They found her immediately. Not scanning the chamber, not adjusting to the light. Directly to her face, as if he’d always known exactly where she was.

His eyes were kaleidoscopic. Colors that shifted and changed with each passing second, every hue in existence cycling through irises that held the depth of something that had transcended normal existence. Beautiful and terrifying and ancient beyond anything his young face suggested.

For one frozen moment, they simply looked at each other.

Him floating in midair, newly awakened after three hundred years of imprisonment, barely functional, barely conscious.

She was standing below him, and he saw her face. It was his mother. She looked exactly like his mother, but in different clothing and with a slightly different appearance.

His face changed.

The blank incomprehension of someone emerging from centuries of suppression, giving way to something else: recognition.

His expression crumpled.

Every line of his young face broke open with emotion that had been building for three hundred years, compressed and sealed and buried but never extinguished.

"Mother!"

The word came out broken. Carrying grief and relief and love and desperation in equal measure. Not a word, so much as the sound of something that had been held together by pure will finally being allowed to fall apart.

The chamber responded to his voice.

The remaining sections of the ceiling cracked simultaneously.

The walls began to fail. The folded space the Sovereigns had created began to collapse inward as the power maintaining it evaporated with the seal’s destruction. The entire structure was coming down.

Martha opened her mouth.

No thought or decision, but a feeling rising from depths she hadn’t known existed.

"Jaenor."

The name came out barely above a whisper.

A name she’d never heard in her current life, that existed in no record she’d ever studied, that should have meant nothing to her.

But it meant everything.

Then her legs gave out.

She didn’t feel herself fall. The world simply tilted and went dark as consciousness left her completely, her mind unable to contain what she was experiencing.

The last thing she registered was the sensation of the air rushing in around her as the sealed space inhaled centuries of outside atmosphere. The roar of collapsing stone. The unbearable heat of ancient power is finally, catastrophically, completely uncontained.

And then arms caught her before she hit the ground.

*

Jolthar moved on pure instinct.

Three hundred years of suppression, of numbed consciousness, of absolute powerlessness, and his body remembered everything the moment the seal broke. Like a muscle that had been held in a fixed position, finally allowed to flex, his capabilities flooded back with dizzying speed.

He caught the woman before she fell.

His feet touched the ground for the first time in centuries. The stone felt real and solid beneath him in a way that the suspended numbness of his prison never had. He adjusted to the sensation in less than a second.

He looked at her face. She looked exactly like Rosaine, his adopted mother, the one who had died waiting for him.

"Mother," he said again, softer now.

A confirmation rather than a cry.

The chamber was collapsing around him. Massive chunks of rock falling from the disintegrating ceiling, the walls failing, and the entire underground structure breaking apart as the divine engineering that had maintained it for centuries rapidly unraveled.

Jolthar looked up at a boulder the size of a house plummeting directly toward them. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

His hand came up.

The boulder stopped. Held in place by will alone, by the chaos energy that flowed back through him with every passing second. He held it there for a moment, almost thoughtfully, then directed it sideways. It struck the wall and exploded into gravel.

He moved toward the passage entrance, carrying the unconscious woman with careful precision. His legs were unsteady; three hundred years without use, even for a body like his, required a few moments of adjustment, but he managed.

The passage was collapsing too. Narrow walls cracking, the ceiling dropping by inches with each seismic tremor. Jolthar moved through the space as the debris fell on the barrier he created to protect her.

He emerged into daylight.

The Kreeshan Valley spread before him, afternoon sun hitting his skin for the first time in centuries. He stood at the base of the cliff face, holding an unconscious woman, dressed in nothing, blinking in light that felt almost physically painful after the darkness of his imprisonment.

He could feel the valley.

The traces of ancient power that had been drawn to this place over centuries. The residual energy from his own battle, from Kailthrys and Suyajna, and the divine clash that had ended with him sealed underground.

He could feel the world had changed. Three hundred years of history had reshaped everything he’d known.

In the distance, he could see the dig site camp. People scattered across the valley floor, some still recovering from the quake, some staring in his direction with open-mouthed shock.

He registered all of this in about four seconds.

Then he looked down at the woman in his arms. At the face that he longed to see.

The grief that had been building since the moment he woke was enormous.

Everyone he’d known was gone. Everything he’d tried to protect had been reshaped by three centuries without him.

Then he placed the woman on the ground and shot up towards the sky; it was in a fraction of a second that he was in the air.

Inside those walls, Jaenor had undergone a cycle of transformations, and he was a completely new being.

He kept on flying into the sky, and he stopped when he reached the clouds. He was now floating naked among the clouds, staring at the sun.

He closed his eyes, and a subtle shift began to move through his body. The discoloration faded first, his skin gradually returning to its natural tone as the damage repaired itself beneath the surface. Muscle steadied, breath deepened, and the strain left his posture. When he finally felt the warmth of sunlight against his face, he drew in a long breath, steadying himself. Then he looked down, gathering his bearings, and made his way back to where Martha was waiting.

Rosaine, she looked just like his mother; he just stared at her.