58 seconds.
The logical choice, Malakor's choice, was clear: sacrifice the few to save the many. The four for the entire Vakhas species. It was what a "leader" would do. It was what the Nexus Archon would have done.
But Skodar was not a leader born of logic. He was born of a brother's love on a mountainside. He was forged in the grief of a gorge.
"Elara! Can you reroute the spike's energy? Divert it?"
"Not in fifty seconds!The matrix is locked!" she cried.
57 seconds.
Kaelen stepped forward, his cybernetic eye whirring as he analyzed the conduits. "The connection... is through a secondary buffer. Here." He pointed to a junction box between the pods and the main crystal. "A physical cut would... disrupt the flow. Cause a feedback surge in the core itself. Unpredictable."
"A physical cut?" Kira asked. "With what? That alloy is rated for plasma torches!"
56 seconds.
Skodar looked at his hands. At the Living Stone fragment glowing on his chest. He remembered the vision in the Under-River—the ancient ships of living crystal. He remembered Vaktari's essence, solid yet luminous.
He didn't need a tool.
He could be the tool.
"Get behind me!" he roared. He slammed his hands onto the junction box. Instead of unleashing destructive energy, he did the opposite. He pulled.
He used the Living Stone fragment as a focus, and his own body as a conduit. He didn't try to cut the connection. He tried to absorb it.
The moment he made contact, agony unlike anything he had ever known seared through him. It wasn't just the physical energy of the Spire; it was the condensed, nullifying power of the dampener field—the anti-Prima energy. It was anathema to his very being.
He screamed, blue light and peach-colored poison crackling over his skin. The spike's countdown continued, but its energy pathway was now being siphoned into Skodar.
45 seconds.
He was being unmade from the inside. His cells screamed in protest. Vaktari's voice echoed in his mind, desperate: "Skodar! Stop! You cannot contain this!"
But he didn't need to contain it. He just needed to hold it long enough.
"KAELEN! NOW! CUT THE LINE!"
Understanding flashed in Kaelen's eyes. He didn't have a weapon. But he had a cybernetic arm, built with reinforced alloy. He raised it like a blade. With a guttural shout that held all his own suppressed pain, he brought it down on the junction box, right between Skodar's hands.
CRACK.
The conduit severed.
The energy flow to the pods stopped.
But the feedback surge Kaelen predicted erupted. A wave of reversed, chaotic force shot back up the line—not towards the core, but towards the only open conduit left.
Skodar.
30 seconds.
The backwash of null-energy and Prima resonance hit him like a galactic tide. His body arched, his vision whited out. He felt his connection to the Living Stone fragment fray, then snap.
The spike detonated.
But without the living conduits, and with the main pathway severed and flooding into Skodar, the explosion was contained, internalized. The crystalline column of the Calm Spire didn't shatter. It turned pitch black, then grey, and crumbled into inert dust. The peach-colored haze emitting from the tower sputtered and died.
The Silent Night over Morvane had ended.
Skodar collapsed, smoke rising from his body, his skin pale and cracked, the glow utterly gone.