The world broke.
Asher fell, but there was no ground, no air—just a whirlpool of nothing that bent in impossible ways. The Architect's last test had started, but there were no rules here. No definite enemy. Only the feeling of being unspun.
Voices whispered through the dark. Some were familiar—echoes of those he had lost. Others were foreign, ancient murmurs that spoke in tongues he barely understood.
"You seek power beyond your reach."
"You are nothing but a shadow of what could have been."
"You will fail."
Asher gritted his teeth. No.
He willed his body to turn, but there was no give, no mass. His hands came apart and reformed, his own self insubstantial. The Trial was unraveling him, bit by bit.
Then, in the emptiness, someone observed him.
A presence, immense and unguessable.
A golden eye unfurled in the darkness.
"Step forward," the voice commanded. It was not the Architect—it was something earlier.
Asher struggled. Each thread of him bellowed to fight, to fight—but something whispered it would be a waste here. So, he obeyed instead.
He moved one step forward.
The nothing shifted.
Instantly, he was planted firmly on solid earth. A throne room lay ahead of him—broad, endless, unbearably stunning. The walls were lined with fiery photographs, each a disparate world. Some of them bore him triumphant. Others of them bore him vanquished.
And in the center was the thing.
Not a god. Not a man. Something between.
"You are not the first to travel this far," it said to him. "You will not be the last."
Asher's fists tightened. "Then why try me?"
"Because power must be earned. And because you still do not know what it is."
The thing waved a hand.
Asher's own skin searing with power—not his own, but all force he had ever borrowed, gained, used. The Trial was telling him what he had become.
And then it asked him another thing.
"What are you going to do with it?"
The ultimate decision was to be made.