The burst of light lasted only an instant, followed by complete darkness.
No trace of light remained. Not even a sliver. Worse still, there was no pain, no sensation of any kind. It was as if he had been completely severed from reality in a single mont.
His mind was thrown into chaos by the sudden shift, and before he could process anything further, the world before him changed.
From absolute darkness, it transitioned into sothing else entirely, sothing unfamiliar, sothing that did not belong to any place he should have been.
He was no longer buried beneath tons of collapsed earth. He was not even in the sa position anymore. Instead, he was suspended in midair, weightless, as though gravity no longer applied to him at all. He was observing a scene completely detached from the situation he had been in just monts ago.
"This... what the hell is happening?" he muttered, but no sound ca out.
He could hear his own words clearly in his mind, yet his voice never actually left his mouth. It was as if it had been swallowed entirely by this strange space.
The confusion deepened further, but it was soon pushed aside as the scene in front of him unfolded.
He was suspended within what appeared to be a vast, elongated hall. Rows of seats lined both sides, grand and refined in design. Yet most of them were empty. So were shattered. Others were stained with dried blood, traces of unknown beings. Despite the disorder, there were no bodies present.
Only two figures stood at the far end of the hall.
There, the central corridor ended with a raised set of steps leading toward a throne.
Unlike the one in the underground laboratory, this throne was different. More majestic. More ancient. More mystical in nature.
A strange atmosphere surrounded it, an aura born from the presence of the two beings nearby.
A man and a woman.
The man was seated on the throne, his expression unreadable, his entire figure seed to be a living shadow given form, settled onto the throne with a relaxed composure, though no real detail could be made out beyond his humanoid shape.
Two white spheres served as eyes, if they could be called that. They appeared empty, devoid of any emotion, yet at the sa ti they radiated a pull so quiet and so absolute that anyone who held their gaze even a mont too long might find their mind beginning to slip.
And then there was the woman, standing in the corridor, close to the steps that led up to the throne. Tall and beautiful, dressed with refined elegance, hair of a vivid, almost startling yellow, and a white gown accented with various gold ornants, simple in appearance and yet perfectly suited to her.
She had her back to him, but even so Evan could tell she was almost certainly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Not that any of it mattered right now.
Not his situation, not the two figures, not anything, because the air that perated that place was suffocating, dangerous in ways that went beyond the physical.
’Is this a dream? Did I pass out?’ he thought, instinctively linking everything back to the pulsating heart he had found inside the cocoon.
"Silas..." The woman’s voice rang out, angry, exhausted, and edged with panic, a mix of emotions too turbulent to untangle. "Do you have the faintest idea of what you’ve done?"
The humanoid figure before her didn’t respond. It simply looked at her with that empty gaze, still, saying nothing.
Seeing that, the woman seed to grow even more furious.
"We had a pact. One that was supposed to buy us enough ti to fight back. So tell why, why did you do it? Why did you destroy the barrier?" Her voice kept rising as she spoke, her body trembling with the force of her anger.
Even detached from this strange reality as he was, Evan could sense an aura coming from the woman, faint but present, powerful in a way he couldn’t fully define, though he could say with certainty it was nothing to dismiss. And then there was sothing else, a trace of energy that caught him off guard.
Vitality. A deep, surging vitality that radiated from her like sunlight, not the kind that would incinerate you at a glance, but the kind that would make you feel younger simply from being near it.
He wasn’t in his body, clearly, and yet he felt his entire being sink into a warmth that was pleasant and utterly foreign to him.
’This woman... she’s powerful,’ he thought, though he didn’t have the luxury of admiring anything further, not when she looked monts away from bringing the entire place down around them.
Silence fell after her outburst, settling over the space for a few beats, before the humanoid figure on the throne finally chose to do sothing.
A hoarse voice resonated from it, no mouth, no visible chanism to justify it, and yet it was there, clear and deep.
"A pact, you say?"
"Tell , Seraphine... how long have you been in this world? How many cycles have you survived to reach this point? Two? Three, perhaps?"
His tone remained steady, but his words grew heavier with each sentence.
"Do you even understand how many cycles have already passed? How many tis we’ve repeated the sa actions... the sa mistakes... only to arrive at the sa inevitable end?"
Evan did not understand.
Cycles. Mistakes. Inevitable end.
None of it made sense.
’What are they talking about...?’ he thought.
The woman’s expression shifted.
That struck nerve was visible imdiately.
"And it is precisely because we have survived all these cycles that we decided to act the way we did. It was the only hope we had, to stabilize the barrier. And yet you chose to go against everything we bled for. For what? For power?"
The man slowly shook his head.
"You still don’t understand," he said quietly.
"Reaching divinity did not give you comprehension. It only made your ignorance more painful."
"Stabilizing the barrier is impossible. "The abyss is growing. It has been growing since the beginning, and after all these cycles it has already reached a point of no return.
"The will of this world can no longer withstand them."
His voice carried sothing tired now. Not anger. Not conviction.
Resignation.
As if he had already seen the end countless tis before.
The woman froze.
Her expression shifted again, this ti into confusion, as if his words clashed violently with everything she believed to be true.
"What are you saying...? What is happening? Tell !"
Her voice cracked slightly.
Panic creeping in.
"Tell !"
"The world can no longer be saved," the man said at last.
"The next cycle will be the last."
"...After that, this world will end."
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