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Chapter 12 - Door of Light

The passage shimmered before Aiden like a veil caught between waking and sleep. It gave no hint of depth, no sense of what lay beyond, only a soft, pulsing glow that drew him closer. When he stepped through, the ground dissolved beneath him. Weight, sound, even breath, gone.

He was neither falling nor floating. The corridor unfolded around him, a river of light bending through an endless void. Shadows formed and dissolved in the current, each carrying fragments of something once alive. He reached toward them, and visions opened like petals.

The first was of a city unlike any he had seen, radiant and alive, built from crystal and song. Its people moved with purpose, their bodies half-light, half-flesh. They sang to the stones, shaping them, building towers that pulsed with warmth. The air itself glowed, alive with their harmony.

They were creators, architects of the Dominion.

He watched as they gathered at the heart of their world, a council of luminous figures around a vast core of liquid light. Their faces flickered with worry. The world outside their crystal paradise was dying. Stars dimmed. The rivers turned to dust. They had built this sanctuary as a refuge, a way to preserve their knowledge, their essence, their very souls.

"We will not end," said one, her voice like the chiming of glass. "We will transform."

"And if we lose ourselves?" another asked.

"Then let memory keep what flesh cannot."

They touched the core together. A wave of light spread outward, swallowing everything, the city, the sky, even the ground beneath their feet. Their bodies disintegrated into strands of radiance, drawn into the crystal heart.

When the light faded, the world was gone. In its place stood the Dominion, perfect, eternal, silent.

But as Aiden watched, he saw what they could not: how their creation began to twist. The Dominion was not life preserved, it was life suspended, caught between existence and erasure. The souls within it did not rest. They repeated their final moments, fragments of thought drifting endlessly.

The light around him dimmed. The river slowed, and the visions blurred. He reached for one of the fading shapes—a child holding a shard of crystal, staring at her dissolving reflection.

"Why did you stay?" he whispered.

The girl's image shuddered. Her mouth moved, but the sound came not from her, it came from everywhere, woven through the current itself. "Because someone must remember."

The light tore apart.

Aiden staggered forward and found himself standing on solid ground again, though the air was still thick with luminescence. The corridor had ended in a vast chamber filled with floating shards of crystal, each one humming faintly. Within them, he saw faces, frozen expressions of awe, fear, resignation.

He reached out to one. The surface rippled, and a whisper brushed against his thoughts. We made the world eternal. We forgot that eternity is another word for stillness.

Aiden's chest tightened. These weren't ghosts. They were echoes of consciousness, trapped in their own creation, each shard a prison of light.

He turned in a slow circle, taking in the endless array. Thousands, maybe millions. The Dominion wasn't a monument, it was a graveyard that refused to decay.

He closed his eyes. For a moment he felt them all at once, a tide of longing and regret pressing against his mind. He could barely breathe beneath it.

Then, as if sensing his struggle, one shard flared brighter than the rest. The light coalesced into a figure, the same woman who had spoken before the council. Her form flickered, half-real, half-memory.

"Who are you?" Aiden asked.

The woman tilted her head. "You hear us."

"I see you," he said quietly.

"You carry the mark. The Dominion remembers you, as it remembers all who seek its heart."

"I'm not one of you."

"Not yet."

The words chilled him. The woman's expression softened, almost human. "Do not fear the light, traveler. It only takes what it is given."

"What was it given?"

"Our hope," she said simply. "And our despair. We built the Dominion to keep both safe. But hope rotted without change, and despair learned to sing."

The vision trembled. Cracks ran through the shard. She reached toward him. "If you would end this silence, you must find the source, the First Light. It sleeps beneath what remains of us."

Before he could speak, the shard shattered, scattering light across the chamber. The fragments rose, swirling upward like sparks in a dying fire, and the room fell into darkness.

Only one faint glow remained, the doorway behind him, now pulsing with a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat.

Aiden exhaled and whispered to the emptiness, "I'll find it."

The corridor of light stirred once more, opening a new path ahead. He stepped forward. The glow followed, swallowing him whole.

Far above, in Ares, the storm split the sky.

Lira gripped the railing of the observation deck as the lightning turned white for a heartbeat, so bright it painted the ruins in ghostlight. Every relic sensor screamed at once. The Dominion's energy signature spiked, then steadied.

"What the hell was that?" someone shouted.

She didn't answer. Her eyes were locked on the heart of the city, where a column of faint luminescence now reached toward the clouds. It flickered once, then vanished.

Something deep within her stirred, a feeling like grief for something she couldn't name.

"Aiden…" she murmured.

The storm quieted, leaving only the sound of the wind.

And beneath Ares, the Dominion dreamed again.

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