The plan was a tapestry woven from madness and desperation. While Kaelith's body recovered, Lyssara became a whirlwind of furious research, her earlier rage sublimated into a white-hot focus. She practically lived at the wall of codices, cross-referencing ancient Guild-founder texts on resonance with stolen Imperial schematics for the Warden's arcane wards.
Ravi, for his part, entered a state of strange, detached calm. He had made a choice that led directly into the heart of the storm, and in doing so, had found a queer kind of peace. The burden of reacting was gone, replaced by the crushing, clarifying weight of a suicidal agenda.
"It's possible," Lyssara announced two days later, her eyes bloodshot, her hair a wild tangle. She slapped a vellum schematic onto the obsidian scrying table, pointing a trembling finger at a complex array of glyphs. "Keldran's Amplification Ward isn't a solid dome. It's a net, just like the one that caught Kaelith, but woven from pure energy and tied to amplifier nodes across the city."
She traced lines on the schematic. "The nodes draw ambient energy, what the texts call 'Breath-motes,' and use it to power the net. The entire system is designed to resonate at a specific frequency—yours. If you touch anything within the Ward, your resonance will travel through the very fabric of reality, be caught by the net, amplified by the nodes, and pinpointed on Keldran's master rune-matrix in the Imperial Spire."
"A perfect trap," Kaelith observed grimly from a nearby stool where he was tending to his still-aching muscles.
"Almost perfect," Lyssara countered, a flicker of her old, predatory grin returning. "But Keldran made one arrogant assumption. He assumes the 'anomaly' would be trying to stay quiet. He built a listening device, not a lightning rod." She looked at Ravi. "The system has no upper limit. If you intentionally introduce a massive, catastrophic burst of your resonance... you could overload it."
"And what happens when a city-wide magical grid overloads?" Ravi asked.
"Best case? The amplifier nodes burn out. The Ward collapses. Worst case?" Lyssara took a deep breath. "The energy has to go somewhere. The nodes will likely vent the overload in a focused, directional blast, like a circuit breaker tripping. The blast will follow the path of least resistance back to the origin of the disturbance."
"Back to me," Ravi finished.
"Back to the Echo," she corrected him. "You won't be there. You will be the bait. The lure. You'll create the disturbance from one side of the city, and the overload will discharge directly into the world-wound on the other."
The final piece of the plan clicked into place. They would turn Keldran's cage into a cannon, and aim it at the abyss.
"And what exactly do you think a concentrated blast of pure, city-level arcane energy is going to do when it hits an unstable tear in reality?" Ravi asked.
Lyssara's grin was gone, replaced by a chilling seriousness. "I don't know. Maybe it will cauterize the wound. Seal it. Maybe it will agitate it. Rip it wider. Or maybe," she met his eyes, her gaze unflinching, "it will provide the raw energy needed for whatever is looking through to physically manifest on our side."
"The monster," Kaelith breathed.
"The monster," Lyssara confirmed. "Our grand, city-saving distraction."
The node they chose was a lesser amplifier in the old Weeping Canal district, a place of crumbling, half-flooded tenements and forgotten smuggling tunnels. It was far from the cordon around the Warrens, far from the eyes of the major factions. The node itself was disguised as a simple stone obelisk in the center of a small, forgotten square, humming with an almost imperceptible energy.
This time, Kaelith insisted on coming. "You are not just a man, my Lord," he had argued, his voice ringing with renewed conviction. "You are the center of the wheel of fate. I am but a spoke. Where you turn, I must follow. I will keep watch."
As twilight fell, bathing the city in a light the color of a fresh bruise, Ravi stood before the obelisk. Lyssara was a block away, hidden in a derelict clock tower with her scrying-slate, acting as their eyes. Kaelith was a heavy, intimidating shadow in a nearby alley, a silent, unmovable guardian.
Ravi could feel it. The Ward. It was online. A faint, tingling pressure against his skin, a hum in the air that was not quite sound. The entire city was holding its breath, listening for him.
"Ready?" Lyssara's voice, transmitted through a small, enchanted communication stone, was a tinny whisper in his ear. "All factions are still focused on the Warrens. The Echo is... stable. No changes."
"Ready," Ravi whispered back, his own voice tight.
He looked at his hands. He was about to perform the same act that had nearly leveled a building, the same act that had torn a hole in the sky. But this time, it was by design. With a clear, cold purpose.
He placed both palms flat against the cold, humming surface of the obelisk.
The effect was instantaneous and utterly violent.
The world went white. The obelisk didn't just vibrate; it screamed, a pure, high-frequency note of agony that was sound, light, and force all at once. The Ward, the city-wide listening net, found what it was looking for. It found him. And he wasn't a whisper; he was a hurricane.
A torrent of energy, of his own dissonant, unmaking resonance, was ripped from his body, siphoned into the amplifier node. The ground around him cracked. The air itself began to shimmer, not with a tear, but with the raw heat of the energy being channeled. It felt like his soul was being dragged out of him through the palms of his hands.
Across the city, Lyssara watched in horror as her scrying-slate turned from a map into a nova of pure, blinding white light. Every single amplifier node across Vaelorra lit up simultaneously. The system wasn't just overloaded. It was on the verge of annihilation.
Keldran Rhyl, in his chamber atop the Imperial Spire, would be seeing his master rune-matrix melt into slag. He had built a net to catch a fish and had instead hooked a leviathan.
"Ravi, get out of there!" Lyssara's voice shrieked through the stone. "The feedback is coming! It's—"
Her voice was cut off by a roar that was not of this world.
The overload discharged. Not from the node he was touching, but from all of them at once. Beams of pure, incandescent white energy, lances of raw arcane power, erupted from a dozen points across the city and shot skyward, converging on a single point above the Warrens.
They struck the shimmering black line of the world-wound.
For a moment, there was an absolute, terrifying silence as the beams poured into the tear. The violet-black light of the Echo pulsed wildly, drinking in the torrent of energy. Then, the tear began to expand. It bulged, stretched, its edges warping and writhing like living flesh.
The violet-black light inside condensed, thickened, taking on a shape. First it was a suggestion, a knot of deeper darkness. Then it grew limbs. A head. It was a silhouette of impossible, horrifying geometry, a thing of too many joints and a posture that defied sanity.
It pulled itself through the now-gaping maw of the Echo, peeling away from the fabric of its own alien reality and into theirs.
As the creature's full form emerged, silhouetted against the agonizing light of the dying Ward, Lyssara's scrying-slate finally managed to clear, resolving the image of the monster. Her blood ran cold. She brought the communication stone to her lips, her voice a strangled, disbelieving whisper.
"Ravi… Kaelith…" she stammered, "what... what is it? It looks like…"
Back in the Weeping Canals, Ravi collapsed to his knees, ripping his hands from the now-dark and silent obelisk. The backlash of the energy drain left him weak, dizzy, his entire body humming like a struck bell.
He looked up at the sky, at the dying corona of light where the Ward had been. And he saw it. A dark, spindly shape, miles away, descending on the city. Even from this distance, he could feel its presence, a wave of profound, psychic wrongness that made his skin crawl.
"It's here," he whispered, a grim finality in his tone. He had summoned his demon.
Kaelith limped out of the shadows, his face a mixture of terror and holy awe as he stared at the distant descending horror. "By all the forgotten gods," the War-Priest breathed.
"Lyssara," Ravi said into the comm-stone, his voice ragged but steady. "What does it look like?"
Her reply came back, strained and full of a terrible, dawning horror that chilled him to the bone.
"...Ravi," she said. "It looks just like the Edict Engine. The armor. Keldran Rhyl's containment suit."
And then, another voice crackled through the comm-stone, not Lyssara's. It was the distorted, amplified voice of Magister Keldran Rhyl himself, hijacking their channel, his words laced not with anger, but with an ancient, bone-deep terror.
"You fools," Keldran's voice hissed across the magical link. "You absolute, world-breaking fools. That's not a monster."
There was a pause, filled with the static of a dying world.
"That is an Archon. And you've just given Vyr a key to our front door."