The chamber was unlike anything they had seen inside the Temple.
No flickering torches. No ancient runes. No grotesque statues watching from the corners.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
The air hung thick, not with dust, but with a low hum like a distant vibration in the bones. At the center of the chamber floated a metallic sphere.
Perfectly smooth, almost featureless, yet strangely translucent. Within it shimmered fragments of something shifting, clouds of light or memories caught in suspension.
Altherion stepped closer, his hand twitching instinctively toward it.
"It feels..." he paused, unable to find the word. "Like it's... not here. And yet more here than we are."
Liesette, pale and trembling, didn't answer immediately. Her eyes were locked on the sphere, her breath uneven.
Something about the object whispered to her, no, not in words. In presence. A sensation crawling up the spine and rooting itself behind the eyes.
"What is this place? Why do I feel like I'm standing outside time?"
Altherion didn't respond.
His fingers reached out toward the sphere. As he drew closer, it pulsed not visually, but inwardly, like it was responding to his thoughts, to the patterns he'd unraveled in the loop.
But just before contact, he felt a sudden force jerk him back.
Liesette.
She pulled his collar with all the strength her wounded arms could manage.
A split second later, a blade whistled through the air where his neck had been sharp, swift, and merciless.
It struck the stone wall behind them with a clang, slicing clean into the rock before embedding itself with an eerie, surgical precision.
Altherion choked on his breath, stunned.
From the shadows beyond the sphere, a voice emerged.
"Well," it said, half-amused, half-disgusted. "You really are like cockroaches, aren't you? Burn them, drown them, smash them and they still keep crawling back."
The air shifted.
He stepped forward, out from the black.
Arviel.
But something about him was different this time.
The usual half-smile was there, yes, but it no longer felt lazy or playful. His presence weighed down the room. Not because of sound or motion, but because everything else seemed to freeze in reverence or fear.
His gaze swept from the embedded blade to the startled pair near the sphere.
"Didn't I just see you two bleeding out in a hallway half a loop ago?" Arviel muttered, stretching his arms overhead with exaggerated exhaustion. "And now you're here. Of course you are."
Altherion struggled to speak, but his words caught in his throat.
Arviel wasn't just a presence now, he was a force. The very air around him wavered like heat above a flame, but instead of warmth, it carried dread. Not evil. Not rage. Just... indifference so deep it felt godlike.
Liesette instinctively moved between Arviel and Altherion, her arms raised despite the shaking in her limbs.
Arviel blinked slowly. "How noble."
Then his eyes moved to the sphere.
"Ah, the infamous ornament of this accursed place," he said, walking toward it without fear. "Harmonicon of the Third Orbit... what a melodramatic name. No one who actually used it ever called it that. But names are all that remain once purpose is forgotten."
He circled it once.
"And you," he turned his gaze on Altherion, "were about to touch it. Brave. Or stupid."
"What... is it?" Altherion finally managed to ask, voice hoarse.
Arviel smirked.
"The short answer?" he said. "It's a gate that doesn't lead anywhere. A memory that remembers you. A machine that responds to your soul, not your commands."
Liesette frowned. "So... it's sentient?"
"No," Arviel said sharply. "Worse. It's curious."
He knelt beside the sphere, tracing a finger just above its surface. The air around it shimmered faintly as if even acknowledging it was enough to disturb its balance.
"It wants to see what you are when stripped of all direction. It pulls, not forward or backward but sideways."
Altherion narrowed his eyes. "Why stop me, then?"
Arviel looked over his shoulder.
"Because I'm not done watching you break yet."
And for a fleeting second, just a second, his smile faltered.
There was something else in his eyes. Not mockery. Not contempt.
Recognition?
No, not quite. But something close.
Then it was gone.
As Arviel stepped closer to the sphere, his foot came down on one of the strange floor tiles, an intricate carving, almost decorative in its placement. There was a sudden hiss beneath the stone, followed by a low rumble, like a beast awakening from ancient sleep.
The tile pulsed crimson.
Altherion's instincts screamed.
"Arviel-!"
Too late.
A section of the wall crumbled open with an unnatural groan. From its hollow depths, something emerged lurching, hissing, scraping against the stone as it pulled itself into the chamber.
A chimera.
A grotesque amalgamation of nature's mistakes: the twisted head of a goat, curling horns etched with burnt runes; the muscular body of a horse, pale and bloated like drowned meat; and behind it, two gnarled legs of a giant bird, talons clicking on stone like nails on glass.
Its eyes were all wrong.
They weren't eyes.
They were mirrors. Shimmering, silver voids that reflected nothing but dread.
"Oh, of course," Arviel muttered, voice flat with disdain. "This room would have one of these jokes."
The chimera screamed.
It pounced.
Arviel didn't even flinch.
In one smooth motion, his blade danced from its sheath like lightning and carved through the beast's head, bisecting it from crown to jaw.
Blood sprayed black, bubbling, acidic but Arviel had already stepped aside before a drop touched his coat.
Liesette gasped, instinctively ducking behind a fallen pillar.
But the moment the creature's body hit the floor, it twitched.
Then it moved.
Regrew.
Right where the goat's head had been, a new head sprouted, this time feline, sharp-toothed, fur covered in lesions. Its body mutated as well, swelling in new directions, forming wings stitched from human arms.
"No," Arviel said flatly, "you don't get to do that."
He launched himself again.
Steel clashed with bone. Flesh tore. The creature split open across the chest and again, it began to regenerate. This time, its legs became serpentine. A long tongue licked the chamber floor.
Liesette turned pale. "It's evolving."
"No, It's replacing."
Arviel moved like a storm. Not graceful. Violent.
His strikes were unrelenting, precise, inhuman in pace.
And yet-
The chimera refused to die.
Each time its pieces fell, new limbs, organs, identities emerged from the ruin. As if it was pulling from some reservoir of life forms mixing them together like discarded memories.
"This thing is just a distraction," Arviel snapped mid-swing, irritation mounting. "A dumb, writhing footnote. I've dealt with smarter fungus."
But he kept fighting, kept cutting.
His eyes never wavered, though the tension in his brow deepened.
Altherion, still wounded, had no choice but to drag Liesette behind a fractured statue, the remains of some long-forgotten deity now offering them reluctant shelter.
"We can't stay in the open, he's not watching where he swings."
"You mean he doesn't care if he kills us," Liesette muttered.
"Exactly."
They watched as Arviel cleaved through a winged form, only for it to reform with a new tail, this one made of wriggling roots that struck like whips.
The fight was endless.
And yet-
Arviel wasn't slowing down.
Not even sweating.
Not even breathing hard.
His coat was unscathed. His boots unmarked. His expression unchanged, annoyed, yes, but not weary.
This wasn't a battle to him. It was housecleaning.
But still, the chimera lived.
Not because it was stronger.
But because it couldn't be killed in the way Arviel was killing it.
"Why won't it stay dead?" Liesette whispered.
Altherion's fingers twitched.
This wasn't just a monster.
This was part of the Temple. Part of the Harmonicon. A function of the loop.
And Arviel... might be trying to cut a pattern that wasn't meant to be solved with blades.
Arviel stopped.
The echo of his footsteps vanished as if the temple itself held its breath.
His blade, slick with the remnants of something that once was, dripped with more than just blood, it wept with the sorrow of a story prematurely erased.
Before him, the chimera staggered.
Its body had now changed again. A head resembling a man's, eyes hollow and expression pleading, sat awkwardly atop the bloated form of a pale, barnacle-covered whale. Where once there had been claws, now throbbed talons made of flesh and parchment. Its wings, if they could be called that, were made of unraveling roots and ivory quills.
The beast blinked out of sync. It breathed as though it regretted each inhalation.
And yet it lived.
Altherion, barely on his feet, felt an invisible weight in the air. He couldn't name it. It wasn't magic, nor malice, but something more ancient. He could taste it in his teeth. Hear it behind his thoughts.
Arviel exhaled, his voice low and sharp.
"You're wasting my time."
He raised his sword.
The change was instant though no light shifted, and no shadow moved. It was the kind of shift one feels rather than sees, like realizing too late that one is standing at the edge of a cliff shrouded in fog.
Then, he whispered:
"Your birth was a mistake.
May reality forget you were ever a part of it."
His words were not meant for the chimera, they were commands spoken to the fabric of the world itself.
And the world listened.
The edges of the room trembled. Not visibly but conceptually. Space quivered. Time hiccuped. The walls seemed less real, like half-remembered dreams at dawn.
Oubliette Slash.
This was not a spell, nor a divine judgment. It was a declaration: a rift torn into the foundation of existence. Anything touched by the strike would not merely die, but be revoked. Like a sentence never spoken. Like a name never given. Like a light that never knew flame.
It was not violence.
It was oblivion.
Arviel stepped forward, no rush, no flourish. With one fluid motion, his blade sliced across space. The sound that followed was not metal-on-flesh, but the brittle crack of a memory shattering.
There was no scream.
There was no fall.
The chimera ceased. There was no body. No remnants. It did not even leave behind the idea that it had existed.
And yet-
A single drop of dark, sluggish fluid oozed out from the cracked stone beneath where the chimera had once been.
It shouldn't have been there. Nothing should have been there.
But somehow, it was.
The black liquid crept forward, as though pulled by invisible threads, inching toward the metallic sphere resting in the center of the room, the strange, transparent orb that pulsed with something not quite light.
The Harmonicon of the Third Orbit.
Altherion's breath caught.
He turned toward it, instinct prickling. His body still ached, blood dried and stiff against his shirt, but his senses screamed that something important was about to happen.
Too late.
The moment the black droplet touched the pedestal beneath the Harmonicon, something changed.
The sphere shuddered once. Not physically but at a level beneath sight, beneath comprehension.
A dim glow bloomed from within the sphere.
It was not color in the traditional sense. It was the hue of childhood promises, of lost languages, of dreams that forget they are dreams. Blue, violet, white but not truly any of them.
A second pulse followed.
Then a third.
The very air thickened, like syrup or forgotten time. Ozone stung their nostrils. The stone beneath their feet pulsed like a slow, ancient heartbeat.
"Get back," Liesette whispered, instinctively pulling at Altherion's arm.
But he didn't move.
Arviel, meanwhile, stood as if nothing had happened. His expression unreadable, neither impressed nor afraid. Just... tired.
Tired of puzzles. Tired of traps. Tired of pretending he didn't know what came next.
He stared at the Harmonicon as it lit up, and muttered under his breath:
"Here we go again."
And then-
The room vanished in light.
No explosion. No sound. Just a blank, pale radiance so pure that it burned away context.
For a single breathless moment, the three of them existed only as silhouettes, memories outlined against a world unraveling.