Finally, tonight a mind had latched on the seed. A human soul. Far away, across barriers that had no name in any language Ilen knew. Unknown to the Authority. Compatible with the template.
Three vials of catalyst waited by the circle. Three more minutes and the merger would lock. The seed would have a pilot. And Ilen would have his life's work complete. A second chance for a species that deserved better than extinction.
The floor bucked.
Stone dust fell from the ceiling. The doorway rippled like water.
"Not now," Ilen said. His voice was calm, which meant the panic was absolute. "Please. Not now."
Above ground, the pillars flickered.
"What is he doing?" one officer asked.
"Containment failure in ten seconds." The scanner operator's voice turned urgent. "Something's pushing through from inside. Energy readings off the scale. The magical plate is destabilizing."
Ilen grabbed the seed. It felt warm in his palm, alive in a way nothing should be. He ran to the west tunnel. A grate of force sealed it, violet light crackling between the bars. He tried the east tunnel. Sealed. The suppression dome had pushed through underground and closed all exits.
He understood what was happening. The dimensional anchor was collapsing. The forced connection between two worlds couldn't sustain itself. The barriers were reasserting. He had maybe thirty seconds before the portal collapsed completely and the energy backlash vaporized everything in a two-hundred-body-length radius.
But if he timed it right, if he could reverse the flow of power at exactly the correct moment, he might be able to push the seed through the closing gap before the portal sealed forever.
He set the seed back above the basin. His hands were steady now. Fear had a way of burning away the shakes, leaving only calculation.
"Trapped," he whispered to no one. "If I wait, they take it and burn me. If I fight, they kill me and burn it. Damned if I do, damned if I don't."
He drew a new circle around the original. His hand moved with the muscle memory of decades of practice. At points around the circle he poured the catalysts: soul-binder, flesh-binder, fate-binder. Each glowed as it hit the lines, humming in sympathy with the anchor plate.
The floor wasn't just bucking now. It was fragmenting.
Ilen stepped into the circle. There was only one way to do this. Trigger the overload from inside, use his own life force as the detonation mechanism. The blast would vaporize him. The seed might slip through the suppression field in the chaos, or it might not. Fifty-fifty odds at best.
Fifty-fifty was better than extinction.
He closed his eyes. Remembered the faces of those who'd died for this cause. His teachers, collapsed after years of research. His friends, burned by the Authority when they knew too much. His daughter, fever-bright and fading, asking him to save her even though there was nothing to save her from yet. The World Cat plague was just an abstract threat then, something that happened to explorers and soldiers, not to healers in quiet villages.
"For you," he whispered. "For all of us."
He flooded the circle with power.
The ritual lines blazed white. Not the pale white of suppression fields, but something hotter, something that burned the air and turned stone translucent.
The anchor plate screamed.
They heard it from above, the officers shifting nervously, rods raised. It wasn't sound exactly. More like a dimensional scream, like the fabric between worlds was tearing and didn't like it.
Sareth held up a hand, staring at the mound. Once. Twice. Three times the dome flickered.
"What is he doing?" one officer asked.
"Containment failure in ten seconds." The scanner operator's voice carried new urgency. "Something's pushing through from inside. Energy readings off the scale. Sir, the dimensional tear is—"
"All units, reinforce the dome," Sareth barked. "Full suppression. Now."
Eight suppression rods slammed into the dome simultaneously. Energy arced. A circuit completing. And then the dome imploded, shockwave knocking the officers flat and sending Sareth stumbling backward. Dust rose in a column that obscured everything.
"Scan!" Sareth yelled, ears ringing.
The scanner operator coughed, waved away stone dust. "Target... gone. The ritual site is collapsed. No life signs in the chamber. But sir... there's something—"
The dust cleared.
The stone mound was destroyed, reduced to rubble. The crystal pillars were shattered, glittering fragments scattered across the Ashmar Wastes like a broken crown. The ritual circle was utterly obliterated, the runes Ilen had carved burnt away by force that shouldn't exist.
And Ilen was gone.
But not the seed.
Sareth's breath came short. He understood what he was looking at. Ilen had detonated. Had used his own life force as fuel to breach the dome, to destabilize the dimensional tear, to push his precious seed through a closing portal before it shut forever.
"No life signs?" Sareth asked quietly.
"Negative. If Ilen Korr was in that chamber, he's... vaporized. But sir, there's something we're detecting. Movement in the waste field, maybe two hundred body-lengths west. Low thermal signature. Possibly biological. Possibly World Cat-class predator."
Sareth looked at the destruction. Looked at the shattered pillars that were supposed to contain any World Cat. Looked at the trail of disturbed sand leading west into the wastes, toward terrain where Authority scouts would have difficulty pursuing.
"Sound the alert," he said quietly. "Tell High Command that the seed escaped. Tell them Ilen Korr succeeded."
He paused.
"And tell them we need to find it before it grows."
In the instant before the detonation consumed him, Ilen Korr experienced perfect clarity.
He saw the seed escaping, felt it through the ritual connection. A tiny spark of life moving through the dimensional tear, pushed by the energy of his own disintegration. He saw it land in the wastes above, tumbling into sand and shadow. He saw it beginning already to respond to this new world, to adapt, to awaken.
He'd done it.
Against impossible odds, after a hundred and thirty seasons of work, after sixteen failures that should have broken him but hadn't, after sacrificing everything a human could sacrifice, he'd succeeded.
The World Cats would live again.
And then the force hit him and there was nothing but white.
Three days later, High Command received the report in the capital.
Director Veth, who had been overseeing the Authority's suppression research for the last fifty seasons, received the news while reviewing supply manifests. A messenger came to her office, pale and shaking, with a sealed message.
When she'd read it, she sat very still for a long moment.
Then she called a full emergency session.
"Ilen Korr succeeded," she told the assembled council, her voice steady. "The seed has escaped. Preliminary scans suggest it's viable, conscious, and already moving through the wastes."
The chamber erupted. Questions, accusations, demands. Why had they allowed Ilen access to research facilities? Why hadn't they destroyed the seed when they found it? Why had the containment failed?
"Because," Veth said quietly, "Ilen Korr was smarter than all of us. He knew we'd never approve resurrection. He knew the seed would be destroyed if discovered. So he stole the dimensional anchor, performed the ritual, and pushed the seed through before we could stop him. He sacrificed himself to guarantee its escape."
"Do we have tracking data?" someone asked.
"Initial trajectory suggests west toward the mountain ranges. After that, nothing. The creature's too small to detect reliably, and it's moving through terrain where our scanners lose clarity."
"Then we deploy hunters. We track it. We kill it before it grows."
"Kill what?" another voice. "A creature that's barely hatched? That we don't fully understand? That might be the last of its kind?" This was from Researcher Saale, who'd worked with Ilen before the ban. "We have a chance to study it, to understand World Cat development in real-time—"
"We have a chance to make sure it never matures," someone else cut in. "A mature World Cat would destroy everything we've built."
Veth listened to the debate spiral into chaos. They were right, of course. They were all right. Kill it to be safe. Study it to be wise. Destroy it to preserve civilization. Protect it because it was endangered.
No good answers.
She made the decision quietly, in her office after the council dispersed.
They would officially report that the seed had been destroyed in the initial containment failure. Ilen was dead. That was true and could be verified. The Authority would claim success: the threat had been neutralized, the researcher had been stopped, and the last seed had been eliminated.
But Veth would send a secondary team. Not to kill the creature, but to observe. To track its development. To document what happened when a World Cat consciousness, sourced from an unknown dimension, merged with a body engineered three thousand years ago.
To know what Ilen had created.
It was illegal. It was probably mad. But Veth had lost too much to the Authority's rigid thinking. She wanted to know.
And perhaps, just perhaps, a world that needed rebuilding might need something the old world couldn't tame.
The World Cat wandered into the darkness of the Ashmar Wastes, confused and hungry and alive in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Behind it, somewhere lost in the destroyed shrine, Ilen Korr's body was reduced to ash by forces he'd never fully understood.
He would never know if he'd truly succeeded or if he'd just created a monster.
The world would spend generations finding out.