Chapter 32
The chamber slowly quieted after the last remnants of Orion's past self dissolved into drifting motes of silver dust. The air was heavy with memory—so dense that every breath tasted like time and every heartbeat echoed against ages that no longer existed.
But something inside Orion had changed.
The merging did not simply strengthen him.
It anchored him.
His senses extended outward in sharp, expanding waves. He felt the island breathing, shifting, watching. It wasn't land—it was a living construct of forgotten eras, an artifact made from condensed fate and severed time.
The eclipse markings beneath his skin glowed faintly. The fog rising from his forearms curled upward like crimson serpents, responding to something deeper within the island.
At the center of the chamber, the shattered crystalline sphere reformed into a thin ring of light, rotating steadily. The entire room shuddered.
And then the world broke open.
The floor cracked into massive fragments, revealing an abyss below—not dark, but filled with swirling memory-clouds, golden timelines, and collapsing echoes of events that never happened. The chamber walls expanded outward, merging with this void, until the entire space became a colossal expanse of floating structures and drifting archives.
The island wasn't an island.
It was a library of lost realities.
Slabs of stone—some enormous, some hand-sized—hovered around him, inscribed with runes older than language. Mirrors made of frozen time reflected moments not yet lived. Entire towers of memory rotated around him like cities wrapped in clockwork.
A low hum vibrated through the void.
Something had awakened.
Orion stepped toward the nearest platform. As his foot touched the surface, the stone lit with silver-blue light. Runes surged across its length, forming a swirling pattern that responded to his presence.
A voice—not human, not divine, not alive—whispered from the void:
"Bearer of the Eclipse…
Inheritor of the Forgotten Path…
You have been recognized."
The fog around his arms thickened, pulsing with each word.
Another platform drifted forward on its own, presenting itself like a kneeling servant. On its surface rested a sealed relic—a long, obsidian vambrace with faint chronal lines carved along its edges.
When Orion reached for it, the relic reacted before his fingers touched it.
White lightning and black fog surged outward, spiraling around his arm. The vambrace fused to him instantly, snapping into place without resistance.
A shockwave tore across the entire memory realm, bending the floating archives and warping the abyss for several seconds.
Orion inhaled sharply. Power flooded upward through his arm, spreading across his spine like a rising storm.
The vambrace whispered its identity into his mind:
Crimson Eclipse Armguard —
Relic of the Forgotten Beast.
The runes lit with deep red, matching the fog that made up his mythical creature form.
His heartbeat echoed like thunder.
Old instincts awakened, as if the relic had belonged to him in a life he no longer remembered.
Before he could adjust, the platforms around him shifted again. The archives rotated in a grand spiral, forming a massive corridor that stretched beyond sight.
At the end of that corridor stood an immense door—
not stone, not metal, but made of pure temporal force.
Two colossal wings carved from frozen time crossed its center.
The door pulsed like a heart.
The island itself was guiding him.
Orion began walking.
Each step triggered illusions—visions of battles long past, faces blurred by time, realms that fell into ruin. His footsteps echoed in the void like ripples spreading across a cosmic sea.
A fragment of his past self's voice lingered in his memory:
"You carry my last burden.
Finish what I could not."
The closer he came to the door, the heavier the pressure grew. By the final steps, the weight felt like the world was collapsing onto his back.
Yet he continued.
When he finally reached the vast temporal gate, he lifted his hand.
The Eye of Space and the Eye of Time awakened simultaneously.
Black gravitational cracks spread from his left eye.
Golden temporal rings spun from his right.
The door responded.
It slowly unfolded backward, revealing a blinding horizon of shifting eras—ages bleeding into one another like rivers colliding.
This was no ordinary chamber.
This was the heart of the island.
The core of the Forgotten Years.
And something was waiting for him at the center.
A throne.
Carved from space.
Wreathed in time.
And on that throne sat a figure—
not his past self,
not an echo,
not a memory—
but something far older.
Something that even his forgotten past once feared.
The moment Orion stepped inside, the throne-bound figure opened its eyes.
Two lights ignited in the darkness—
one black, one white—
mirroring Orion's own.
And the world itself stopped moving.