Chapter 39

  Raime stirred with a sharp inhale, his vision lurching back into focus as though he had been pulled from drowning. The rough-hewn walls of the mountain corridor sharpened around him, cold stone glistening faintly with veins of violet crystal. His boots never touched the floor.

  He was suspended.

  Air pressed against him like invisible chains, locking his arms and legs into place. His body hung just above the ground, his cloak drifting as if stirred by currents no one else could feel. A pulse of psychic pressure beat through the space like the echo of a vast heart, each thrum reminding him of the restraint caging him.

  Beside him floated the meditating guardian, now risen without a single motion. The being’s eye glowed faintly violet, its tunic unmoved by the subtle breeze threading the corridor. Around them, a small formation of guards stood in silence, their heads tilted toward Raime yet betraying no emotion. Not one blade was raised, not one spear leveled at him. Their stillness was worse than any open hostility.

  Raime’s breath caught in his throat as he tried to move. Muscles strained, psionic thread coiled within him, but his body didn’t so much as twitch. It was like attempting to command stone to bend. His mind pushed, probing the bonds that held him, but the force pressed back with an unyielding calm, as though the very mountain had decided he would not move.

  No… I won’t—

  His thoughts cracked with effort, flaring into the threads that answered him, thin but sharp. He drove it outward, a spark of resistance, a blade of will meant to cut through the field pinning him. For an instant, the air shivered, and he felt the faintest slack in the grip.

  Then the guardian’s gaze turned upon him.

  It was not hostile—worse, it was placid, serene as still water. That serenity drowned his effort in an instant, swallowing his defiance before it could take form. Raime’s pulse quickened, heart pounding against a restraint that was not merely physical but psychic, a cage of intent layered over intent.

  He tried again. His mind screamed, pushing harder, pulling at every ounce of psionic energy he had nurtured in the past days. His consciousness lashed against the unseen walls. The bonds did not even ripple. His body remained aloft, a puppet suspended by strings too fine to see, too strong to sever.

  Only his eyes were left to move, and through them he caught the sight ahead.

  The stone doors loomed, rough and ancient, framed by jagged violet crystal that pulsed with a light far older than the guardian or the guards. The glow licked across their edges like breath across the rim of a blade. The doors were shut, but beyond them, he felt it—the same gravity that had haunted his dreams since stepping into the mountain, the pull of something vast, suffocating, divine.

  His breath left him in a shudder.

  The guardian moved forward, though its feet never brushed the ground. Its presence folded over Raime like a cloak, pulling him along without motion, without struggle. The guards moved too, perfectly synchronized, a small contingent flowing into a half-circle escort around him.

  Together they drifted toward the door.

  Raime’s thoughts clawed for clarity. He did not understand how he had come here, how his will had been submerged so utterly, when just moments ago he had stood free, weighing his choices. Had he walked willingly, lulled by that placid presence? Had his mind been touched so deeply he hadn’t even known?

  The questions churned, but no answers came. Only the cold awareness that whatever lay beyond the stone doors was no longer a destination he chose. It was one he was being delivered to.

  And for the first time since stepping into Ithural, Raime felt less like an Anomaly—and more like an offering.

  The crude stone door loomed ahead. Its surface was carved with sigils that resonated faintly, as if holding back something immense on the other side.The guardian lifted a hand, and a line of light flew to its palm across the carvings, and the door groaned softly, sliding open with a sound that felt more like exhalation than metal on stone.

  The cavern beyond yawned into a long corridor. Until the stone gave way to an immense chamber completely covered in violet cristals. But the center of the space was drowned in an unnatural darkness. And yet, Raime could sense it—something immense, something aware, something that pulsed with authority and expectancy. The god. Or whatever had been called such.

  He felt the stone doors close behind himself, while they passed through the archway, feet dragging on the crystalline floor. The chamber felt impossibly large, as if the walls themselves stretched farther than any measurement could hold. The crystals’ glow gave him orientation but no comfort; the dark heart of the room drew him in, pulling at the edges of thought and feeling, making every instinct flare inside him.

  As they approached the center, the shadows began to recede, not by the movement of his own light, but as if the darkness itself yielded to his presence. It pulled back, wave by wave, revealing a form within void. And there, in the very heart of the chamber, he saw it: a single, immense violet eye.

  It hung suspended in the blackness, its iris vast, intricate, as though the universe itself had been folded into that single aperture. The sclera shimmered with impossible depth, layers of light and motion playing across it, patterns that felt alive, moving with a rhythm that resonated with the pulse of the mountain itself. The eye’s gaze met him, and the moment it locked onto his presence, Raime felt the gravity of it—not in weight, but in force of being. The sheer presence of the eye pressed into him, not as a threat, but as an absolute certainty of authority, awareness, and age that dwarfed any thought he had ever held of power.

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  Every fiber of his body, every neuron in his mind, hummed with a mixture of reverence and terror. And yet, as he studied it, he noticed the chains.

  Massive, luminous chains, embedded with glowing glyphs and sigils, anchored into the eye itself. They wrapped around its form, binding it with a precision that seemed deliberate, cruel, and paradoxically protective. The symbols etched along the chains vibrated faintly, radiating psychic energy so vast it pressed on Raime’s mind with an undeniable weight. He felt threads of force, almost alive, pulsing along the glyphs, flowing in directions he could not have imagined, hinting at a power that was both constrained and limitless at once.

  He recognized fragments of the symbology. After learning from the thought-knots, the lessons with mental lattices and the intricate psychic signatures of the masters of thoughts, had taught him—at least in part—what power could look like. And though he did not understand everything, he understood enough to know that this eye was not allied with Ithural. If anything, it was something the world itself had sought to restrain. The chains, the glyphs—they were not merely binding. They were an attempt to contain something that, if freed, could reshape the entire Rift with its power. Something that had turned its intelligence against the established order.

  The eye exuded light, not just visually but mentally. The aura of majesty and presence filled the chamber, pushing at his thoughts even as he fought to remain steady. He felt every pulse as a wave, each beat of awareness like a drum inside his skull, stretching outward to touch the crystals, the walls, even the chains that held it fast.

  And yet, despite its confinement, the eye’s intelligence reached toward him, curious, probing—not hostile, but undeniably aware. It brushed the edges of his mind, flowing like liquid thought, slipping around the psionic web he had drawn over himself. He felt impressions, hints of intentions and concepts he could barely frame: patience, strategy, an awareness that had endured for eons, and perhaps, most unsettling of all, anticipation.

  The chains binding it seemed less like a prison now and more like a boundary of respect—a line the eye could feel, one that even it would not cross carelessly. And as Raime floated there, hovering between awe and dread, he understood that this was a being whose purpose had been entangled in conflict with the Rift itself, and yet somehow it had remained restrained, patient, and observant through centuries of being bound.

  Every instinct screamed at him. Every fiber of his being urged him to step back, to leave the chamber and retreat, but not only he couldn’t move, he could not even tear his eyes away. He felt the weight of knowledge pressing against him: a consciousness far older, more vast, more cunning than anything he had yet faced, restrained not by brute force but by intellect and careful preparation.

  The chains rattled faintly, as if aware of his recognition. The eye pulsed once, a single beat of overwhelming presence, and Raime felt a chill that was so cold he felt he could freeze that very instant.

  And then, as he floated there, like a bug suspended in amber, the eye blinked—or something analogous to a blink—and the chamber fell into silence, the pulse receding just slightly, as though it waited.

  Raime breath came rapidly, realizing that the mountain itself seemed to hold its breath with him. And in that pause, a single certainty formed: he was standing before a being of unimaginable power, restrained yet defiant, a consciousness that had history, purpose, and intent unlike anything the Rift had ever shown him.

  And for all the awe, all the fear, all the pressure pressing against his mind, Raime felt the smallest flicker of opportunity: the chance to engage, to learn.

  No! This is not what I want!

  The chamber waited. The eye waited. The mountain waited.

  And Raime, anomaly, chosen, pawn, and man all at once, took the first mental step forward.

  The pulse shifted as the guardian moved him closer, a slow wave that seemed to draw him forward without physical force. And then, faintly, almost imperceptibly, a thought:

  You have come. The path is open.

  No words. Just truth.

  Every fiber of his being screamed against the words, but the pressure on his mind was too much, everything was too much to fight.

  Come closer. See. Understand.

  They closed the distance further, heart beating like a drum. The violet crystals flickered, as though responding to his motion, lighting the edges of the darkness. Raime’s mind seemed to slow to a crawl.

  A final pull, subtle, intimate, coaxing:

  Witness. You were chosen to see. And to act.

  Raime strained against the forces keeping him contained with all his might. He could feel the edges of understanding fraying against his mind. His eyes saw for the first time. The pull, the Call, God—it all converged here, in this pulse, in this shadow, in this place at the heart of the mountain.

  And then the violet crystals flared once, a sudden bloom of light that cast the chamber into stark brilliance.

  In that moment he knew… Raime knew why he was sent here, what was his role in this tapestry of possibilities called life. God showed him the way forward, both for himself and for Earth, a future so radiant could only be possible with the help of a trascendental being. An utopia free of the machinations of the System, in the vision he saw the horrors that the integration will bring. His family would die, most of the people would die if he didn’t play his part. He was the Anomaly, he was God’s champion, the only one with the ability to act in defiance of the System.

  The stream of informations was immense, he was seeing the past, the future and the way forward, graciously served to him on a silver platter. He understood the errors of his ways, how did it came to his mind to try and escape the Call? He saw the inefficacy of the powers he wielded now, he was led astray. But there was still time to correct the course, the vision gave him the knowledge and the means to create a perfect vessel for his God to inhabit, there was much to do but in the end he will be able to become more than a mere champion, more than anything he could ever thought possible, he will become God’s Avatar and bre…

  “BE STILL.”

  Two words, and the world stopped.

  Sound, motion, thought—all froze. The violet eye ceased its slow, hypnotic pulse. The guardian beside him stood in place like a statue carved from flesh, every flicker of the crystals halted in mid-glow.

  And then the chains burned.

  A brilliance erupted from them, so fierce Raime thought a star had been born within the mountain. Each sigil carved into the metal flared with authority, power ancient and immeasurable. Where moments ago the chains had seemed like bindings, now they flared as conduits, anchors that reached across time and space.

  The words slammed into his mind like the toll of a colossal bell. His breath tore free of his chest, the fog peeled from his thoughts, and the vision unraveled. His pulse thundered. He was himself again. He was horrified.

  The searing light of the chains grew harsher, pushing back the eye’s radiance. For the first time, Raime saw that vast pupil tremble—strained, furious, but bound.

  He staggered, drenched in sweat, his mind reeling. He knew there was no time, he couldn’t waste the moment. He won’t, because doing that means forfeiting his own mind.

  A final message came to from the chains.

  “Seek me in the capital. There, you will learn the truth.”