When he was done, Zavier ascended the steps to the crucible, shouldering through the entrance to present the final articles with a solemn, old-fashioned bow.
‘Try them on,’ he invited.
Sheba took the cold, crystalline visor and pressed it to her face.
Her tactile connection to her own limbs vanished, and her vision shifted into a spectrum of pure psionic energy.
She reached out to touch her arm, but her fingers passed through a void where her flesh should be.
‘In essence, you’ve become an apparition, a whisper of existence invisible to the physical world,’ Zavier rasped from somewhere close by.
‘Idan?’ she whispered, her voice sounding as if it traveled through miles of pressurized water.
‘Here,salkia,’ he growled.
She sensed a phantom pressure as he laced his hands with hers.
He spoke into her mind now, bypassing her neural node, and again she shivered at the invasive, intimate experience.
‘This is wild,’ she muttered, her senses struggling to process the lack of mass.
‘Tis,’ Idan agreed.
The sensation was disorienting, a hollow lightness that made her feel like a stray thought.
She took a few tentative steps, getting used to the experience of gliding through space without the resistance of friction.
After several minutes of practice, Zavier’s rasp broke through their mental link.
‘If you are now more comfortable with the test, remove them, and we will secure them for transport.’
They did as asked, the world snapping back into solid, heavy reality.
Zavier handed the masks to Veruth.
The succubus took them back to the forge to pack them into velvet-lined cases.
‘Now, for the location of the crematorium,’ Zavier rasped.
A virtual console glimmered into being, and his fingers danced across a holo interface to summon a high-resolution projection of their destination.
‘Remember this; the sepulcher mausoleum is not a mere tomb; it is a monument to the ultimate betrayal, a heavenly coup,’ Zavier stated.
He swiped his hand, summoning a holo map of the Ophiuchus nebula, a violent, turbulent nursery of celestial gases.
Nestled within it was a boiling, raging scarlet mini planet. ‘That’s Ignis IV. Your endpoint.’
The vision dipped below the atmosphere, punching past violet and ocher clouds, to reveal a structure on the surface of the churning volcanic globe.
It was a brutalist cathedral of floating basalt and iron, anchored by gravitational tethers.
‘A warning: the Old King does not rest in a state of grace,’ Zavier continued, his scarred jaw tightening. ‘He endures an existence of eternal, agonizing un-death. He is the engine that keeps the chains powered, and they cannot be unwound from him unless -.’
‘Unless what?’ Molan murmured.
Zavier held up a finger to stop the Rider and moved to a secure vault in the wall, which he unlocked.
He retrieved a star-gem dagger.
