Offworld.
The word was a splash of ice water in the face of their immediate, desperate reality. Aurelise, the Warden, the Choir—they were wolves, circling a fire in a dark forest. Familiar predators with understandable motives. But this... this was the sound of something ancient and vast stirring in the deeper woods, drawn by the scent of their struggle.
Kaelith, having regained some of his strength, pushed himself off the wall and limped toward the table. He stared at the pulsing, violet-black signature. "An Echo," he breathed, the name a half-remembered verse from a forbidden scripture. "The apostate gospels spoke of them. Tears in the firmament, through which the gaze of the Outer Celestials could fall."
"Celestial is a comforting word for it," Lyssara countered, her voice sharp with dread. "The founders of this vault had a simpler term. Predators. They believed our world, Vaelorra, is… insulated. Floating in a sea of something else. That tear you made, Ravi… you didn't just break the wall. You let the ocean in."
The alien thought Ravi had felt brush his mind, the cold, inquisitive pulse, suddenly made horrifying sense. He had rung a dinner bell in the deepest trench of the cosmos.
He felt a profound, world-altering fatigue. He had started this chain of events with a simple desire: to be left alone. Now, his every action seemed to magnify his predicament, escalating the stakes from personal survival to urban warfare, and now, apparently, to cosmic trespass. He was an existential trainwreck, gaining momentum with every pathetic, desperate choice.
"Can we close it?" he asked, the question feeling foolish even as he posed it.
Kaelith shook his massive head. "One does not mend the sky, my Lord. The wound is a fact. A truth. The gospels say that only a power of equal and opposite resonance can seal an Echo. A canceling note to the song of its creation."
Equal and opposite. The words hung in the air, a silent, damning indictment of Ravi himself. The only thing that could fix the world he was breaking… was a world that could break him back.
"So, we're on a timer," Lyssara summarized, her mind already moving past the metaphysics to the brutal, tactical reality. "This... 'Echo' will attract unwanted attention of a kind we cannot fight. And in the meantime, every faction in the city is now hunting you, not as a man, but as the living cause of this new blight." She pointed to the map. "They're forming a cordon around the Warrens. Not just guards. Keldran is setting up a city-wide Amplification Ward. He's going to try and light you up like a festival lantern if you so much as... break a teacup."
Their sanctuary had just shrunk. The entire city outside their door was becoming a hyper-sensitive alarm system, tuned to the frequency of his power. His quiet, subtle war was over. From now on, every act of self-defense would be a city-wide broadcast.
"There is still hope," Kaelith said, his voice a low, resolute rumble. His faith, it seemed, was immune to cosmic horror. He turned his intense gaze on Ravi. "The people flee the Warrens. They carry with them the tale of your sacrifice. The story is no longer a rumor, but a revelation. The fist of the Warden struck down. The vaults of the greedy shattered. The innocent warned at great personal risk. These are the first articles of a new faith."
"It's a faith built on a catastrophe I created," Ravi shot back, his guilt a bitter taste in his mouth.
"All great faiths are born from cataclysm," Kaelith replied calmly. "You are the lightning that strikes the ancient tree, and from its ashes, new life will grow."
"We can't afford a new religion right now!" Lyssara interjected, pinching the bridge of her nose. "We need an escape route. We need to get out of the city before Keldran's Ward is complete, or we'll be sealed in here with whatever that Echo decides to spit out."
The three of them stood in silence for a moment, a triumvirate of desperation. The priest, the strategist, and the cause of all their problems. They were trapped between a city that wanted to dissect him, a faith that wanted to deify him, and a hole in reality that was leaking something terrible and unknown.
The path forward seemed nonexistent. Every option was a different flavor of doom.
It was Ravi who broke the silence. He was staring at the map, at the pulsating violet-black light, and a strange, cold resolve began to settle in his gut. His whole life, he had been running from the next bad thing. The punch, the executioner, the guards. He had spent his entire existence in Vaelorra reacting, being herded by circumstance into actions he barely understood.
But the choice he had made in the square, the vow to stand his ground, had changed something fundamental inside him.
"You're right," he said, his voice quiet but devoid of its usual tremor. "We can't hide from this. And we can't run from it."
He looked at Lyssara, then at Kaelith. "But you're both thinking about this the wrong way. You see the Echo as a threat. The Ward as a cage. The city as a hunting ground."
He took a deep breath, the cold logic of a cornered animal formulating a final, desperate gambit. "I see a resource. A tool. And an opportunity."
Lyssara's eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"Keldran is building a cage for me," Ravi explained, a strange, feral light entering his eyes. "A city-wide net designed to detect and pinpoint my power. But what if I'm not the one he catches in it?"
He pointed to the scrying table, at the converging forces of the Warden, Aurelise, and the Choir. They were all still clustered around the reality tear, a hornet's nest of mutual suspicion.
"Right now, they're all enemies. But they have a common cause: me. And a common terror: that… thing." He gestured at the Echo. "We are going to give them something else. A new enemy. An immediate, physical threat that has nothing to do with me."
Kaelith frowned. "A scapegoat?"
"More than a scapegoat," Ravi said. "A sacrifice." He finally laid out the terrible, audacious core of his plan. "We're going to use Keldran's own Amplification Ward against him. We're going to find a way to redirect it, to focus its power. We are going to intentionally resonate with the Echo. We're going to pull something through."
The blood drained from Lyssara's face. "Ravi, no. You have no idea what's on the other side. You could be inviting a world-ending entity into the middle of the city."
"Exactly," Ravi said, his voice cold and hard. "I'm going to give them a monster. A real, tangible monster they can see and fight and fear. Something so terrifying it makes a quiet, invisible man who accidentally breaks things seem like a minor nuisance. I'm going to become the lesser of two evils."
It was a vow of a different kind. Not of sacrifice, but of escalation. He was going to set a fire to escape the flood, to summon a demon to distract the inquisitors. It was the most reckless gamble he could have imagined. And as he stared at the pulsing violet light on the map, at the maw of the abyss he had torn open, he knew it was the only move he had left to make. He had to become a monster, to prove he wasn't the worst one out there.