As his words echoed around him, he felt the pull toward the city center grow stronger.
The clarity in his head sharpened. He replayed his steps inside the illusion, tracing how naturally he had let himself be led. First the clean streets, then the familiar faces, then the research wing and the ghost of his past self. Each scene lined up too perfectly, handing him exactly what he wanted at each turn.
That alone made it suspicious.
He had wanted to know what he had done here, so it had shown him glimpses. Every time he turned toward the past, the Warden had opened another door.
Every time he thought of the present, the doors had closed.
He clicked his tongue, annoyed at himself. "So that was it," he muttered. "You wanted me nose-deep in old bones while you would bond with Lume undisturbed."
The city did not bother to answer him. But the fake Aiyra continued with its day, traffic flowing, people laughing, the early afternoon light soft on clean glass. Beneath all of that, he could feel the tension, the strain in the illusion. His chains had cut into it. His seals had bitten back.
For now.
He could sense them now, faint signals. The memory, an everchanging illusion that the warden had setup was made in a way to trap the team. But some signals were unique and barely perceivable by him.
One felt like Lume.
It was trembling, not steady like a normal living presence. A line that kept trying to split into two and merge back into one. The other was sharper, pulsing with a different kind of rhythm. Mira's artifact. The slight connection from before, when he had helped Mira bond allowed him to sense it as well in this domain.
His own artifacts were silent. His chains now hung heavy around his arms, pretending to be nothing more than restraints. He did not dig into them. Not now. They were his seals. What he did need to worry about were the seals he had used to make the Warden fall asleep in the past. Time was running out.
He started walking, then running. The illusion blurred around him as he cut through streets, ignoring the scenic routes the city tried to gently nudge him into. Each time a side road brightened invitingly or a familiar building came into view, he forced himself to stay on the line that pulled at his chest.
The line that led to the center.
The more he moved, the more he felt it. The seals he had placed here, long ago, were thinning. Whatever he had done to the Warden back then had never been meant to last forever. It was a stopgap, a field dressing on a wound that wanted to bleed. And now that he was inside its mind, inside the very space those seals had once been anchored in, they were failing faster.
Idle wandering gave it time.
Time for its old scars to open. Time for it to wrap Lume tighter.
"Enough," he said under his breath. "You got what you wanted. You reminded me. Now I am coming to take him back."
The closer he got to the heart, the more distinct the other signals became. Mira's line was just barely to his left, on his path to the center.
He turned toward her.
A lab appeared around the corner. Glass windows spotless, logo of some old institute he half remembered painted above the doors. Inside, he could see the white walls, delicate instruments, light spilling across polished floors.
Too clean.
He stepped through.
The world beyond the glass windows was a temple of science. Holographic displays floated in the air, layered like translucent pages. Numerous tables lined up with experiments and equipments. The place was full of everything that you would imagine to be present in a super advanced lab. But there was a sense of chaos poking him. Like none of this was meant to be here. It was scattered. It was too overfilled with the concept of science, as if props from a theatric scene.
And at the center of it all, head bent over a projection, stood Mira.
There was no on else in the lab, only her. Lost in whatever the projection was showing her. As he observed her, she started typing into the projection and then the display in front of her dissolved, replaced by another.
He did not understand the scene, but something was very wrong with her state. And the slate in her hand was wrong as well, not the artifact he was familiar with. It lacked the glow that was unique to a bonded object. And from outside he could see her speaking, waving her hands as if explaining something, but truly she was standing alone in there.
The Warden had built her a perfect lab, and it was feeding her puzzles that would never end. Trapping her. And now he had to extract her from this prison.
"Mira," he called.
She did not flinch. Her lips moved, but he couldn't hear her. And maybe she couldn't hear him either. As he stepped closer he felt it. A strange sense of distance separating them. Although it liked she was just before him, there was a membrane between them.
The Warden had not imprisoned her within some solitary room or cage. It had instead given her the perfect memory to replay again and again, caging her within her own desires and memories.
He exhaled slowly. There was no time for being gentle now.
The chains around his arms stirred.
They did not obey the rules of this illusion. They did not exist in the Warden's memory of Aiyra. They belonged to something older and closer to him than this city. As soon as he let them move, the air around him rippled, like a stone thrown into a still pond.
"Come on," he muttered. "If you are going to be here with me, then be useful."
Metal links slid forward, ripping through anything that stood in its path. They pass through the membrane smoothly, covering the infinity and reaching Mira. Wrapped around her waist, they pulled back, jerking her out of the false state.
For Mira, it was like being yanked out of deep water. The perfect lab trembled and then collapsed around them.
"Let go," she gasped, instinctively trying to fight the chains that had suddenly appeared around her.
Kshaya tightened his grip. The chains around her pulsed, as if shaking her. The fake slate in her hand transformed, regaining its true appearance, that of a simple wooden substitute. In turn, Mira saw the illusion around her break.
Her eyes cleared.
"Kshaya?" she whispered, like the name itself was pulling her all the way out.
"Finally," he said. "You were busy."
Mira stared, breathing hard. "It showed me... puzzles," she said. "The equation that had bugged me in the past. Questions that I had sought answers to. Along with the answers. It kept giving me more. Every time I solved one, answered something, there was another. I thought I would be there forever."
"You would be," he said. "The Warden was giving you exactly that which your heart desired. In doing so, it keeps us occupied, distracted from the purpose for which we had decided to face it in the first place.
Her jaw clenched. Anger flickered, but her eyes regained focus. "Lume," she said. "I can feel him."
"Good," Kshaya replied. "We are done here. And he needs our help."
The last of the lab fell away, leaving them standing in a hollowed-out shell of a building. Windows were broken, ivy crawling up the walls. The sign over the entrance was faded into illegible scars. Outside, the illusion of bustling streets tried to reassert itself, cars passing, people chatting.
This time, Kshaya ignored all of it with ease.
Mira clutched her real slate, feeling its slower, organic pulse under her fingers, the slight resistance that no illusion could fake. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat, letting Lume's trembling signal line up in her mind.
"He is below," she said quietly. "Under the center. And there are others… Eira, Korr. They are somewhere to the North."
"Signal them to meet us at the city center. If they aren't trapped, we will see them soon," Kshaya said.
They stepped back onto the street. The city reacted instantly, lights along the main road blinking twice, redirecting traffic, opening a clear path straight toward the center. A welcoming route. A mouth opening wider.
Kshaya chose not to speak and broke out in a run. Since a path was cleared for him, he would accept the invitation.
Mira matched his pace, eyes fixed on a point only she could see. The memory of the lab still lingered at the back of her mind, a ghost of perfection. She crushed it, focusing instead on the shaky, imperfect thread that was Lume.
The past could wait. For now, they ran towards the pillar.