Consciousness returned not as a waking, but as a falling. Roewi fell through layers of himself, through memories both cherished and cursed, through the scorched data-streams of recent atrocities. He landed not on a surface, but in a landscape. His own mind.
He stood in a fractured replica of the Nexus Academy training arena, but it was twisted, broken. One half was pristine, orderly, every line perfect and gleaming, the domain of Vextor. The other half was a chaotic storm of raw, churning energy, where the walls melted and reformed into screaming faces and the floor was a sea of shifting emotions, the domain of the Orbs. Above it all, a grey, featureless sky threatened to descend, the lingering horror of the scoured world.
And in the center of it all, stood the aspects of himself.
To hi
