His work here was done. The first piece of the gauntlet was in his hand. The balance of power in the universe had just shifted, and no one but him even knew it.
He took a step, and was back on the bridge of the Whisper of Dawn. Behind him, on the dead world of Morag, the ocean rushed in to fill the void, burying the last secret of the Power Stone forever.