As K'Tharion's mental plane's obsidian spires fell behind him, Zephyros again stood within the churning black winds of the Void, but this time with a clearness of mind which had not before existed. The Trial of the Thought Titan had written upon him new ideas of memory, self-deception, and destiny. But the Void never tired, nor did he.
The Nexus Map, a tapestry of starlight and thrumming with echoes of long-forgotten voices, flared in a mental vision. A new beat had begun to throb within it a slow, unearthly throb like the beat of a furnace heart.
"Velmoria…" he gasped.
This was the next domain. A name that once sang across the mouths of dying worlds and vanished civilizations.
He walked through the fissure that opened up in front of him. This one was bleeding red light.
The Void warped.
No longer a land of silence and darkness, Velmoria welcomed Zephyros with waves of heat, the sky a crucible of molten bronze, rivers of fiery crimson stone that flowed through mountainous scars. Black iron strongholds hung suspended in midair, anchored to the earth by chains of living fire. This world breathed. It lived. Its very heartbeat could be felt in the earth beneath his feet.
The air hummed with the thrum of feeling.anger, sorrow, love, and madness bleeding into each other. Every element of Velmoria was filled with emotion raw and unbridled, molded into shape by something that had slipped out of control.
In the distance, an obsidian giant walked by a volcano of fiery hearts. Its chest creaked open with each breath to show a furnace within white-hot and throbbing. That was her. Velmoria the Heart-Furnace Titan, the Guardian of Unbound Feelings.
But she wasn't alone.
A ring of smaller Voidborn, human in shape but composed of flame, glass, and feeling, danced around her edge like priests conducting a ritual. Their incantation hummed into the earth, altering the vibration of thought itself. Zephyros sensed his memories stirring moments of suffering, flashes of lost happiness, anger at deception, and longing from days long past.
He tightened his fists. His own mental armor, tempered by K'Tharion's test, stood firm.
And then the voice.
You possess vacant power, Crownless One. Let us find out what happens when we shatter it?
The wind reversed. The sky churned. The world narrowed, and Velmoria moved.
With a step that curved mountains and toppled a castle in the air, she stood before him. Her furnace-heart glowed like a dying sun, and her voice did not come from her lips but from the air itself, resonating from his memory, his guilt, his broken dreams.
"Would you command the Void, but deny your own depths? Have you loved and seen it consume you? Wept for something lost that never was? I shall not seek your strength, Zephyros. I shall command your truth."
And then the trial began.
She began with a fire not out there but in.
Zephyros was thrust into a crucible of emotion and thoughtvisions, as real as life, devouring him.
He stood in his old world.
The broken world. The place he never spoke of.
The sky was dark, but not dark from darkness from smoke. From ash. He stood on a ruined city that bore his name in a tongue that only the dead still remembered now.
He spotted her.
Aria.
Silvery storm hair, eyes like the final sunrise before the world ends.
She reached for him.
And then was consumed in a fire of betrayal his own betrayal. Words he once spoke echoed in reverse. A promise broken for the sake of a greater cause.
The guilt surged, molten.
He staggered.
And then there were others. Friends. Enemies. The boy who had bled for him. The mentor who had died cursing his name. The Void did not need demons; it had his past.
But Zephyros didn't fall.
Not this time.
His breathing became even. He moved, past the illusions, past the flames. "These are wounds I have inflicted on my own skin," he said. "I do not regret them but I will not deny them."
Velmoria roared. The volcano of burning hearts erupted. The colossus launched at him.
Her hands, both the size of a citadel, slammed at him like the rage of a star imploding.
Zephyros spread his arms wide. On his right, the Mark of K'Tharion burned, and on his left, a sphere of Voidstone coalesced a crystallization of willpower crafted from the endowment of the Thought-Titan.
They collided.
A blast tore the ground. The psychic energy shattered glass-temples nearby. But Velmoria wasn't done.
She opened her chest.
The furnace-heart roared, and a wave of raw emotion a love lost to the ages struck Zephyros like a doomsday confession. Not fire. Memory. The sorrow of a billion worlds weeping over children they never knew. Overwhelming.
Zephyros shouted not in agony, but in outrage.
You believe that I am incapable of feeling?" he bellowed into the whiteout storm. "I have buried galaxies in silence. I have preferred the Void to Heaven not because I am hollow, but because I am full."
With that, he used the Void as an emotional conductor, and not as a weapon.
He embraced the sensation Velmoria imparted to him not to destroy it, but to understand it.
The orb in his palm changed melted, sharpened, turned musical. A melody and a weapon.
He strode forward and drove the blade into Velmoria's furnace-heart.
Not to kill.
But to synchronize.
The ensuing silence was oppressive.
Velmoria stiffened.
The fire never lost its spark, but it came to rest like music reaching its final note.
Her obsidian head bent. The glass-priests dropped to their knees.
Zephyros stood tall, panting hard, body scorched by memory and fire.
"You succeeded," she said to him, her voice not any longer a storm but a requiem. "You didn't struggle to hold back your emotion. You utilized it. Let it define you. Let it hurt you."
Her eyes like cracked rubies glowed.
"I confer upon you the Sigil of the Heart-Furnace. You now have mastery of the fire of the Void. Use it… or burn by it."
She reached into her breast and drew out an ember from her heart. It drifted toward Zephyros and seared into his chest. He experienced heat not bodily, but spiritual. Love, anger, loss all distilled into a single ember of strength.
Behind her, the sky parted, revealing a new path through the Void.
Three radiant sigils now illuminated on his body.
Three Trials survived.
More awaited.
Far in the distance, far even from Velmoria's realm, something ancient stirred. It watched.
It whispered.
"He grows. He gathers. The Crownless dares shape the unshapable."
A name forgotten echoed in the most distant corner of the Void.
Not Zephyros.
Not the King.
But something else. A title sealed behind time and truth. And soon, it would awaken.