The chamber pulsed behind him like a dying star.
Jonas lay on the cold floor, chest heaving, skin slick with sweat. The glowing symbols had faded, but the knowledge remained. Every moment, every failure, every buried act of desperation and ambition, stitched into his consciousness like barbed wire.
Mara stood over him, afraid to touch him.
"You're different," she said.
Jonas looked up slowly.
"I remember," he said. "All of it."
He rose to his feet with a calm that didn't feel like his own. His voice had changed too not deeper, but quieter. Like it didn't need to raise itself to be heard anymore.
"What did you see?" Mara asked.
Jonas turned toward the far wall , a smooth metallic panel that began to flicker in strange shapes as he approached. The house's systems were responding to him. Recognizing him.
Or rather…
Obeying him.
"I saw what we tried to build," he said. "We weren't just opening a door to something else. We were designing a prison for ourselves. A way to isolate emotion, desire, thought everything messy about being human and separate it into clean code."
He touched the wall.
A map appeared.
The original Gate structure is geometric, spiraling, symmetrical. It looked almost beautiful now, like a divine machine.
"Eris didn't come through the Gate," he whispered. "We created Eris… by trying to leave too much of ourselves behind."
Mara's voice cracked. "So it's us?"
"It's the worst parts of us. The parts we pretend don't exist. Guilt, rage, obsession, grief. All the echoes we refused to carry. We put them out there and they took shape. They became something that feeds on us."
He turned back to her. "And I was the first to make contact."
Her eyes filled with dread. "Then you're the only one who can close it."
Jonas looked past her, toward the stairs leading back up to the house.
"No," he said. "There is no closing it. The Gate never needed to stay open. It already did what it was meant to do."
"What does that mean?"
"It means it left something behind."
The walls around them groaned.
The air bent.
And from somewhere above, a sound came down not footsteps, not thunder, but something between sound. Like a thousand voices whispering through a broken speaker.
Jonas's skin went cold.
"It's not coming anymore," he said. "It's here."
Mara grabbed his arm. "Then we go now. We escape."
Jonas shook his head.
"There's nowhere left to run."
The hum deepened. The lights dimmed.
And then the stairs collapsed, swallowed by a crawling blackness that spilled down into the corridor like smoke made of shadow.
Jonas stepped in front of Mara.
She tried to pull him back. "What are you doing?"
"I remember what it wants," he said.
The shadow reached the floor.
It stopped.
Waiting.
Jonas looked into it, eyes no longer afraid.
"Eris," he whispered.
And the shadow responded.
Not in words.
But in recognition.
Like looking into a broken mirror.....