The transition was jarring. One moment he was in a silent, sterile void of pure light, the next he was slammed back into a world of sensory overload.
The smell of pine and damp earth filled his lungs. The sound of chirping birds and rustling leaves flooded his ears. The cool, evening air of the real world kissed his skin.
He opened his eyes. He was standing in the glade, before the ancient, vine-covered shrine that had stolen his life four years ago—or two, from this world's perspective.
It looked smaller, less mysterious. The humming energy he'd once felt from its symbols was now a faint, pathetic whisper compared to the power thrumming in his own veins.
The entire world felt… muted. Thinner. Less real than the Crucible.
He looked at his hands. They were the same, yet different. Calloused, stronger. He was taller, broader. The face that looked back at him from a nearby puddle was no longer a boy's. The fear was gone, replaced by a deep, weary calm. He was twenty-one. A stranger in his own life.
With Nyx a silent weight in his shadow, he began to walk. The path back to Siji village was achingly familiar. Every tree, every rock, was a ghost from a past life.
When the small, quiet homes came into view, a pang of something—nostalgia, dread, love—struck him in the chest.
He saw his father first. He was in their small yard, splitting firewood, his shoulders just as hunched as Alvian remembered. The rhythmic thwack of the axe was the only sound in the quiet evening.
His father paused to wipe sweat from his brow and his eyes fell upon the figure walking out of the woods. He froze. The axe slipped from his numb fingers and fell to the dirt with a dull thud.
His face, a canvas etched with a decade of grief and fear, went bone-white. He wasn't looking at his son. Not the boy he knew. He was looking at the man who stood in his place, a man from whom power radiated like heat from a forge. It wasn't just the controlled, potent aura of Aether, an energy his father knew intimately. It was the other thing. The cold, silent void that clung to him like a second skin, a terrifyingly familiar echo of a power his father had spent his life trying to forget.
"Alvian?" his father whispered, the name a fragile, broken thing.
"I'm home, Dad," Alvian said. His own voice sounded strange to him, deeper, calmer than the one that had last spoken in this yard.
They went inside. The small, quiet home was exactly as he'd left it. The air was thick with years of unspoken words, a tension so heavy it was hard to breathe. They sat at the small wooden table, the silence stretching between them, a chasm of four years and a shattered seal.
Finally, Alvian broke it. He didn't shout. He didn't accuse. His voice was quiet, heavy with an understanding that was far older than his years.
"I know."
His father flinched as if struck.
"I know about the seal," Alvian continued, his gaze unwavering. "I know why you did it. And I know about her."
He raised his left hand over the table. With a simple act of will, a small, perfect sphere of absolute darkness coalesced in his palm. It didn't radiate light; it consumed it, a miniature black hole of pure, unmaking Null.
That was what broke him.
The sight of that forbidden power, his wife's power, held so calmly in his son's hand, shattered the dam of fear and denial his father had built for seventeen years. A raw, choked sob tore from his throat. He slumped forward, his face in his hands, his body wracked with the kind of grief that never heals.
When he finally looked up, his eyes were bloodshot, filled with the ghosts of a thousand painful memories. The story, held back for so long, finally came pouring out.
"We were Architects," he began, his voice hoarse. "Our lineage… we don't just use Aether. We can weave it. Change the very fabric of things. It's a power that frightens people. It frightens empires."
He spoke of the Crimson Covenant, not as a simple faction, but as a zealous, galaxy-spanning crusade dedicated to "purifying" those with reality-warping potential. They saw Architects as a universal threat, a cosmic heresy that had to be purged.
"And your mother… Selene…" His voice broke on her name. "She wasn't just an Architect. She was the most powerful I had ever known. And she wielded the Null. The other side of creation. They hunted her across star systems. We fled here, to this quiet world, hoping to hide."
His father's gaze became distant, lost in a past that was more real to him than the present. He described Alvian's mother not as a distant photograph, but as a vibrant, fierce woman with twilight hair and a laugh that could silence storms. He spoke of their love, a union of light and shadow that the universe itself seemed to reject.
"They found us," he whispered, the words like poison on his tongue. "A High Inquisitor of the Covenant. He cornered us. He was going to take you. Your mother… she made a choice."
The memory played behind his father's eyes, vivid and terrible. A battlefield of shattered trees. A sky on fire. Selene, standing between the Inquisitor and her infant son, her body a blazing nexus of Aether and Null. She had overloaded her own core, sacrificing herself in a cataclysmic explosion of Duality that had not only killed the Inquisitor but had erased miles of the ancient woods from existence.
"I found you in the crater," his father choked out, tears streaming freely now. "But your soul… it was a warzone. The Aether and the Null your mother left in you were tearing you apart. You wouldn't have survived to your fifth birthday."
In his grief and desperation, he had turned to a forbidden Architect technique. He gathered all the pure Aether he could, all the love he had for his son, and wove it into a cradle around his soul. The Prismatic Seal. It suppressed the Null, stabilized his core, and crippled his potential.
He had traded his son's destiny for his son's life.
"I didn't want this for you," he cried, his sorrow filling the small room. "I just wanted you to be safe."
Alvian listened, his own expression unreadable. When his father's confession finally subsided into ragged breaths, he reached across the table and placed a hand on his shoulder.
"You kept me alive," Alvian said, his voice firm, clear. "You did what you had to do. But that life is over."
His father looked up, seeing the iron resolve in his son's eyes. This was not a boy asking for permission. This was a man declaring his intent.
"There's one more thing," his father said, wiping his eyes. He rose and went to a loose floorboard, pulling out a small, lead-lined box. Inside, resting on a bed of velvet, was a silver locket. It hummed with a faint, sorrowful energy.
"When she… when it happened," he struggled to say, "I managed to save a fragment of her soul. A remnant. It's all that's left." He looked at Alvian, his eyes pleading.
"They say it's impossible to restore a shattered soul. That it's a fool's hope."
Alvian took the locket. The moment his fingers touched it, he felt her. A faint, loving echo, a whisper of the woman who gave him life. He closed his hand around it, the cool metal a brand against his palm.
His purpose, once a blurry desire for strength, was now forged into a set of unbreakable vows, clear and sharp as his own blade.
One: Protect his father.
Two: Find a way, no matter how impossible, to restore his mother's soul.
Three: Annihilate the Crimson Covenant, root and stem.
"It's only impossible until someone does it," Alvian said, his voice devoid of doubt.
For the first time, the fear in his father's eyes was replaced by something else. Awe. And a glimmer of the fierce, defiant hope he thought had died with his wife. He saw not just his son, but Selene's heir. He finally let go of his fear and accepted the path Alvian had chosen.
He accepted the man his son had become.