[Ava's POV]
Beyond the glass walls of Lucien Vallin’s penthouse, beyond the humming sprawl of the city that slept in ignorance, the world of the Elders moved to a different rhythm.
A rhythm measured in heartbeats of stone, in the slow exhalation of centuries. High in the cerulean teeth of the Astral Peaks, accessible only through paths that wound through mist and memory, lay the Chamber of Echoes.
It was not built; it was revealed, a geodesic cathedral of raw power and colder logic, exposed by some primordial cataclysm and consecrated by time and purpose.
Here, the air was not breathed so much as it was ingested—thin, crystalline, and tasting of lightning-struck quartz and the iron tang of deep earth. Light, a grudging concession, emanated from bioluminescent fungi that clung to the
