The Core-Battery was no longer a room; it was a pressurized chamber of divine agony.
As Caspian lunged toward the Architect, the physical laws of the Abyss began to shred. The white light of the Sequence 0 entity didn't just illuminate the space—it carved into it. To Caspian's Grave-Sight, the Architect's soul looked like a dying star being held together by rusted iron wires.
"You dare?" the Architect's voice resonated, vibrating Caspian's very atoms. "You are a scavenger in a dead man's suit! You think you can cage a Sun?"
Caspian didn't answer with words. He answered with the Silent Gallery.
He threw his arms wide, and the obsidian gates of his mental domain manifested within the white void. The gates weren't the polished, elegant structures they once were; they were cracked, leaking indigo smoke, and straining under the sheer gravitational pull of the Architect's presence.
"Clarity, now!" Caspian roared.
The girl-system's eyes vanished into a stream of white light. She merged with the Athanor of Souls, turning the ancient Old World forge into a massive vacuum of spiritual energy.
The cables rooted in the Architect's flesh began to vibrate. They weren't being cut; they were being rerouted. Caspian was acting as a bridge, a lightning rod for a god. The golden light of the Architect began to flow through Caspian's arms, turning his veins into glowing gold rivers and his indigo blood into white-hot ichor.
The Interior War
Inside Caspian's mind, the Silent Gallery was screaming.
The faceless statues he had collected—the Mourner, the Ash-King, the remnants of Oakhaven—were melting under the heat. The Vellum of Souls was spinning so fast it began to smoke, the ink of centuries being rewritten in a single second.
"I am the Light!" the Architect's consciousness thundered inside Caspian's skull. "I am the order that keeps the dark at bay! I will erase your petty 'Void' and turn this Gallery into my throne!"
Caspian stood his ground in the center of the burning hall. He felt his memories being incinerated. He saw his childhood in the Gutters, the face of his mother, the smell of the first surgery he ever performed—all of it turning to ash.
If I lose my past, I lose the resonance, Caspian realized. A Mourner without memories is just a shell.
He reached into his throat and gripped the Tongue of the Silent King.
"You want a throne?" Caspian hissed, his mental form growing to match the Architect's size. "Then sit on the one I built for you. REDACT!"
He used his Sequence 7 power not on the Architect, but on himself. He redacted his own pain. He redacted the heat. He turned himself into an absolute zero, a vacuum that even a sun could not fill.
The Architect's golden light hit the vacuum and was swallowed. The divine entity felt the terrifying pull of the Void—the one thing light cannot escape. For the first time in five hundred years, the Architect felt fear.
The Indigo Dawn
In the world above, on the floating islands of the Caelum Chain, the Great Extinguish seemed to be repeating itself.
The "Sun-Spheres" in the streets of Aethelgard flickered and died. The "Great Lung-Bellows" of the Church stalled. For ten seconds, the world was plunged into a darkness so absolute that the citizens thought the Abyss had finally risen to claim them.
Then, the light returned.
But it wasn't the warm, artificial gold of the Church. It was a haunting, ethereal Indigo.
The sky itself turned the color of a deep bruise, shimmering with stars that shouldn't exist. The air didn't smell like ozone anymore; it smelled like cold rain and ancient parchment.
In the Iron Belt, the rebellion led by Ash paused. The soldiers looked up, their rusted armor reflecting the new light. In the upper-city, Marble felt her stone-corruption finally go dormant, her white eyes turning a soft, glowing violet.
The "Sun" had been replaced.
The Cost of Sovereignty
Back in the Core, the Architect was gone.
The fiber-optic cables were still there, but they were now connected to a floating, indigo sphere that sat at the heart of the Gallery's gates. The Architect's consciousness had been successfully "Caged" within the Athanor, his power filtered and softened by Caspian's Void.
Caspian fell to his knees on the white floor of the Battery chamber.
His clothes were gone, replaced by a skin that looked like polished obsidian. His hair had turned white, and his eyes... his eyes were no longer indigo. They were black holes, rimmed with a constant, spinning ring of golden gears.
[SEQUENCE 7: VOID-VOICE — OVERLOADED.] [HIDDEN PATHWAY UNLOCKED: THE ARCHITECT OF BONE AND STAR.] [CURRENT RANK: THE CURATOR OF THE INDIGO SUN (Pseudo-Sequence 5).]
Clarity appeared beside him, her sundress charred but her expression one of awe. "You did it. You didn't just save them. You took the world's heart and put it in your pocket."
Caspian tried to speak, but his voice caused the very walls of the chamber to crack. He had to learn to speak all over again.
"The... Church..." he managed to rasp.
"They're coming," Clarity said, her voice turning grim. "The High Inquisitors saw the light change. They know the Architect has been moved. They're launching the 'Ark of the Covenant'—their last Dreadnought. They aren't coming to investigate, Caspian. They're coming to kill the new Sun."
Caspian stood up, his body feeling heavy with the weight of millions of lives now tethered to his soul. He looked up, his Grave-Sight piercing through miles of rock and cloud to see the Church's fleet descending like vultures.
"Let them come," Caspian said, his voice now a calm, terrifying harmony. "I have a Gallery to fill, and I'm missing an Inquisitor-General."