Chapter 203: Chapter 203: Saviour Back inside, the light vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving the hall in a disorienting, purple-tinged darkness. Silence returned, even more profound than before. In fact, it was more violent than the explosion. A thick, swirling mist of pulverized obsidian... the remains of a thousand-year-old relic... coated everything in a fine, dark soot. Through the haze, the only thing visible was Sol. He stood exactly where he had been, his hand still outstretched into the empty air where the Sun-Stone had once sat. He looked at his palm, his skin wasn’t burned, it was glowing from within, a soft, fading white light pulsing beneath his veins like a dying star. He felt... fine. A little hungry, perhaps, but fine. But the hall was in absolute shambles. Chairs were overturned, splinters were scattered, and the air smelled of ozone and burnt wood. High Shaman Zephyra fell to her knees, her silver hair spilling over the floor. "Peerless," she whispered, her voice a mix of terror and religious ecstasy. "In the annals of the Veynar... there has never been a core like this. It is not a Sun. It is something more than that." "Sun Core is a pillar of light," Zephyra muttered, sounding like she was losing her mind. "A pillar that lasts seconds. That... that was something never seen before. He didn’t just light the stone, Warchief. He detonated it. The purity... it was absolute." Veylara stared at the shattered obsidian, then at Sol. She saw the fear in Thorne’s eyes, the utter defeat in Korash’s, and the burgeoning hope in her daughter’s. Veylara was the first to move. She didn’t stand; she lurched forward, her heavy chitin armor scraping against the stone floor. Her face, usually a mask of unshakeable command, was pale. She stopped in front of him and looked at the pile of shattered glass that used to be a sacred tribal relic, then at Sol, then back at the ceiling where a hole the size of a wagon wheel had been punched through three meters of reinforced Heartwood. "You broke the Sun-Stone," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I... I didn’t mean to," Sol said, looking at her, and then around at the destruction. "I just followed the instructions. It just... it felt like it wanted more." On the far side of the room, Korash was a pathetic heap. He had been blown back five meters, his expensive silk robes scorched and his face smeared with soot. He was hyperventilating, his eyes darting toward Sol with a primal, animalistic terror. Every time Sol shifted his weight, Korash flinched as if a lightning bolt were about to strike him. Thorne was standing, but his hands were buried deep in his sleeves to hide their violent shaking. The greed that had fueled him moments ago had been incinerated. If Sol was this powerful at the moment of awakening... before even learning a single technique... then by the time he reached Layer 2, he would be a walking natural disaster. Thorne’s plans with the Zharun suddenly felt like a child’s game played in the path of an avalanche. But he also didn’t want to give up so easily, as it would mean all his efforts will be gone. "The instructions don’t include destroying our history, boy!" Thorne hissed, though he didn’t dare step closer. He was shaking, his face pale as death. He looked at the dust, then at Sol. "This is an omen! A curse! To break the Sun-Stone is to invite the wrath of the forest!" "Warchief!" Thorne called out, his voice thin as he tried to regain some semblance of authority. "This... this is an unstable power! Look at the destruction! He is a danger to the Heartwood itself! We must—" "Shut up, Thorne!" Harkan roared, his Great Ape phantom standing tall again, though it refused to look Sol in the eye. "An omen? It’s a miracle! We have a peerless genius in our midst! Less than five minutes to awaken, and a core so dense it shattered the test crystal? The ancestors have sent us a saviour!" ... Outside, the silence finally broke. It started as a low murmur, then a shout, then a roar of voices that drifted through the hole in the roof. "THE SUN! THE SUN HAS DESCENDED!" "THE SAVIOUR!" The tribespeople weren’t waiting for permission anymore. The sound of hundreds of feet sprinting toward the High Hall, the circular building, the center of tribe’s power, echoed through the corridors. The guards at the doors didn’t even try to stop them, they were also stunned by the events, they really didn’t expect that boy, the so called divine envoy to achieve something that even their most respected and revered ancestor hasn’t been able to achieve. Thinking about their previous rudeness, they couldn’t help tremble, and could only hope that he was magnanimous enough to forget small characters like them. ... Sol finally turned around. He looked exhausted, his eyes slightly glazed, but the "Hidden Sun" in his chest was now a steady, humming warmth. "Did I... pass?" Sol asked, his voice rasping. But no one answered the questions and looked at him like he was some sort of deity. Zephyra drifted forward, her silver hair now wildly dishevelled. She looked at Sol with a mixture of awe and something that looked suspiciously like fear. She reached out a trembling hand and touched his solar plexus through the vest. She pulled back instantly, as if burned. "Y-you... Who are you?" "Me? I’m just a human as you are, I don’t even know what is happening." Sol answered even more confused than they were, taking in the reactions of all of them and realizing that he seemed to have done something crazy. She turned to the Elders, her eyes sharp. "Is there anyone here who still thinks he is a ’burden’? Anyone who wants to offer him as a jester to the Zharun?" Thorne felt the shift in the room like a cold blade against his throat. The political leverage he had spent decades building... the whispers of "stability through merger," the fear he had cultivated... was evaporating in the heat of Sol’s aura. He looked at elders, High shaman and Chief, and didn’t say anything, although he was absolutely white-faced, his hands shaking as he gripped his vulture-feather cloak. He looked at Sol, then at his son Korash, who was still groveling on the floor. He knew his power was slipping. In a tribe that valued strength above all else, Sol had just become the most valuable asset in the Great Orrath. Thorne’s mind raced. If he couldn’t discredit the boy, he had to claim him. Or, failing that, he had to ensure the Zharun knew exactly how dangerous this "guest" had become before Sol learned how to actually use that power. "A fluke," Thorne muttered, though there was no conviction in his voice. "A divine accident." "An accident that just lit up the entire forest?" Harkan barked, stepping forward, his ape phantom standing tall. "Thorne, you’re a fool. This is the sign we’ve been waiting for! The forest has spoken! The ’Divine One’ is our salvation!" "We don’t know that yet!" Thorne countered, his voice rising in desperation. "He has no soul-spirit! He is just an empty husk with no power! Until he passes the Rite tomorrow and get a soul, he is still just a weak boy!" "Then we will see ii tomorrow," Veylara said, her voice regaining its mountain-like authority. She looked at Sol, her stormy eyes softening for the first time. "Sol. You have proven your inner sun is bright. But Thorne is right about one thing... a sun without a shadow is just a desert. In two days, no forget that, tomorrow, you will enter the Shamanic Grove. You will find your beast soul. And then... we will see if you are truly the one to lead the Veynar through the darkness." Kira walked over to Sol, her eyes wet with tears of relief and pride. She didn’t care about the politics or the elders. She just saw the man who had carried her through the meat-grinder now standing as a peerless genius. "You did it," she whispered. "Five minutes. Sol, you’re going to be a legend." Sol looked at her, then at the shattered stone. He felt the Liquid Silver in his chest settle into a slow, satisfied swirl. He had the core. He had the attention of the tribe. Now, all he needed was the soul. "Five minutes," Sol muttered to himself, a slow, dangerous grin spreading across his face. "Even I didn’t expect something like this to happen." ... But just as they were talking, the heavy, wooden doors of the High Hall didn’t just open... they were thrown wide by a surge of bodies. The first to burst through were the younger warriors, their faces flushed with a mixture of terror and religious fervor. Behind them came the elders, the weavers, and even the children who had escaped their mothers’ grips. They stopped dead the moment they crossed the threshold. The air in the hall was ionized, smelling of ozone and burnt wood. But what stopped them wasn’t the smell, it was the sight of the obsidian dust drifting through the shaft of light coming from the ceiling. "The Stone..." someone whispered from the back of the crowd. "It’s gone." The Sun-Stone, the literal bedrock of their spiritual heritage, had been reduced to a pile of soot at Sol’s feet. In any other circumstance, this would have been seen as a sacrilege, a disaster of the highest order. But as they looked at Sol... his silhouette framed by the jagged hole in the roof, and a pillar of sunlight falling on him like he was some deity, nobody thought of the loss. Because all they saw was the Saviour. A young girl, barely ten years old, her ears still bleeding slightly from the sonic boom, stepped forward. She didn’t look at the Warchief. She didn’t look at the Elders. She walked straight to the edge of the dais and knelt, pressing her forehead into the soot-covered floor. "The White Sun," she murmured. Like a wave hitting the shore, the rest of the crowd followed. Hundreds of tribespeople, from the lowliest laborers to the hardened veterans of the Zharun border wars, collapsed into a sea of bowing bodies. The sound of their collective movement was like the rustle of a thousand leaves. Seeing this, instead of feeling angry, Veylara looked up at him. Instead, she hammered her fist against her chest plate in the highest salute of the Veynar... a gesture reserved only for a Warchief or a Deity. One by one, the priestesses and the loyalist warriors in the room followed suit, the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of fists on armor echoing the heartbeat of a tribe that had just been reborn.