After settling the most urgent matters, Lucien went to Eirene first.

He found her in the central office with the same composed posture she always carried.

Lucien did not waste time.

"Sister Eirene," he said, "I’m leaving with sister Vivian for a while."

He did not need to explain further. Eirene had always been the sort to understand what mattered from the direction a thought leaned in before it fully arrived.

"I’ll take charge while you’re gone," she simply said.

Vivian, standing beside Lucien, gave her a grateful look.

Eirene’s gaze softened for just a breath as it moved over the two of them.

"Be careful," she said. "Both of you."

Lucien smiled faintly. "We will."

Eirene inclined her head once.

"I’ll keep things steady here."

That was enough.

With that, Lucien and Vivian departed.

•••

They crossed toward the Middle Continent using the Covenant of Pathless Sovereignty.

The Middle Continent spread vast beneath them when they arrived.

Lucien looked out over it for only a moment before drawing out the coordinates Seran had given him and letting his senses align with the direction. Then he and Vivian moved.

The farther they went, the stranger the land became.

The atmosphere itself changed first.

It grew purer.

This place was beautiful.

Vivian walked beside him in silence.

Her grip on his sleeve had tightened long ago, though she seemed not to notice it herself.

Then they reached it.

The barrier.

It rose before them like a wall of golden law drawn across the world by beings who had once held peace not as a wish, but as jurisdiction. It was massive and imposing.

Lucien stopped.

So did Vivian.

They could not see through it.

Their senses touched the surface and slid away as though the barrier itself politely refused being understood by lesser methods.

Lucien raised a hand and pressed his palm against it.

It was very solid.

The Celestial Race had once stood as overlords and peacemakers of the Big World. Of course, if they close themselves away, then they would not have done it halfway.

Vivian’s hand tightened harder against him.

Lucien turned his head and looked at her.

She met his eyes, and for a moment all the years between childhood and now, all the fear, all the hesitation, all the half-healed ache of absence passed silently between them.

Lucien gave one small nod.

Then he drew out the Void Disc again.

Teleporting directly into a sealed space would cost too much energy. It was the same as when he forced entry into the hidden goblin world in the void.

Only this was worse.

The Celestial barrier was older, cleaner, and far stronger.

Lucien could feel that immediately.

He did not hesitate anyway.

He looked at Vivian and said, "Sis. Activate your Wings of Atonement and Halo of Absolution." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Vivian understood at once.

If the Celestials saw them arrive already carrying the marks of sacred authority rather than skulking in with concealed pressure, then there was at least a chance they would not be judged as intruders first.

Vivian obeyed without delay.

Light unfolded behind her.

Her wings opened in pale brilliance. The halo formed above her with quiet solemnity. The moment it did, the atmosphere around her shifted into something cleaner and unmistakably connected to the holy lineages of Celestials.

Lucien breathed out once.

Then activated the disc.

The drain was immediate.

A monstrous amount of stored energy vanished into the leap.

The Void Disc trembled in his hand with the force of the expenditure, and then—

space folded.

The barrier did not break.

It yielded only enough to let impossibility pass.

Lucien and Vivian disappeared from before the great golden wall—

and reappeared inside the Celestial Dominion.

...

Both of them went still.

Because the sight before them was enough to steal thought.

The Celestial Dominion was paradise.

Floating islands drifted through layered skies like sacred thoughts made solid. Rivers of light ran between terraces of crystal and white stone. Vast gardens bloomed across suspended lands where flowers shone with their own purity and ancient trees carried leaves like living gold. The air was thick with divine energy, so rich and naturally distributed that even breathing there felt like a kind of healing.

Celestials moved across the skies.

Some flew openly on radiant wings. Others traversed elegant paths of light suspended between high structures and floating districts.

Their cities were not packed in frightened density like lesser civilizations. They spread with calm confidence, as though the land itself had always agreed to hold them.

Lucien looked out over it all and knew at once.

Lootwell was magnificent.

But this place was old magnificence.

This is a dominion shaped by ages, not acceleration.

Just then...

Armored figures came.

They approached at once, swift and direct, descending from different angles in a pattern so practiced Lucien knew he was watching a people who had never truly forgotten vigilance even in paradise.

Lucien was ready.

He had already begun arranging his explanation in his mind.

He even glanced toward Vivian, anticipating that she might need only a heartbeat before things became delicate.

But then something unexpected happened.

He felt no aggression.

Not even the restrained kind.

The armored Celestials halted before them, studied them, and then the foremost among them inclined his head.

"Friends," he said, "we have been waiting for you."

Lucien and Vivian blinked.

Then looked at each other.

Lucien was more startled than he wanted to show.

The world had forgotten him. So why would anyone inside this sealed dominion expect his arrival?

Seeing their confusion, the armored Celestial’s expression softened.

He was an older man by bearing, though not by decay. His eyes carried the calm depth of someone long accustomed to difficult duties.

"Our leaders gave instruction before they fell into sleep," he said. "They told us someone would come when the time was right. We were to wait."

That made Lucien still.

The Celestial continued, "And our senses are not poor. We can read intent well enough to know when one comes with rot in the heart."

Then his gaze settled on Vivian.

"And this young woman..." He paused. "She bears their likeness."

That part needed no explanation.

Vivian’s fingers tugged at Lucien’s sleeve again.

He nodded.

Virel and Aniel.

The leaders of the Celestial Race.

Their parents.

But if these Celestials had been waiting for a rightful arrival, then something else was also true.

Something had gone wrong.

The lead armored Celestial stepped aside and said, "Please come with us. I apologize that we must receive you this way. Once the Grand Barrier was raised fully, it ceased to be a gate we could open and close at whim. It listens only with difficulty now."

Lucien finally answered.

"It is we who should apologize for intruding."

Then, because there was no point pretending their purpose was anything else, he added, "As you likely guessed, we are connected to your leaders. We came because we needed to know their current condition. How are they?"

The question changed the air immediately.

The Celestials around them deflated.

The lead guard lowered his gaze briefly.

"They still sleep," he said quietly. "Before they lost consciousness, they told us someone would come. They said that perhaps those who came would carry the cure."

Lucien felt something grip him hard at the center of his chest.

He should have come sooner.

That thought arrived immediately and uselessly.

But the greater truth beneath it mattered more.

They were alive.

If they still slept, then they could still be reached.

That was enough to keep hope breathing.

The Celestials led them inward.

As Lucien and Vivian walked deeper into the dominion, Lucien could not help looking around more carefully.

The place was enormous.

There were also many races here.

Humans most visibly among them.

They lived here well.

The Celestial Race had protected them, uplifted them, and folded them into the life of the dominion without degrading them into ornamental dependents.

Lucien saw children running across bright courtyards. Human practitioners training alongside others. Families living in broad neighborhoods filled with light and calm order.

And he felt divine energy everywhere.

Also from the people. They had been baptized.

Lucien knew it immediately.

This beautiful, restrained, equal paradise. This insistence that power, if it truly meant anything, had to create shelter for others.

That was them.

It made memory rise in him all at once.

The small world. Their baron estate. The days when life had been simpler, smaller, but deeply happy. Their parents standing at the center of that peace with the same impossible steadiness they had apparently carried into this Celestial dominion.

Vivian was crying quietly again by then, but she kept walking.

Soon the Celestials brought them toward a palace of white crystal and living gold.

It stood at the center of one of the higher sanctified regions and seemed half-grown, half-built, with walls that caught light like frozen dawn and corridors that curved with the solemn geometry of sacred rule.

Inside, the atmosphere changed again.

The outer beauty remained, but now it deepened into stillness.

They passed through a sequence of halls and turning corridors so intricate they almost felt like a maze.

The silence thickened. The light softened. Even Lucien, who had entered ready for uncertainty, felt his own breathing slow.

Then the Celestials stopped before a chamber.

Soon...

The doors opened.

And Lucien saw them.

Virel. Aniel.

They lay side by side upon jade beds under soft luminous ward-light. They were sleeping so peacefully that for a terrible instant it almost looked like nothing had happened to them at all.

Their faces were familiar.

Painfully familiar.

Even though these forms were Celestial, not the human bodies they once wore in the small world, the resemblance was absolute where it mattered. The line of the face. The calm around the mouth. The strange old kindness that seemed present even in unconscious stillness.

It was them.

Their father. Their mother.

Vivian broke first.

A sob escaped her before she could stop it.

Then she ran.

The Celestials did not interfere.

By now the resemblance between their leaders and the female visitor was too obvious to ignore, and the grief in Vivian’s movement held no threat anyway.

She reached the beds and dropped to her knees between them, trembling.

"Mother..." she whispered.

Then, more weakly, "Father..."

Lucien stopped several paces behind her.

He had thought himself ready.

He had not been.

Because this was no longer theory.

They were here.

Vivian bowed over them and wept openly.

Lucien stood in the solemn chamber with the Celestials silent around him and realized, with painful certainty, that he and Vivian had just reached something they once believed had been lost forever.

They had found their parents.

And now—

They had to wake them.