The jungle exhaled smoke and sorrow.
Aouli stood at the edge of the clearing, the stabilizer now silent behind him. The jungle had ceased its panic. But its stillness wasn't peace—it was the aftermath of a scream.
He could feel it in the air, the way the vines coiled inward, the way the ground had gone slack beneath his feet. Tellurin's system had been shocked into temporary dormancy, but the damage radiated outward, slow and rippling.
The survivors were gathering what little remained of their gear. Isla's crew was silent, busy, bruised. No blame yet. Just shock. They hadn't processed the failure, not fully. But it would come.
Maelle sat cross-legged near the wreckage, cradling the fractured core of her data crystal. She didn't cry, but she didn't look up either.
Aouli turned away.
She was there when he did.
Elysia.
She hadn't arrived. She hadn't entered.
She simply was.
Her glow was muted, her posture still. No comfort, no fury. Only presence, wrapped in disappointment like silk pulled tight around a blade.
"You disobeyed me," she said.
He didn't answer.
"You were told not to interfere."
"They needed—"
"They believed they needed," she corrected. "Belief is not certainty. It is desire in disguise."
He flinched. "And what was I supposed to do? Watch them die? Watch them try and fail without lifting a finger?"
"Yes," she said, without malice. "Because this wasn't your story. It was theirs."
His light flared briefly, then dimmed.
"I stopped it from being worse."
"No," she said. "You prevented one catastrophe. And seeded another. That stabilizer was a relic, yes. Dangerous, yes. But it was a link in their legacy. By severing it—"
"I saved Maelle!" he shouted.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Elysia took a step closer. "And in doing so, you taught her that desperation rewarded with divine intervention is acceptable."
Aouli looked down.
"Would you have let them die?" he asked quietly.
"I would have let them choose," Elysia said. "Choose fully. Succeed fully. Fail fully. That is the only way they grow beyond this cycle."
Aouli's fists clenched. "But I felt it. The collapse. The fear. How do I not act when I feel that?"
Elysia's gaze softened, but only slightly. "That is your test. That is what it means to carry Gaia's grief. Feeling is not justification. Compassion without comprehension becomes control. You tried to help—but you did not understand the system. You reacted to pain with instinct, not wisdom."
Aouli turned from her, shame burning through his core.
"I thought I was ready," he said.
"You thought your feeling was enough," she replied. "But feeling is the beginning, not the end."
A long silence stretched between them. The jungle crackled faintly in the distance, like a radio signal struggling to return.
"Will they survive?" Aouli asked.
"Perhaps," Elysia said. "But now their future is one of reaction, not understanding. You gave them safety—but took from them ownership."
He sank to his knees, his light low and flickering.
"I didn't mean to."
"I know," she said.
And then she was gone again—leaving him not with answers, but with silence, and the weight of a lesson he hadn't wanted to learn.