The plan was insanity, and everyone knew it.
"You can't 'reason' with a wound in reality!" Elara argued, her voice tight. "It's not a person, it's a natural disaster! We go in, we grab whatever data-core they're using to mine it, and we get out. That's a mission. What you're describing is a suicide pact."
"She is not wrong, Kaelen," Lyra added, her brow furrowed. "The Schism is a place where logic failed. To engage with it is to risk your own. Your Spark is the legacy of that failure. To confront it directly… the Paradox Burn could be permanent."
Kaelen listened, feeling the newly restored hum of the Weave around him. It felt more fragile now, more precious. "And if Vorlag succeeds in mining it? He won't try to understand it. He'll try to compress it into a weapon. He'll turn a question into a period." He looked at Elara's locket, still open on the table. "That's a fate worse than silence for everyone."
The moral standoff was clear. Elara saw a tool to be captured. Lyra saw a plague to be contained. Kaelen saw a patient in critical condition.
He spent the next 48 hours in intense preparation, but not by cultivating Aether. He sat with the Gardeners, listening to their oldest stories about the Unraveling. He didn't seek battle tactics; he sought the emotional landscape of the first Axiom's final moments. The despair. The desperation to fix a broken world. The overwhelming weight of god-like power.
He was preparing for a dialogue, not a duel.
The journey to the Origin Point was a descent through a corpse. The Wastes were a physical manifestation of Paradox Burn on a planetary scale. The sky was a sickly, bruised purple, and the ground shifted underfoot, one moment solid, the next like ash. Distant, ghostly echoes of lost battles played out in silent loops.
Corbin guided them, his face strained. "The Schism's energy is disrupting space itself. My usual paths are… unraveling. I'm navigating by the tears in the world."
They crested a ridge, and there it was. The Stabilization Fortress was a monstrous obsidian claw sunk into the earth, its geometric lines a brutal imposition on the chaotic landscape. And at its center, visible even from this distance, was the Schism. It wasn't a hole. It was a flaw, a vertical slash of bleeding light and screaming non-space that hurt the eyes and the mind.
"Guard patrols are on a fixed, predictable rotation," Pim whispered, his goggles displaying data streams. "They're terrified of getting too close. The 'Warden' is their only line of defense."
As if on cue, a figure emerged from the fortress's main gate. It was the Warden, its armor forged from the same black iron, but etched with pulsating silver lines that bled stolen light from the Schism. It moved with a chilling, precise grace, a hybrid of machine and harvested Axiomatic power.
Elara raised her shock-cannon. "I'll draw its fire. You and Rork flank it. We break it, then we run for the Schism."
"No," Kaelen said, his voice calm. "That's exactly what it expects."
Before anyone could stop him, Kaelen stood up and walked into the open, his hands held away from his body.
The Warden's single red eye swiveled to him. It didn't raise a weapon.
"Kaelen," its voice boomed, a horrific fusion of mechanical precision and the first Axiom's resonant tone. "The Scion. I am the Warden. Imperator Vorlag offers a bargain. Surrender your Spark willingly. Submit to the Stitching. In return, the Garden will be spared. Its people will be assimilated peacefully. Continue to resist, and we will not simply destroy the Echo. We will use the power of this Schism to unravel its existence from the Weave. It will be as if it never was."
The threat was existential. Not just death, but retroactive erasure.
Elara's finger tightened on the trigger. "Kaelen, don't you dare—"
But Kaelen wasn't looking at the Warden. He was looking past it, into the raging heart of the Schism. He could feel the first Axiom's consciousness, not as a memory, but as a lingering, tortured will. It wasn't a set of techniques. It was a single, overwhelming, foundational truth. The Primal Axiom. And he understood it now. The first Axiom hadn't been trying to create or destroy. He had been trying to simplify. To reduce the complex, painful paradox of existence into one, elegant, final statement.
He had failed, and the failure had created this Schism.
The Warden raised its hand, and the Schism flared. Kaelen felt a wave of nausea as the very concept of the Echo—the memory of Lyra's face, the feeling of the Soil of the Soul—flickered in his mind, threatening to be unwritten.
He had a choice: surrender and save the Echo's present, or fight and risk it never having existed at all.
In that moment of impossible pressure, Kaelen made his decision. He didn't attack the Warden. He didn't try to shield the Echo.
He turned his perception inward, to the Spark at his core, and then outwards, towards the raging Schism. He aligned his own resonance with the raw, unformed power of the Origin Point.
He wasn't trying to control it. He was trying to complete it.
He poured his consciousness into the Schism. Not a command, but an offering. He showed it his memories of the Echo. He showed it Elara's love for her family, Rork's stubborn loyalty, the quiet courage of the Gardeners. He showed it the child in the collapsing building, their will to live. He offered it complexity. He offered it life.
The Primal Axiom was not a command of simplicity. It was the command of potential.
[LET_THERE_BE_CHOICE]
The Schism didn't close. It transformed.
The violent tear in reality softened, stabilized, and blossomed into a permanent, stable gateway. Not a wound, but a connection. A door. On the other side was not null-space, but the Sunken Atrium of the Echo.
The Stabilization Fortress, its purpose rendered obsolete, began to crumble. The Warden, its hybrid power source now harmonized with a reality it was built to control, simply shut down.
Kaelen stood panting, staring at the permanent bridge he had just created between the heart of the Chronos Guard's greatest discovery and the sanctuary they sought to erase.
He had not won the war. But he had changed the battlefield forever. The Echo was no longer just a hidden garden. It was now a connected nation. And Kaelen had just proven that the ultimate power was not control, but connection. The look of dawning horror on the faces of the remaining Chronos Guard troops was not because he had destroyed their fortress, but because he had made it part of his garden.