The air of the new Aethelgard tasted of ozone and ancient pine. It was a sensory overload—a world that had been stitched together by a god with a broken needle. One step on the moss felt like stepping on a living carpet of earth; the next step, my boot would click against a patch of semi-translucent floor tiling that had bled through from the laboratory’s mainframe.
I stood at the edge of the clearing, my chest heaving. The white fire inside me didn't feel like a weapon anymore. it felt like a part of my anatomy, like a lung or a second heart. It hummed in time with the violet ring around the sun, a rhythmic pulsing that reminded me I was no longer just Elara Vance. I was a bridge between the physical and the digital, the creator and the created.
"Silas," I breathed, looking at my hands.
