Several minutes had passed. Nylessa remained unconscious, slumped against the pillar, and Alph crouched over her with the obsidian dagger reversed in his fist. His bolts were spent, scattered somewhere below in the dark. Whatever climbed the pillar, he cut back down.

  "Lass awake yet?" Thorfin's voice boomed up from below, rough and impatient.

  "No." Alph slashed at a grasping limb, felt resistance, heard it drop.

  A pause. Then a low grumble rolled up through the stone. "Advancement doesn't usually take this long." Another beat of silence. "Hope she didn't have an accident."

  Alph glanced down at Nylessa. Her chest rose and fell, but her face was slack, her grey hair matted against her jaw. Too still.

  His grip tightened on the dagger.

  Alph made his decision.

  "Hold them off!" he shouted down at Rugnir and Thorfin, voice cracking across the din of grinding bronze. He didn't wait for an answer. He dropped cross-legged beside Nylessa, closed his eyes, and let the Mind Garden take him.

  The Mind Garden unfurled; endless light, boundless potential. Alph's mind surged into it, shedding his body's weight.

  "Shaper," Alph cut through the quiet, voice sharp as flint. "What's happening to her?"

  Alph threw open his memory to the entity. The throne room erupted in chaos within his mind; the Centurion jolted into a violent awakening while bronze constructs multiplied in the dark. Nylessa’s muscles locked tight. He projected the flash of lightning, the rain of debris, and Rook’s shadow-form bringing her to Alph. His desperation bled into the vision.

  The Shaper remained silent. His consciousness peeled back under the entity's gaze. It weighed his choices and mapped the exact pitch of his fear.

  "She's advancing," Alph said, the thought a dull blade. "I don't know if something went wrong."

  The Shaper extended its formless awareness into Alph's mental space.

  "Her constellation reaches for the node," the Shaper said, its voice resonating through the stillness of Alph's mind, "but it cannot hold the thread. She has the strength. That much is clear." A pause, weighted and deliberate. "Her will is scattered. Something broke in her, little one, and a fractured will cannot forge the connection."

  Alph's focus sharpened. "Help her."

  "I cannot." The word rang through the stillness, final as stone. "I shaped the garden, but I am not its creator. This space lets me watch. Guide those who seek understanding. Never interfere with a soul's climb." A breath of silence, vast and cold. "I cannot touch her constellation, little one, any more than I can touch yours."

  "You can warn her," Alph said. "Tell her what's waiting outside. That people need her."

  "Even if I wished to warn her, little one, she would not hear me." The Shaper's voice settled through the dark like dust falling on stone. "You are the anomaly. The singular point of contact."

  Frustration clawed at Alph. "Then what?"

  "Only she can forge her path," the Shaper replied. "The will must come from within."

  Alph's soul form rippled with tension. He weighed every possibility; each was insufficient. A radical idea took shape. The Shaper sensed the shift as the thought solidified.

  "That should not be possible, little one. Nobody has done it." A silence stretched through the dark. "But you are the anomaly. I would very much like to see you try."

  Alph's focus was set. He made his decision.

  Nylessa floated in an endless void. Stars burned in the distance, cold pinpricks scattered across infinite black, and directly above her hung a constellation. Three nodes blazed with light, connected by slender threads of silver luminescence.

  She tried to move, to speak, and failed. Her body was absent. She existed as pure awareness, a consciousness suspended in nothing. Panic flared through her formless mind, hot and sharp. The void pressed against her from all sides. She lacked lungs; she could not breathe. She possessed no mouth; she could not scream. The silence was total and suffocating.

  Then the fear broke apart.

  She knew this place. Her advancement to Tier 2, the same void, the same constellation, the same weightless suspension. She had floated here before and reached out with her will to draw power from the nodes. The process was natural, instinctive, like remembering a song she had always known.

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  Excitement surged through her. Tier 3! I’m finally ascending. The battle, the constructs, the Centurion, Rook’s stunned expression; none of it mattered now. I’m getting stronger. Faster. Deadlier.

  She reached for the constellation.

  The three connected nodes pulsed with steady radiance. They represented what she had already claimed, the power she had integrated into her being. Beyond them, deeper in the void, a fourth node waited in darkness. It shimmered with potential, close enough to see but too far to touch without bridging the gap. She needed to draw energy from her existing constellation, channel it outward, and forge a new thread to connect with the dormant node.

  She had done this before. The process was simple. Willingness alone could shape the energy into a bridge. Her being present here already spoke volumes that she has reached the threshold.

  Nylessa reached for the nearest glowing node. Its warmth touched her, known and welcoming. She readied to pull its light toward the distant fourth point—then memory struck without warning.

  She stood in a sunlit chamber with marble floors and gilded columns, and she was small, a child with verdant skin and pointed ears that swept upward in elegant curves. Her fingers clutched a silk dress embroidered with golden thread. Her mother stood before her, tall and radiant, a crown of woven silver resting on her brow.

  "You must be brave, my star," her mother said. Her voice carried the weight of command. "What comes next is for your protection. You will not remember this conversation. You will not remember me. But you will live, and that is what matters."

  The vision fractured.

  Nylessa screamed without a voice. The memory was wrong. It was impossible. Her skin was blue, had always been blue, pale as frost on glass, marked with the heritage of dark elves. She was half-human, half-dark elf, a mongrel abandoned at the village entrance. She knew her history. She knew who she was.

  Another memory tore through her denial.

  She sat in a candlelit room, older now, her skin a pale verdant green in the flickering light. Three figures stood before her. Rook occupied the center, his face lacks its current deep lines and his eyes hold a sharpness since vanished. Beside him stood a woman with long brown hair and robes of deep violet; her features were sharp and angular. Lovia. The name surfaced unbidden. The third figure, Sourash, gripped his gnarled staff with a bare, muscular chest.

  "The spell will alter everything," Lovia said. Her voice was gentle but firm. "Your appearance, your memories, your very connection to the bloodline. You will believe you are half-dark elf. You will believe you were raised in obscurity. The truth, if it ever got out, would kill you."

  Rook stepped forward. His hand reached out, trembling slightly, and touched her cheek. "I will protect you. I swear it. You will never know the danger that hunts you, and you will never know what you lost. But you will live."

  "Rook," she whispered, and her younger voice cracked. "Why?"

  Sourash’s voice dropped, sharp as a blade. "The throne’s poisoned."

  Nylessa’s breath hitched.

  "The high council, the royal family—" His fingers tightened around the staff. "We’re sending you west. A village. No questions." A rough exhale. "You’ll grow up unseen. Safe. And we’ll be there."

  The memory shifted again.

  She was sleeping in a thatched hut. Lovia sat beside her, stroking her hair.

  "Sleep now, little princess," she murmured. "When you wake, you will be someone else."

  Her fingers flashed purple and then nothing.

  Nylessa reeled in the void. The memories poured in without pause, every suppressed moment of her true life laid bare. She saw the faces of attendants who had loved her, the gardens where she had played, the lessons in etiquette and diplomacy and the subtle arts of elven magic.

  She felt the ache of homesickness for a place she could not name, a phantom longing that had haunted her entire life without explanation. She understood now why she had never felt truly at home in her village, why she had always felt like an outsider among her own supposed people.

  She was not Nylessa, half-dark elf orphan of no consequence.

  She was something far more valuable and in a precarious position.

  A princess of the Sylvan bloodline. A target.

  The revelation broke her.

  Nylessa's consciousness curled inward and collapsed under the weight of truth. The constellation dimmed above her. The fourth node flickered and receded into the dark. Her fingers remained frozen. She stood paralyzed. Memories surged, relentless and unforgiving, and she drowned in the tide. Her mother's face flashed. Rook's voice echoed. Silk brushed against skin that had never truly been blue.

  I've lived a lie. Every moment of my life, every choice I've made, every person I've trusted, all of it was built on a foundation of deceit. Even Rook, her silent guardian, the one man she had believed she knew, had hidden the truth from her.

  He knows! All this time, he's known! He held the secret behind his eyes every time he looked at me, every time he protected me, every time he called me by a name that was not truly mine.

  The grief was absolute.

  The void closed in. Stars dimmed, their light devoured by the dark swirling around her shattered mind. She sank, falling through emptiness, too spent to resist.

  Alone. Only echoes remained—of a life never hers.

  Then, cutting through the silence, she heard something.

  A voice. Soft. Familiar.

  She thought it came from the memories, another fragment of the past rising to torment her, but the quality was wrong. The memories arrived as sensations, impressions, emotions given form. This sound was external. It pressed against her from outside the void, urgent and insistent, calling her name.

  Who is it? A figment of imagination. She thought.

  Then she heard it clearly.

  "No. I am not."

  She recognized the owner of the voice. But, it was impossible. Nobody was here.

  "I am real and you need to wake up Nylessa."