Back in the safety of Whisperwood's shrine chamber, the keystone gem felt heavier than stone.
Elder Gareth watched, his face grave, as Echo placed the gem into the empty socket of the Inter-World Arch.
For a moment, nothing.
Then, the runes carved into the arch blazed to life — not with a single color, but with a cascading spectrum that hurt the eyes. The air hummed, thickened.
"It's working," Mira breathed.
But instead of showing a portal, the arch became a window. A memory.
An entity of pure, structured light — humanoid but vast, its form woven from galactic filaments — fought a shifting, amoebic shadow that consumed the light around it. They clashed in a silent void, their conflict sending ripples through the fabric of reality.
The light-being was losing. A spear of darkness pierced its core. With a final, soundless pulse of will, it tore a fragment of its own consciousness free and sealed it into a crystalline gem — the keystone — before its form unraveled into fading luminescence.
The vision vanished.
The arch's light stabilized, now showing three distinct, swirling vistas:
1. A lush, magic-rich world with floating islands — Eldria.
2. A shattered tech-world, its skyline dominated by broken spires under a perpetual twilight, veins of sickly purple energy crawling across its surface.
3. A nebulous, ever-shifting hub of interconnected platforms and doors suspended in a star-dotted void — The Crossroads.
Mira gasped, clutching her chest. Her eyes were fixed on the Crossroads image. "It… calls to me. My blood… it sings."
Echo's Error-Sight analyzed the connections. The shrine was active, but the portal was unstable. Flickering. "It needs more power. Either more keystones… or much higher cultivation from the one activating it."
Elder Gareth placed a hand on the cold stone of the arch. "The light-being in the memory… it was a Keeper. A guardian of balance. This gem holds its last thought. Its warning."
"Warning about what?" Leyla asked, her new claws still gently extending and retracting as if of their own accord.
"About the thing that killed it," Echo said quietly. The shifting shadow in the memory… it felt like the opposite of the ordered light. It felt like chaos. Consumption. Corruption. "We're not just opening a door. We're stepping into a war."
Mira touched the arch, her fingers tracing the rune for the Crossroads. "This is where we need to go. Not just for a way home for you, Echo. But for answers. I feel it."
Echo nodded. The Crossroads. The neutral hub. Where the being who knew about dead multiverses and anomalies might be found.
Where he might learn what he truly was.