He descended inward — not with force, but with the practiced breath of stillness, like a diver slipping beneath the surface of memory and meaning.
The inner world greeted him.
A vast sea of light and silence, where threads of his affinities glowed in slow constellations. Here, the layers of his soul stretched like a dreamscape — ordered, contained.
Until now.
There — at the deepest edge — something pulsed.
Five pulses.
Old. Familiar. But stirred.
Ethan approached them. Slowly.
Each beat held weight.
Galeno was first — the Divine Tortoise — his vast presence like a mountain beneath the ocean, unmoving but suddenly restless. Cracks of golden light rippled across the inner realm floor as his shell shifted.
He was awakening.
Malverick came next, suspended above an alchemical circle etched in ever-morphing sigils. His gargoyle-like form curled like a statue half-broken, half-born — grey skin twitching, fingers grasping for the substance of a realm that no longer restrained him.
