Chapter 316: In His Stead
The man stepped away from the golden wall.
Liam’s first thought was that the resemblance was deliberate.
His second was that it was not a resemblance at all.
The figure wore no recognizable clothes. Ether simply shaped itself around a body matching Liam’s proportions, forming a loose suggestion of shirt and trousers without seams, fastenings, or fabric. Brown-gold light fell where Liam’s hair would have fallen. Even the face was his.
The features were softer at the edges, continuously dissolving and reforming beneath the haze. The eyes had no crimson in them. They were pure gold, without pupils or whites, illuminated from somewhere deeper than the body containing them.
Liam stared.
The other Liam smiled. Then he chuckled.
It was Liam’s voice.
That was offensive.
"This has been entertaining."
Liam’s brows drew together. "What has?"
"You."
The being walked toward the center of the chamber. Its bare feet made no sound against the dark floor, though runes brightened briefly wherever it stepped.
Liam remained where he was.
He was beginning to develop several theories.
None survived longer than a few seconds.
"A projection generated from whoever enters," he said, more to himself than the thing approaching him. "Possibly a cognitive interface. The room could be using my own neural architecture to create something comprehensible—"
The being laughed again.
"You really cannot help yourself."
Liam frowned. "Understanding what is happening seems like a reasonable priority."
"It is not."
"That is a terrible answer."
"It is the only useful one." The being stopped several meters away, hands loosely clasped behind its back. "There is no point trying to understand this place from where you are standing. Not yet."
Liam’s attention moved to the runes streaming behind it.
The symbols blurred every time he attempted to focus on individual sequences.
"Where am I?"
The smile widened.
"The Trial."
Everything inside Liam stopped.
His gaze snapped back to the being.
"No."
"Yes."
"The Trial of Ether."
"Humans do enjoy adding unnecessary nouns to things."
Liam looked toward the vanished entrance.
Then at the gold flowing through the walls.
Cassian’s warnings returned with remarkable clarity.
The protections were stripped away.
The passage closing.
Candidates dying.
Goliath disappearing for three days and remembering none of it.
Arik’s absolutely blank expression when he realized Liam wanted to reverse-engineer the mechanism.
"Oh, Arik is going to lose his mind."
The being appeared delighted by that as well.
"He usually does where you are concerned."
Liam’s eyes narrowed.
"You know Arik?"
"I know what he carries."
That was not an answer Liam could currently afford to investigate.
He pressed one hand against the high collar of his shirt. His containment formations still existed beneath the fabric.
"How did Narissa open this?"
"She did not."
Liam stared.
"Then how am I here?"
"She placed you where the unfinished invitation could reach you."
A cold sensation moved through Liam’s stomach.
"Felix."
The being’s expression changed for the first time, still amused, but older somehow.
"Yes."
Liam’s jaw tightened.
Of course his grandfather had found a way to make an ancient lethal ether mechanism irritating.
"What did he do?"
"He entered."
The chamber seemed quieter around those words.
"When?"
"After he poisoned Goliath."
Liam went still.
The figure continued almost conversationally.
"After the children were dead. After the imperial household had begun collapsing around a sovereign who did not yet understand why his own ether was turning against him. Felix had already taken what knowledge he believed he needed."
The gold in the walls darkened faintly.
"He came here because sovereign ether could not be stolen cleanly. He understood that much. He wanted what Goliath possessed."
Liam thought of Felix returning decades later with a manufactured approximation strong enough to deceive Nuria’s outer systems.
"He tried to take the Trial."
"He began it."
"But he didn’t win."
The being smiled.
"He ran."
That made Liam blink.
"You can run away?"
"Apparently."
There was unmistakable amusement in the answer.
Liam almost laughed despite himself.
Felix Canmore, who had built decades of research around sovereign ether, rebirth, inheritance, and replacing Goliath, had reached the mechanism that might actually have given him what he wanted... and fled.
"Why?"
"He was too weak."
The words carried no judgment, only fact.
"The Trial began removing what did not belong. His stolen ether. His grafted structures. The pieces he used to imitate strength. He discovered very quickly how little remained underneath."
Liam’s mouth curved.
"I could have had a better grandfather."
The ether-being stared at him for half a second.
Then it laughed.
Not the quiet chuckle from before.
Actual laughter rolled through the chamber, echoed by the walls until the ancient runes seemed to tremble with it.
"Yes," it said eventually. "You could have."
"I feel cheated."
"So do several generations of your family."
Liam was about to ask exactly how much this thing knew when it lifted one hand.
Its fingers snapped.
The effect was immediate.
Pain struck beneath Liam’s collar.
He gasped and staggered back as every containment formation around Felix’s corruption ignited at once.
Something tore loose from the ether threaded through his channels.
Liam doubled over, one hand braced against his knee as light spilled from beneath his skin in thin, fractured lines. For months the foreign presence had felt like contamination: a wrong pressure woven through his natural signature, something that responded to Felix’s palace and carried the faint undertone of lily through his pheromones.
Now it was being extracted.
A pale thread erupted from Liam’s chest.
Then another.
White at first.
Green.
Blue.
Yellow.
Red.
And between them... something else.
A wavelength his instruments had never known how to classify.
It shimmered outside the familiar spectrum, visible only because the Trial apparently had no obligation to obey the limitations of Nurian measurement systems.
Liam forgot the pain.
His eyes widened.
"I was right."
The being looked almost fond.
"You were."
"It is another wavelength."
"Yes."
Liam reached instinctively toward it.
The being slapped his hand away.
Liam stared at his own ether-generated duplicate in offense.
"You could have simply told me not to touch it."
"You would have touched it."
That was probably true.
The strange ether twisted between them like a thin ribbon caught underwater.
Except now that it was outside Liam, he could feel something in it.
The desperate impulse to escape.
Liam slowly straightened.
"What is that?"
The being’s amusement faded.
"The part of Felix that ran from the Trial."
Liam looked at the writhing light.
Understanding arrived unpleasantly fast.
Felix had not merely escaped.
He had left something behind.
A piece stripped away when the Trial began dismantling everything false inside him.
And somehow, decades later, that discarded fragment had found Liam through the Gate.
The being closed its hand.
The strange wavelength collapsed into a point of light, then vanished.
Liam’s containment formations went silent.
Completely silent.
For the first time in months, there was nothing foreign beneath his skin.
The being lowered its hand and smiled with Liam’s face.
"Now," it said, "we can begin."