Chapter Twelve: The Price of Awakening

  The universe felt… colder.

  Even on Tartarus, where the days burned and the nights froze, this felt wrong. Something massive had shifted.

  Rizer stood in the Gaia-9 ruins, body still glowing faintly from the psionic backlash. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from aftershock. Something had awakened in him. Something that wasn’t entirely his.

  But there was no time to rest.

  Ankura was gone. For now.

  Bodies littered the collapsed corridor, some Odryix, some human. Smoke hissed through shattered beams. Kael stumbled over, half-burned, dragging a young recruit behind him who wouldn't make it through the hour.

  “Rizer,” Kael rasped. “That power, what was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Rizer said quietly. “But it wasn’t just mine.”

  He looked up to the red sky. Somewhere, his brother was hurting. Somewhere, Elias had found him.

  And the world just felt smaller because of it.

  Tartarus – Medical Wing, Hours Later

  Elias floated unconscious in a psionic stasis field, golden veins still flickering down his arms. Medics worked around the clock to keep him stable. His power was burning him up from the inside.

  Jules stood at the observation deck, watching the boy. Behind him, someone approached.

  It was Wrenna, an ex-psionic researcher turned rebel. Her face was pale. Her voice, tight.

  “If we don’t teach him to ground this energy, he’ll die.”

  “We can’t teach what we don’t understand,” Jules replied grimly. “He tapped into something ancient. Something raw.”

  She turned. “Then maybe it’s time we visit the ones who do understand.”

  Jules frowned. “You mean the Earth survivors?”

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  “No,” Wrenna said. “I mean the psionic monks. The ones who survived the Great Purge. They live in the stone valleys outside Tartarus’ northern shadow. They warned us years ago. We didn’t listen.”

  Jules cursed under his breath. “Then it’s time we do.”

  Earth – Delta-37 Underground Rebellion

  Adelpha Rae had rarely allowed herself to cry.

  But tonight, she did.

  News had just arrived through a secret transmission, a young scout named Deccan Vale, who had infiltrated an Odryix garrison in Paris, was gone. Tortured. Killed. His last message was intercepted halfway through, just enough to learn one word.

  “Eclipse.”

  Nobody knew what it meant, but it haunted her.

  His death wasn’t just tragic, it meant the enemy knew humans were organizing again. They were watching. And they’d found something worth silencing.

  Adelpha stood before her people in the heart of the root-lit cavern. Above them, vines and strange psionic flowers bloomed unnaturally in the absence of light. The Earth itself was beginning to respond to the reawakening.

  She raised Deccan’s old jacket and nailed it to the tree they called the Soul Root—a living thing now infused with the memories of fallen rebels.

  “We bleed now so the future won't,” she said. “And we don’t stop—not until we rip those bastards from our sky.”

  In the crowd, one child whispered to another.

  “I heard he left a message.”

  “Yeah? What did it say?”

  They leaned close.

  “Rizer’s alive.”

  Odryix War Council – Orbiting Earth, aboard The Maw

  Ankura stood alone before the others, Zuron at his side, silent and twitching with fury. Across the curved obsidian chamber, Garter’s holographic form loomed high.

  “You had him,” Garter hissed. “The human with the blood of the Ancients. You tasted his power. And yet you failed.”

  “I did not fail,” Ankura replied coolly. “I provoked the storm.”

  “The storm may drown you,” Garter snapped.

  Zuron growled. “Let me hunt them. Let me crush the Tartarus worms and burn the tunnels of Earth myself.”

  “No,” Ankura said, eyes burning. “We wait. The more he draws power, the more he feeds us without realising. Every psionic pulse awakens something older… and when it’s fully awakened?”

  He smiled.

  “We don’t need to hunt. The boy will come to us.”

  Tartarus – Training Grounds (Days Later)

  Rizer stood before a circle of psionic monks, their robes whipping in the wind, their faces covered in obsidian masks. These were the Korythians, survivors of the First War, keepers of the true human legacy.

  “Will I lose myself in this power?” Rizer asked.

  One of them stepped forward. “Only if you believe it belongs to you.”

  Another added, “You are not using the power. You are becoming the bridge. You are the fracture in fate that lets the old blood return.”

  Rizer inhaled sharply.

  Somewhere far away, Elias stirred. His hand gripped the edge of the medical bed.

  His eyes opened, fully golden.

  Final Scene – Gaia-9

  A scout sprinted into the old ruins. Breathless. Panicked.

  “Sir! Commander! We found something beneath the south quadrant—”

  Kael turned. “What?”

  The scout gulped. “It’s a vault. A sealed one. Human-made. Still active. And it’s… it’s humming.”

  A long silence.

  Kael nodded slowly. “Then let’s open it.”