Phaser's breath came out in slow, misty waves that curled and shimmered in the frozen air. The blizzard was dragging at his steps, yet his body radiated heat. Steam was rising off his shoulders and arms in faint wisps. The snow hissed and melted wherever his boots touched.
He wasn't cold. He was walking for three days toward nothing but the storm itself. The blizzard had direction, and so he followed it.
He wasn't tired. His rations were untouched save for a few, and his inventory shimmered faintly with the Fluvehearts. They replenished his strength endlessly, cycling Xana through his veins until even fatigue seemed to bow to him. till, he couldn't help but chuckle softly to himself as he trudged through another snowfield.
"Why do the mountains love me? Every time, it's ice and snow. Maybe they think I'm one of them."
The storm howled in reply and Phaser smiled faintly, pulling the fur-lined hood tighter over his head.
Hours passed. The blizzard rose and fell until finally, it began to fade. Phaser's steps slowed down. The snowflakes thinned. The air cleared. Spread before him was a cliff that dropped into a vast, white valley below.
At the heart of that valley stood a temple. He stopped breathing for a moment.
It was built entirely of black rock. The pillars rose like spines from its structure, wrapped in ancient sigils that pulsed faintly as if alive. The snow didn't dare fall near it. Instead, it circled the temple in slow spirals, as though paying respect.
"The hell? That's—"
He didn't finish. His body was already moving.
He leapt from the cliff. The fall a hundred meters deep. As the ground rushed up to meet him, he flicked his wrist. Void strings burst from his fingertips, weaving into a smooth, glowing sphere that enveloped him completely. The impact thundered across the valley. The snow spread outward in a perfect circle. Phaser stood at the center of the impact, unharmed. The sphere faded away in motes of light. He exhaled, steam curling around him again.
The temple loomed even more massive up close. The structure was made of onyx columns, each carved with swirling inscriptions that seemed to move when he wasn't looking directly at them. At the entrance stood a colossal statue four times his height, depicting a hooded figure holding an open book. The figure's face was completely hidden by the shadow of its hood. Only the suggestion of a mouthless visage lingered beneath. The robes were carved so intricately they looked like real cloth caught in a phantom wind.
Phaser stepped closer, squinting at the base where words were etched in an ancient language. The symbols flickered, rearranging themselves into meaning as the system in his eye decoded them.
[The Hidden God, Keeper of Chronology.]
"Chronology? The God of Time's records?"
His gaze lifted toward the twin doors of the temple. Two impossibly tall slabs of black stone met in the middle like a sealed tomb. Across them, enormous glowing sigils twisted into readable letters.
[THE TEMPLE OF THE FLUX GODS.]
For a moment, all he could do was stare. His pulse quickened. The architecture was too precise. Even his Flux felt smaller here, like it bowed instinctively before something greater.
"Why am I seeing this? This shouldn't exist."
The air shimmered in front of him.
White text appeared before his eyes, glowing faintly above the doors. He squinted as the message took shape in poetic verse:
[Those blessed by stars and scars of flame,
Who walk through worlds no mortal claim,
Their blood must sing, their soul proclaim,
The gods' lost truth, through pain's own name.]
Phaser exhaled slowly, lowering his gaze. It took him a long while to piece the meaning together, tracing the logic behind the words. It wasn't just a riddle. It was a requirement.
Only those touched by the divine .those whose Flux had once resonated with the gods, could enter this place. But even that wasn't enough. It required sacrifice. His own blood, maybe?
"'Through pain's own name,' huh? You really don't make things easy."
He stepped closer until his reflection warped on the surface of the black doors. He extended his hand and summoned his strings once more. They shimmered once, then cut neatly across his palm. A line of crimson welled up immediately. He pressed his hand against the center of the doors.
The blood hissed as it met the surface, vanishing instantly, but the doors began to tremble. The sigils flared brighter, bleeding from white to violet to gold. Phaser's eyes widened as the entire valley seemed to respond. With a slow, thunderous groan, the Temple of the Flux Gods opened.
The doors split, revealing a darkness so pure it seemed to devour the world's light. Phaser stood there, the wind tugging at his coat, the storm howling in the distance, but he didn't hesitate.
"Alright. Let's see what kind of gods built this place."
-----
The doors boomed shut behind Phase, the echo rolling down the halls. One by one, torches flared along the walls, white flames blooming from their tips. The firelight wasn't warm; it glowed with a sacred chill, casting reflections across the black rock of the temple. The flickering illumination stretched forward into the long hall, which seemed to go on forever.
He saw a few murals.
They weren't mere carvings or murals. They were living etchings, faintly moving beneath the light as if the stone itself remembered.
To his left, the first mural spread across the colossal wall like an entire landscape compressed into stone.
He aww the planet Earth.
It was blue and white, spinning inside a perfect ring of color. Around it stood eight colossal beings surrounding it. Earth itself looked fragile, no larger than a football in their palms.
Phaser's footsteps slowed down. His hand hovered close to the mural, tracing the curve of a continent as if to test its texture.
"This… isn't possible."
But it was.
He followed the wall's flow until it melted into the next mural on the opposite side and this time, the scene shifted.
To his right, the eight beings now sat upon a mountain peak, watching over a world teeming with life. Great jungles sprawled in endless green waves. Gigantic dinosaurs roamed the plains below, their shadows stretching across the fertile earth. Phaser stopped walking entirely. His pupils narrowed.
"Dinosaurs? Here? On Altera Earth?"
The eight figures remained motionless, gazing upon the world they had created, or perhaps mourned. One leaned forward, the light of its form glimmering across the face of the landscape. He began walking again, his boots crunching faintly on the dustless stone. Every mural told a chapter of Altera Earth itself.
On the left, the third mural unveiled a new age. The eight beings stood upon the earth, towering among primitive humans. The beings were vast, whose heads brushed the clouds. Their faces, however, were hidden behind veils of shadow, or perhaps light too pure to behold. The cave people below were kneeling, offering crude stones, fire, and their own painted walls as tribute.
"So these eight had walked among the first men, huh..."
He noticed faint details. One of the beings was handing a spark of white fire to a kneeling woman. Another drew patterns in the air that looked like the earliest forms of sigils. The people were learning. The beginnings of their civilization were being etched in divine exchange.
The world changed again.
Gigantic beasts like winged reptiles, multi-headed serpents and creatures whose eyes burned like stars tore through primitive villages. The humans were no match. Phaser could almost hear their screams trapped in the silence of the hall. The eight beings were no longer among them. Their absence left only blood and suffering.
He stepped closer. The flames on the torches shimmered, their white glow merging with the mural's colors until the world in the stone seemed to breathe. The detail was unreal. He saw broken spears, claw marks in the earth, a child reaching up to a figure in the clouds and the monsters killing them.
And then came the final mural in the sequence. Phaser turned right again. His boots scraped the floor as the next wall revealed catastrophe.
A meteor descended through a black sky. Its size dwarfed the earth, swallowing continents in fire. Below, dinosaurs and beasts screamed in carved agony as they were obliterated. The eight beings floated above, their forms eclipsed by halos of power, their hands raised toward the falling star.
The meteor struck the world in a flare of crimson that had somehow been preserved in stone. Yet amid the destruction, humans were spared. They were small figures but each one was bathed in a sphere of white light that poured down from the beings above.
Phaser stood utterly still. His chest rose and fell once, deeply, as realization dawned.
The dinosaurs were purged. The chaos erased. And those first humans were transformed.
The eight beings had seeded something inside them.
"This is the beginning of Flux that wasn't mentioned in the game..."
He staggered back a step, staring wide-eyed at the depiction. The white light that surrounded the ancient humans flickered faintly.
"This… is where it began. The First awakening of Flux started here. So Flux didn't start in the 1300s. It began from ancient times."
He looked down the hallway stretching into darkness, the torches continuing endlessly like a bridge through time.