Feris stepped out of the seam like she’d been hiding in the wall the whole ti.
Her light hit a sheet of Luminite and ran back in a dozen soft echoes. The chamber’s glow - pale, patient - soaked into her shoulder plate, turning the black to a faint winter green.
"You undersold this place, Raizen" she breathed, and then the grin ca back. "Also? Rude. Only Hikari gets a private tour?"
Raizen felt heat climb his face. "It’s- the shaft was closed without clearance. Illegal closure. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone."
"And yet here we are" Feris said, teasing. She tipped her chin toward Hikari, whose lamp hung low, whose eyes were lit like she’d just rembered sothing kind. "Why her?"
His mouth jumped ahead of his brain and tripped. "I... I trusted she- that Hikari wouldn’t say anything"
Hikari’s brow lifted. Soft, amused. Grateful in a way that made him want to look anywhere but at her.
Feris let him off the hook with a laugh, but it wasn’t an. "Relax. I’m not going to make a calendar about it. Yet."
She turned, finally, taking the chamber in properly. Even dim, the geode was a quiet cathedral - lines of crystal packed shoulder to shoulder, color thinned, the hum small under the air like soone humming to themselves out of habit. "Still pretty" she said. "Like it’s thinking."
Raizen nodded, then ruined his own nod. "Last night it was brighter. It... sang. Now it’s like it forgot the words."
"Last night, huh? Then maybe it just needs waking up." Feris said.
Hikari glanced over, hearing sothing in Feris’s tone that Raizen heard a half-second later. "Feris..."
"What?" Feris raised both hands in mock innocence, then dropped one to her hip and popped her weapon. The mace’s head spilled out in a hard ghost - an Eon projection swelling over tal. "Rocks react, you said so yourself. Maybe it likes a nudge."
"Feris, don’t-" Raizen shouted, moving before he decided to move.
She pivoted lightly, a dancer with bad intentions. "Light’s dull. I’ll wake it."
"Wait." Hikari’s voice had that thread of okay-this-isn’t-funny-anymore, but Feris was already stepping down into the bowl, eyes tracking a long vein thick as a forearm that ran like a frozen river through a wall of combed plates.
"Feris!" Raizen dropped to the floor of the chamber and slid in talc-fine dust, grabbing for her elbow.
She looked back, bright and certain. "Trust . When I hit things. They answer."
And before his fingers found her, she set her feet, pulled a breath, and brought the mace down with both hands.
The room answered.
It wasn’t sound. Not at first.
Light blew up.
Every rib, every plate, every tiny shard in the low center flashed to white at once, as if soone pulled the sun through a straw and snapped it inside the walls. Raizen’s vision went black.
The hum they’d been listening to all morning lurched a half-step and beca a scream so pure it stopped being loud and started being everywhere.
He felt the impact through the soles of his boots, up his shins, into his teeth. The Eon head should have bit and dimd. Instead the big vein took it, handed it sideways, and sent it flying along the lattice like a thrown spark hitting dry grass. The crystal didn’t shatter outward; it collapsed inward, plates bowing like breath drawn hard, then snapping back with a sound like ice breaking under a runner.
The pressure hit him a beat after the light - hard enough to pick him up and set him sowhere else. He slamd shoulder-first into a tal rib, bounced, rolled, and lost the lamp. For a heartbeat there was no direction - just white and a dry, angry thunder. His throat tasted like salt. The air turned sharp, as if the light itself had edges.
Sothing warm spattered his cheek. He blinked until shadow ca back, slow and stuttering, the chamber returning in pieces: shards glittering midair like soone had flung a handful of stars and forgotten to finish the trick. A fog of powder drifting down in lazy sheets; his lamp flickering on its side. Feris cough-laughing, dazed, on her knees with hair loosed, the Eon head dissapearing and the real tal underneath glowing at the seams.
"Hikari" Raizen said to the wrong patch of floor.
He shoved himself up. Palms slid, found purchase, slipped again. Dust coated his tongue; he spat and tasted copper. "Hikari!"
There. Under the slope of a rib, half on her side. She’d been thrown clean across the bowl. Face down, beam trapped under its own body and turning the dust into a private galaxy.
He slipped the last distance, knees banging rock, and reached for her shoulder, then stopped, stupidly careful, because he couldn’t not be careful with her, even now.
Her eyes were closed. A pearled line of blood traced from her hairline into her eyebrow and disappeared there. Her hand was still outstretched toward where he’d been a second before, palm up, fingers half-curled, a faint afterglow riding along the tendons like the last of the staff’s light refusing to leave her skin.
"Hey" he said. It ca out wrong. Tools with the wrong nas. He put two fingers to her throat and found a pulse that made his chest fall apart with relief and then reassemble into fear. "Hey. Hikari. Open your eyes."
She didn’t. Breath moved under her coat. Slow. Thank every cruel god that watched this place.
He dragged his gaze over the room, stupidly - counting arms and legs and glass and light like an inventory would make sense of the noise. Feris had gotten to her feet and stumbled back to the wall she’d hit. The big vein she’d struck looked like a wound soone had salt-poured - glassy, slick, the color blown out of it. Across the chamber, things looked newer, sohow, because so many of their skins had sheared off, their faces exposed, raw, too bright where they’d broken.
"Feris!" Raizen barked, surprised by the cold in his own voice. "Are you hit?"
Feris wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and ca away chalk-white. When she spoke, the bravado had gone sowhere else. "I’m - I’m fine. I’m fine." She wasn’t. Her shoulder plate had hairlines like spiderwebs.
"What the hell was that...?" she managed, half awe, half horror. "Why does it react that way!?"
Raizen wanted to say sothing simple and instructive and angry. But he held it in.
He turned back to Hikari. He wanted to pick her up like she weighed nothing and carry her out. Like he once did. He settled for kneeling down so his face was level with hers, so if she opened her eyes, he’d be the first thing she saw and maybe that would pull her the rest of the way up.
"Hey..." he said again, quieter. "You have to give sothing. Blink. Breathe louder. Insult . Anything."
A tremor passed under her jaw. Not a swallow. A twitch. He got his hand under the back of her head as gently as he knew how and found a tender knot there - a swell already rising under the hair. His stomach knitted itself into a hard, wrong shape.
"Okay" he whispered, as if the word could rewind the room to the quiet version it had been. "Okay. We’re going to move slow."
"Feris" he then said, not looking away. "Get the lamps upright. Check the plate. If that gate shifted..."
A cough cut him off. Small. Fragile. Wrong and perfect.
Hikari’s eyelids tugged and then lifted a sliver. Her gaze swam, found him, tried to focus, failed, tried again out of stubbornness. She didn’t get a word out.
He would’ve said sothing stupid and huge then - sothing he never let out where anyone could hear it - except the chamber groaned a long, low note that had nothing to do with Luminite and everything to do with weight.
The dust was still falling. It made a curtain between him and the rest of the room, soft and lying. He blinked through it, saw Feris stagger to the nearest lamp and kick it upright. Its beam kicked across the bowl, found the vein she’d struck, and turned the raw face into a dead, cold mirror.
He looked past her. The plate they’d squeezed through had eased inward a fraction, the foam along its edge torn free by pressure. Dust boiled toward the gap from their side, as if the room didn’t want the tunnel to keep the air.
Hikari’s hand twitched again. He closed his fingers around it like a promise and felt how cold hers were, how fine the bones.
"Stay with " he told her, which was both too much to ask and exactly right.
"Raizen." Feris again. Closer now. Scared in a way he’d never heard out loud from her. "I’m sorry. I’m- I shouldn’t have- I just thought-"
"It’s alright." he said. Not unkind. Not forgiving. Not yet.
The floor under him ticked as a shard settled, bright as a tooth in the dust.
He looked at Hikari’s face. The line of blood at her hairline had dried into a thin, dark thread. Her lashes were white with powder. The tiny star in her earring blinked once with the lamp’s swing and went still.
She didn’t move.
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