The chamber collapsed behind them as if it had never existed, and suddenly Kaelen and Lyra were stumbling through silence.
No walls. No floor. Only endless dark, the stars above like cold embers. Kaelen's breath came in ragged gasps, his hands still trembling from the relic's searing power. The blade pulsed faintly in his grip, alive, hungry.
Lyra kept her blaster raised, eyes darting in every direction. "This… doesn't feel right. It's too quiet."
Kaelen forced himself to focus, though his mind was still burning with alien knowledge. "It's not quiet. It's listening."
And then he saw it.
High above them, spread across the void like a wound in the sky, an eye opened. Not human. Not alien in any familiar sense. It was vast, faceted like crystal, colors shifting inside it like oil on water. Each blink was an earthquake of light.
It wasn't the cloaked figure. This was something older. Something the Sphere itself obeyed.
The voice that slithered into their skulls wasn't words, but meaning:
"Two threads bound. Two threads refusing the weave. Curious. Defiant. Dangerous."
Lyra's jaw tightened. "If it's curious, maybe we can talk our way out."
Kaelen shook his head. His veins still glowed faintly with the glyphs. "No. This… thing doesn't want to talk. It wants to understand what makes us break."
The stars around them shifted suddenly into scenes—projections of other lives. Kaelen gasped as he saw flashes of Lyra:
Lyra as a child, scraping for scraps in a ruined colony.
Lyra holding a dying soldier's hand on a battlefield.
Lyra alone, staring out at the stars with eyes that never let themselves cry.
Lyra turned sharply, seeing visions of Kaelen:
Kaelen bent over an alien skeleton in a dig site, eyes burning with wonder.
Kaelen being mocked by professors, dismissed as a dreamer.
Kaelen, alone at night, staring at a holo-image of someone he had loved… and lost.
Their private memories. Their buried scars. Exposed in the open.
The eye pulsed brighter, its meaning cutting deeper:
"Pain makes you weak. Pain makes you loyal. Which thread will tear first?"
Kaelen staggered forward, voice raw. "We're not your threads. We're not part of your damn weave!"
The eye dilated, colors storming within it. The void rippled. A dozen shadow-forms materialized again, but this time—they wore faces.
Kaelen's face. Lyra's face.
Twisted, hollow-eyed doppelgängers, stepping toward them with slow, predatory smiles.
Lyra raised her blaster, teeth gritted. "Guess it's time to fight ourselves."