Beneath the sands of Jordan's eastern desert, buried beneath centuries of shifting dunes and silence, lay the Hollowed City—once a stronghold of the ancient Archaics, now reduced to fossilized stone and forgotten warnings. What had once been a marvel of architecture and consciousness was now a tomb. And Aiden would be its next guest.
They arrived at dawn.
The sun cast a bleeding hue across the sand, painting the horizon in violent pinks and golds. Isaiah, Sofia, Felix, and Harrow remained behind at a mobile command station camouflaged with reflective plating. Aiden descended alone, his shard embedded in a bronze medallion strapped over his heart.
The city opened for him.
The descent was a spiral. Stone staircases wound deep into the crust, through catacombs layered with murals too worn to read. But Aiden recognized the stories—not with his eyes, but his memory. Or someone else's.
The first chamber pulsed with violet light.
Aiden stepped through the archway and the city breathed. Walls shifted. Doors opened. He did not walk through corridors—he was led.
With every step, voices whispered from the stone:
"He returns." "He bleeds stars." "He remembers."
The city was awake.
It tested his truth.
In the second chamber, he found mirrors—hundreds of them—each showing a different Aiden. Some scarred, some burned, some monstrous. One showed him as a child curled in a dark corner, sobbing.
He walked past them without speaking.
In the third chamber, fire.
Not literal, but emotional—images of his worst failures, projected in flame. The day he left his sister to die. The time he turned away from Isaiah's call. The moment he decided the mission was more important than the people behind it.
The fire demanded guilt. It offered no forgiveness.
"I know who I was," Aiden said. "But I choose who I become."
The flames bowed low and parted.
He reached the heart of the Hollowed City on the fourth day.
At the center was a throne made of light. Not solid, not entirely there. Hovering. Waiting. Above it, a canopy of symbols rotated, flashing ancient language into the air.
Aiden knelt.
He placed the shard in the throne's core.
Nothing happened.
Then everything did.
The room collapsed inward. Time unraveled. Aiden floated in a sphere of memory and pain, surrounded by versions of himself—those who chose revenge, those who broke, those who surrendered to the Whisperers' call.
But none had made it here.
"You are the sum of your failures," a voice said. Not cruel. Just true.
"I am the choice that follows," Aiden answered.
He reached into the light. And the city sang.
He emerged two days later, gaunt but smiling. The sandstorm that had raged outside for a week broke the moment he stepped out of the crevice.
Felix helped him into the rover.
"Three down," Aiden whispered.
Isaiah nodded. "Two more. And then… they come."