The first sound Aiden noticed was not a sound at all, it was the absence of one. Even his breathing felt muted as though the air refused to carry it. The corridor that had led him from the Core narrowed into a bridge of glass-like stone, suspended over an abyss that shimmered faintly with colorless light. Beyond it waited the city.
He stepped forward. The echo of his boot vanished before it could form, swallowed whole by the quiet. He had thought the Dominion vast before, but this… this was a hollow world inside the world. Towering spires stretched upward like the bones of giants, translucent and ghost-pale. Streets wound through them in patterns too precise to be chance, converging around a great circular plaza where a crystal monolith rose from the center like a broken tooth.
Aiden paused at the bridge's end. The wind or what might once have been wind, moved faintly through the structures, stirring motes of dust that glowed with internal light. Each one drifted lazily, refusing to settle, as if time itself had been slowed to a crawl.
He descended into the city.
Every building he passed was carved from the same translucent stone, etched with faint sigils that no longer glowed. Doorways gaped open onto rooms filled with frozen shapes, furniture, tools, statues that looked uncomfortably human. Once, he might have mistaken them for sculptures. Now, in the stillness, he wasn't sure they hadn't once been people.
A whisper touched his mind, too faint to be words. He stopped, waiting, but nothing followed. Only the silence, heavy and wrong.
At the city's heart the monolith waited. It was taller than any tower, cracked through the middle, its surface lined with runes that flickered weakly as he approached. He reached out. The crystal pulsed once beneath his fingers, cold as death.
Images burst behind his eyes, flashes of a civilization built on radiance, of beings walking among rivers of light, of their downfall when that light turned inward and devoured them. The echoes of their lives had not gone, only calcified, turned into the still air and hollow shells that surrounded him. The Dominion was not empty. It was full, overflowing with the weight of what it remembered.
The vision broke, leaving Aiden gasping. The monolith's pulse dimmed to a steady throb, as if aware of him now.
He heard a faint crackling behind him. The air shifted. For a heartbeat he thought the city was breathing.
Then everything went still again.
He whispered into the silence, "What are you showing me?"
The monolith answered only with another weak pulse, this time synchronized with his heartbeat.
He stepped back and looked up at the towers once more. The unease deepened. Each structure seemed to lean slightly inward, as though listening, or watching. He could feel their weight pressing down, not physically, but in the space behind his thoughts.
Far above, in the waking world of Ares, Lira stood on the observation deck of the northern fortress. The storm had not lifted in three days. Crimson lightning crawled across the clouds like veins, illuminating the shattered skyline. Raiders patrolled the walls below her, their armor dim against the gloom.
Reports kept coming in: new fissures opening near the core district, strange static interfering with relic sensors. She had sent teams, but none had returned with answers. The Dominion's activity was bleeding through again.
She touched the comm-crystal at her wrist. "Status on Gatepoint Seven?"
A voice crackled back. "Unstable readings, Captain. It's like the energy's… remembering something."
Remembering. The word stuck in her mind. Somewhere beneath all this ruin, Aiden was walking through memories that didn't belong to him. She could feel it, the faint vibration under her skin whenever the Dominion stirred.
Back in the dead city, Aiden wandered deeper. His steps carried him toward the smaller streets that spiraled away from the plaza. There were carvings on the walls, rows of symbols depicting figures raising crystals toward a sun that no longer shone. Beneath them, smaller figures bowed, their faces indistinct.
He touched one of the carvings. It crumbled instantly, turning to dust. Beneath the dust lay another layer of markings, older and simpler: a single circle with a jagged line through it, the same emblem that had burned itself into his mind since entering the Core.
The Architect's voice echoed faintly from memory: Every world leaves an imprint. The Dominion remembers the first fracture.
He looked around. Everywhere he turned, that emblem repeated. On doorways, on pillars, even on the cracked surface of the monolith behind him. Whatever had happened here had begun with that mark.
Aiden felt something shift within him, not power exactly but awareness. The Dominion had chosen him to see this. Or perhaps it was using him to remember itself.
A sound cut through the silence, soft, deliberate, like a footstep on glass.
He turned sharply, but there was no one there. Only the drifting motes, brighter now, gathering near the plaza. They began to spiral upward, forming faint outlines, tall, humanoid shapes that flickered and dissolved before they could take form.
"Echoes," he whispered.
The shapes stilled, as if they'd heard him. For a moment he thought they would vanish again. Instead, one turned its faceless head toward him. Light spilled from the empty space where eyes should have been.
Aiden's pulse quickened. The monolith pulsed in answer. Across the city the towers began to glow faintly, runes reigniting after millennia of dark. The air trembled with a low hum.
The Dominion was waking.
Aiden took a step back, shielding his eyes from the rising brightness. The echoes lifted their heads in unison, their bodies unraveling into light that poured toward the monolith's fracture. The entire structure blazed like a second sun, then dimmed again, leaving the city once more in silence.
Only this time, the silence felt expectant.
Aiden exhaled slowly. "You wanted to be remembered," he murmured. "Now you are."
He turned toward the far end of the plaza, where a new passage had opened between the towers, a corridor that hadn't been there before. Beyond it, a faint shimmer of movement waited, almost like a door made of light.
He hesitated only a moment before stepping forward.