Elara's golden stone pulsed gently, casting a warm, almost comforting light in the hidden room. It was the antithesis of the cold, dead white light of the NWCO's power.
"It's... beautiful," I whispered, the word feeling strange and heavy on my tongue. Beauty was forbidden.
"Beauty is truth," Elara said, holding the golden orb like it was the last star in the universe. "And this is the last of the truth they couldn't bury."
Benny finally broke the silence, his yellow body practically vibrating with curiosity. "Okay, Granny. History lesson time. What's the difference between this fancy gold marble and those boring black pebbles the NWCO guards carry?"
Elara didn't seem offended by Benny's bluntness.
"The stones the NWCO uses are not tools of power, but tools of suppression," she explained, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "When the Great Compliance began, the city wasn't just painted gray. It was emptied of its people's minds."
I frowned. "The Uniformity Drops we take every day?"
"The drops are just a mild sedative," Elara dismissed with a wave of her hand. "The real magic, the one that guarantees absolute obedience, is the NWCO's Power Stone—a frequency blocker. It suppresses your ability to generate and process complex energy, which they call emotion."
They weren't just making us sad. They were making us empty.
"The NWCO leadership, the founders of the Compliance, realized that if they could kill the capacity for feeling—joy, anger, love, defiance—they could wipe out memory and history, too," Elara continued. "Every time you feel something strong, it generates a tiny spark of color inside your neural pathways. Their stones block that color, keeping your world gray and your mind numb."
I felt a dizzying coldness spread through my chest. They built a cage not of iron, but of quiet oblivion.
"And the True Relics?" I asked, my voice barely a thread.
"Before the Compliance, the True Relics were common," Elara said. "They were the stones used by our ancestors to record and store those complex energies—the colors. My golden one stores generations of memories of happiness, art, and vibrant life. It doesn't block power; it hoards it."
"A secret battery for the soul," Benny muttered, sounding impressed for the first time all day. "I like it."
Elara moved to a recessed stone wall and ran her hand over a specific section. With a low grinding sound, a small section of the stone slid back, revealing a brittle, leather-bound scroll tucked away in a cool, dry alcove.
"The Noble Houses who resisted kept these scrolls," she said, gently unrolling the yellowed parchment. "They record the final, desperate actions taken to save the Old World."
She pointed a delicate finger to a spot of text, miraculously preserved and written in a language I didn't recognize, though the words seemed to burn with latent energy.
"This part speaks of your mother's final mission," Elara translated. "The founders of the NWCO couldn't destroy the source of all color and emotion, only block it."
She traced the ancient symbols.
"It says: 'When the sky turned to ash and the stones turned to dark, the last fragments of the True Relics were taken to the sacred ground. Hidden behind a shroud of natural growth, the Source Garden still blooms, providing life to any Relic brought near its soil.'"
My heart pounded. This wasn't just a place. It was a wellspring.
"The Garden of Eden," I whispered. "It's not just a legend. It's where my mother put the final relics before she was captured."
Elara nodded gravely. "Yes. The NWCO's power is absolute because they control the only source of the obsidian blockers. But if you can find the Garden, you can access the True Source—the place where the catalysts are made."
"So, we're not just looking for a library," Benny summarized. "We're looking for the original factory of emotion! This is officially better than the cheese riddle."
I looked at Elara, my hands still tingling faintly green. "How do we get there? Do the scrolls have a map?"
"The scrolls only provide one final clue," Elara said, her eyes warm with encouragement. "You must find the Keeper. The person who guards the entry point to the sacred ground. And only a True Relic can reveal the Keeper's location."
I frowned. I had just used my only green catalyst to help the Noblewoman escape.
I gave away the key.
"How?" I asked, the grim reality setting in. "I don't have a True Relic."
Elara smiled again, this time with a spark of mischievous hope. "Perhaps not. But your mother was clever. She left one more Relic behind... hidden inside the most obvious and overlooked object she could find."