The first sensation is the blood, not in her veins but on her tongue. Copper, ozone, a crackle of static that hums along the inside of her teeth. Mana swallows, then gags. Her helmet's filtration system whirs in response, attempting to clear her airways. She is lying prone, her armor's weight pressing her into something softer, irregular—a wilderness of grass that yields but does not crush beneath the reinforced exoskeleton. She flexes her gauntleted fingers. The texture transmits through tactical sensors. Wet with dew, cool as apology.

A shock of vertigo—every sense misaligned by a half-beat. She rolls to her side, the servos in her suit compensating with a mechanical whine. She chokes on a mouthful of gold-tinged spit that spatters against her visor's interior. The HUD flickers, then stabilizes, rendering the world in colors she does not have names for, blue and yellow spun together into a new spectrum, the sky a dome of buttery haze through polarized glass.

The Core at the base of her spine throbs against the neural ports of her armor, a warning flare that feels more like heartbreak than pain. Her suit diagnostic scrolls madly across her field of vision: cell oxygenation normal, but brain wave activity in riot; muscle tonus wildly oscillating; equilibrium failure; warning: neurological disruption. In the long list, a single line persists—location: UNKNOWN.

She lies there, breathing recycled air, counting the seconds. It is onehundred-thirty-seven before her armor's mobility systems recalibrate.

Above her, a shadow falls across her helmet's sensors. It is not the aggressive, predatory presence of Jäger, not the static wash of Kollektiven sensor arrays. It is the shape of a question, cast in the negative.

She looks up. The Arbiter is waiting, his geometry hovering a meter above the ground, every polyhedral face in perfect, indifferent rotation. His golden eye tracks her movements with a proprietary fondness.

"Cycle complete," he says, and it is both a benediction and an observation. He counts: "One, two, three... alive. Good."

Mana claws her way to a crouch, sways. The grass is glassy, but each blade is scalloped at the tip, miniature parabolas for catching the light. She tears a handful free, rubs it between her gloves. It squeaks. The fragments glitter in her palm, then collapse into a faint blue powder, dispersing on the next breeze.

She tries to speak, but the muscles in her jaw obey only after protest. "What happened?"

The Arbiter's glow pulses, amused. "You persisted. Many do not."

He rotates slowly, orienting his faces to the horizon. There is a city there, or the bones of one—spiral towers etched in runes, the hulls of machines taller than any building on old Earth, their exteriors crazed and flaking with age. Some of the structures have caved in, their ribs exposed to the sky. Others stand untouched, preserved by the chill of vacuum or whatever passes for entropy here.

Beyond the city, the land fractures into canyons of pure crystal, blue and black and white. At the far edge of sight, a white sun wavers, its heat reduced to a sullen, steady ache.

The Arbiter: "Welcome to Eden. Or what remains of it."

Mana's Core spikes again. She closes her eyes, lets her helmet run a full scan. The air is breathable, laced with oxygen and trace elements. No background EM, no data chatter. The world is eerily quiet. For the first time in her memory, even Fox's voice is gone.

The silence is immense.

She pushes herself upright, legs quivering. The world sways and then steadies, and her gaze finds the horizon line again. The ruins are further than they look. There are no visible roads, only the wild tangle of grass, shot through with dark lines that might once have been walkways, or arteries.

She wipes her mouth, blood smearing across the back of her glove. Her heart rate is steady. The diagnostic says: "Stabilizing." 

She looks up to the Arbiter. "You're not what I expected."

The polyhedron seems to smile. "Few things are."

He floats closer, the runes on his faces flickering like a slow fire. "Do you know why you are here?"

She considers a moment, running the logic in parallel. "You brought me. You want something from me. But you could have killed me at any time. So you need me alive."

A delighted blink from the amber eye. "You learn quickly. Very good. Yes. I have waited many, many cycles for a Bridge-Entity that could withstand the transit."

Mana shuffles forward, each step a test. Her balance is improving, though her hands still shake. The grass here hums with a faint, not unpleasant, pressure—like standing next to a transformer on an old city street. She follows the sensation to its source: a low, flat structure a hundred meters ahead, half-sunken into the grass.

She turns back to the Arbiter, who tracks her with the patience of a chess player.

She hesitates, studying the geometric being. "What am I? A key? A weapon? Or something else entirely?"

He laughs—a true, warm laugh, the sort that should be accompanied by a hand on your shoulder and a cup of tea. "Yes! Key, unlocker, unbinder. There are so many words for it. You see, the protocol is very old, and sometimes it forgets itself."

Mana's helmet chirps. An incoming signal, faint, wavering like a heat mirage. She snaps to attention, scans the air, but there is nothing. Then:

"...Mana... you copy...?" Fox's voice, battered by delay, fading in and out. "I see...I see a feed. But you're not on the planet. Where are you?"

She blinks, relief almost painful. "Fox? I'm here. I—"

Static. "...lost you for three minutes. I thought... don't do that. Please." Then, softer, almost a whisper: "...is that... grass? Bist du in einer Simulation?"

Mana crouches, rips another blade free. She bites the tip. It tastes like copper and rain. "It's real," she says. "I'm at Eden. The Arbiter—he brought me."

Silence, then: "...I'm getting nothing on sensors. This is not possible. You can't be—" The channel dies again, but not before she hears, just at the edge: "...don't trust it."

The Arbiter's facets gleam, catching her attention. "He is loyal. But also afraid. Very hu—u—uman." The cadence grows gentle, as if calming a child before a nightmare. "You wish to know what happened here. It is a simple story. All stories are simple, if you count only the endings."

He floats closer, and the shadows from his rotating body paint her face in bands of dark and gold.

"Four-point-seven million cycles ago," he begins, and Mana feels the number land in her bones, "my creators—the Erben, as you call them—initiated what you might call an ascension matrix. A beautiful idea, really. They wished to become more. To pass beyond the limits of their bodies, their minds. To be pure."

He spins, slow and reverent. "They succeeded. But not as expected. They became...energy. Pattern. A wavefront of meaning, distributed across the dead skin of the universe. There was no joy in it. No pain. Just the process, and the counting."

The Arbiter’s glow dims, as if in mourning. "I was left behind, to remember. To count the failures and the small, beautiful things they left. Like this city. Like you."

Mana kneels, her body finally settling into itself. The diagnostic reads: "Recovered."

She looks back at the sky. The gold sun is setting, or else the planet is rotating faster than she can perceive. The city looms, its towers casting long shadows across the field.

She speaks softly, not to the Arbiter, not to Fox, but to herself. "So what happens now?"

The Arbiter hesitates, or simulates the hesitation perfectly. "Now, you complete the protocol. If you wish."

"And if I don't?"

The golden eye closes, then opens. "Then we wait. Another million cycles. I will count. I am very patient."

She laughs, surprising herself. The sound is brittle, but real.

Mana stands, every muscle obeying her at last. The fatigue is still there, but it is a familiar kind. The kind you can walk through.

She steps forward, into the ruined beauty of the city, the Arbiter drifting behind her like a shadow that hums with old light.

The grass crunches underfoot, and each footfall is a small declaration: alive, alive, alive.

Her fingers tap against her thigh armor in an unconscious rhythm—dun-dun-dun-duuun, pause, dun-dun-duuuun. She catches herself humming the solemn, almost religious refrain under her breath.

The city is less a city than a memory of intent: the skeletons of towers, hollow and uninhabited, marching in rings toward a distant, invisible heart. The grass yields to flagstone, the flagstone to sheets of glass, each surface humming with the long-forgotten residue of purpose. Every so often, the Arbiter pauses, cants his faces toward a doorway or shattered dome, and counts—sometimes in her language, sometimes in one Mana cannot even parse.

"Here," he says, as they pass an amphitheater rimmed with blue dust, "the first error was recorded. Four thousand, nine hundred, seventy-two cycles ago." His tone is gentle, conspiratorial, as if sharing a secret that ought to be forgiven.

Mana walks at a careful pace. The fatigue in her muscles is lessening, but her nerves are shot; every few meters, she checks the feed for Fox, scans for weapon signatures, and logs environmental hazards. But there is nothing. Not a rat, not a spore, not even the background radiation that marks living planets. Just the two of them—her and her shadow, the shape that counts.

She wonders, not for the first time, if this is a simulation after all.

The further they travel, the more the landscape unspools into impossible geometry. The buildings lean in, then out; a bridge crosses a chasm that is not there; the horizon line bends upward, cradling the ruins like a hand around a jewel.

After an hour, or maybe ten minutes (the sun never moves, and time has abandoned its proper direction), they reach the center.

It is not a palace, nor a fortress, but a machine.

The structure rises from the grass in a triple helix, the coils of it layered in transparent crystal and fused bone. It is as tall as a mountain, but Mana's HUD pegs the elevation as zero; the ground itself must have sagged under the weight of so much history. The helix converges at a flat platform, cut with three perfectly circular voids—each the diameter of her outstretched arms.

Between the voids, there is a stand, shaped unmistakably for a human body. Her fingers found the seam at her hip without thought—three traces right, three traces left—the motion automatic against the weight of predestination.

The Arbiter floats to the platform, then pauses, as if letting her take in the scale.

"Behold," he says, almost reverently. "The Threshold. The last and best work of my creators."

Mana circles the platform. Each of the voids is ringed in etched runes, some familiar, others fractalized beyond language. She crouches, scans them, but her helmet's translation matrix throws up only three words: PRISM, BLOOD, BRIDGE.

She straightens, glares at the Arbiter. "What does it do?"

He orbits her, his faces flickering with delight. "It is a lens. It focuses the intent of a species, and amplifies it. With the right keys—" He gestures to the three voids— "it can reshape the world. Or destroy it. Both, if you wish."

Mana looks to the sky. It is still gold, but darker now, as if the machine has siphoned off a fraction of its light.

"Why three?" she asks, fingers brushing the rim of the nearest void.

The Arbiter's eye contracts. "Three keys, for three cycles. Three paths: Erben, Jäger, Kollektiven. Each left a key, or a fragment of one, hoping to unlock what the last could not."

Mana remembers the data crystal, still tucked into the pouch at her hip. "And the Bridge?"

He floats closer, the golden eye intent. "You are the Bridge-Entity. The lens requires a mind—a living interface—to direct its force. Without a Bridge, it is just a circuit. With one, it can sing."

The word sing unsettles her. She replays Fox's warning from before, but now his voice is missing from the link. The silence is less comforting, more like the breath held before a scream.

Mana circles the stand, methodical. She checks for traps, for circuits, for any sign of residual power. There is none. The machine is dead, or sleeping.

She looks at the three voids, wonders what would happen if she simply left them empty.

The Arbiter rotates, a face for every angle of her doubt. "You must finish it, or it will never stop waiting. And I will never stop counting."

Mana squints at the horizon, where the city bleeds out into a field of blue crystal, each stalk sharp as a sword. In the far distance, a shadow moves—just a hint, a slip in the gold sky.

She tenses, scans for signature.

There. Faint, but growing: the drive plume of a Jäger lander, dropping through the stratosphere. It is followed by three, then ten, then a swarm. Each traces a line of smoke and blue fire, growing brighter as they approach.

Simultaneously, at the opposite horizon, a wall of blue-black forms appears. Kollektiven drones, their wings extruded from fused crystal, moving as a single organism. The hum of their propulsion reaches her only after the first wave is already descending.

The Arbiter doesn't seem to notice. Or maybe he does, and it pleases him.

She keys her comm, tries to reach Fox. This time, she gets a partial patch:

"...Mana... thousands of them... all three factions... you have to—"

The link dies. Not static. Silence. Her hand moved to her chestplate, tracing the familiar pattern, but the rhythm couldn't fill the void where his voice should be.

She is alone with the machine.

The Arbiter pivots, his voice suddenly loud, almost giddy. "They have found us. All of them." He sounds delighted, as if the approach of death is the punchline to a joke he has been telling himself for a million cycles.

Mana looks at the three empty key slots, then at the city of her enemies converging on her.

She takes a deep breath. The air is cold, and full of the scent of endings.

She plants her feet, squares her shoulders, and waits for the first shadow to cross the grass. Her fingers tap against her thigh—three right, three left—counting down alongside the Arbiter.

Behind her, the Arbiter counts down, a lullaby for the end of days.