Approaching the Stillborn Heart without the immediate threat of hunters or a predatory artist should have been easier. It wasn't.
The conflict zone was a physical and spiritual pressure cooker. The Abyssal scar's hunger was a constant, gnawing ache in their guts. The Void scar's erasure made their thoughts feel thin and stretched, threatening to unravel. Damien's Rime-Void Anchors helped, creating small pockets of stable space, but maintaining them was a drain.
"The artist was right," Lyra gasped, sweat beading on her forehead despite the chilling air. "It's a duet. And we're the annoying buzz the musicians are trying to ignore."
Brom was having the hardest time. His earth affinity, his connection to solidity and endurance, was directly antithetical to the Void's negation. Each step was a battle of wills for him. His void-brace shimmered, holding firm, but his face was etched with strain.
Kiran, conversely, seemed energized. The Void energy was familiar, if more potent. His new eyes drank in the emptiness, and he used his void-folds to subtly redirect tendrils of erasure away from the group. "It's like walking through my old family archives," he said with a grimace. "Cold, dead, and full of things trying to make you forget who you are."
Damien led, his Storm-Eyes parsing the chaotic flows. He saw the "score" the artist mentioned—the interplay of the two forces wasn't random violence; it was a brutal, elegant pattern of consumption and negation, locked in a stalemate. The Heart was the focal point, the unresolved chord.
They reached the inner ring. The Stillborn Heart hung before them, vast and terrible. Up close, the cancerous hemisphere looked less like stone and more like a petrified organ, veins of purple-black energy pulsing sluggishly. The smooth hemisphere was a hole in reality, a perfect circle of nothing so absolute it hurt to look at.
"So," Sylvia said, her voice barely a whisper. "How do you harvest a star?"
"Very carefully," Damien replied. His initial plan—a direct assault or devouring—seemed laughably crude now. The Heart wasn't just an object; it was a state of being. Conquering it wouldn't be a battle of force, but of concept.
He remembered the Fell-Wyrm's choice: become its heir or conquer its power. This was similar, but twofold.
"I believe," Damien said, thinking aloud, "we must not harvest it from the outside. We must… resolve the duet from within."
Lyra stared at him. "You want to go inside the cosmic tumor-void?"
"Not physically. Spiritually. Our avatars. We must project our consciousness into the conflict point and impose a new harmony." He looked at Kiran. "Your void to match its Void." He looked at his own hands, frost and faint abyssal hunger swirling. "My frost and hunger to counter the Abyss. Lyra, your creation-magic to weave a new pattern from the chaos. Brom, your endurance to be our anchor."
"And me?" Sylvia asked. "I don't do spiritual projection. I stab things."
"You guard our physical bodies," Damien said. "If anything gets past the artist's fog, you are the last line. Buy us time."
Sylvia nodded, a fierce, professional gleam in her eye. "Can do."
It was a desperate, insane plan. But it was the only one that didn't involve being eaten or erased.
They formed a circle, backs to the Heart, facing outwards. Brom sank into a deep root-stance, his good hand on the ground, his will becoming a mountain. Lyra began a soft, weaving chant, foxfire dancing around them in protective, creative loops. Kiran closed his new void-eyes, folding the space around them into a protective buffer.
Damien took a deep breath, the air biting cold and tasting of ash. He reached out with his Spiritual Avatar—Conquered Frost, the icy phoenix that was his will made manifest. He didn't send it toward the Heart. He sent it into the space between himself and his friends, a conduit.
"Link to me," he commanded.
Lyra's foxfire-essence, playful and bright, flowed in. Kiran's void-essence, sharp and still, joined next. Finally, Brom's earth-essence, stubborn and deep, completed the circuit.
Their combined consciousness, a tangled chord of Frost, Foxfire, Void, and Earth, shot forth from Damien's avatar and plunged into the jagged seam of the Stillborn Heart.