"…but mine."
The last echo of her words faded into the stone. No glyphs responded. No flare of power acknowledged her claim. But the pulse remained beneath her fingers—thin, fractured, barely alive—and through it, something shifted.
A pressure peeled itself from the air.
Across the vaulted ruin, shadow deepened—not as darkness, but as erasure. Color receded. Light bent sideways. The fractured resonance chamber dimmed until even reflections couldn't hold shape, and in the center of that fading world, Sytril stepped into being.
Not emerged. Not appeared.
He was simply there.
