Sami descended the winding stone stairs, followed only by the echo of his footsteps and the five of Lisasara.
The air grew colder the deeper they went into the earth, and the scent of ancient dust gave way to a strange metallic aroma, like the smell of dead stars.
They reached a colossal door—not made of wood or iron, but of a dark, obsidian metal that reflected no light.
Lisasara stopped before it, placing her slightly trembling hand upon its surface.
“Here…” she whispered, her voice lost in the vastness of the dark passage.
“Here is where it all began, and here… it will end.”
She pushed the door with a deep, rumbling sound.
The door didn’t swing open; it sank into the ground, revealing a hall of infinite dimensions.
This throne room looked like nothing Sami had seen in history books.
No golden statues, no ornate banners, no stained-glass windows.
Only darkness, and a black stone wall rising upward until it vanished into nothingness.
In the center of the hall stood only one thing: the Throne.
A seat carved from the same black stone, hewn from a single piece.
It did not gleam, it did not radiate, it emitted no discernible energy.
Yet, the moment Sami’s gaze fell upon it, he felt time itself slow down.
His heartbeat became heavier, his breaths deeper.
Behind him, a deathly silence reigned.
The Four Knights, who were always in a state of motion or suspense, all stood in absolute respect.
Valdrak bowed his head, his hands gripping the hilt of his inverted sword.
Seraphine closed her eyes, her head tilted slightly as if listening to an ancient hymn.
Elysion closed his book and tucked it under his arm as if it were a sacred tablet.
Even Lyra, the perpetual troublemaker, stood still, her red eyes fixed on the throne with terrifying seriousness.
“…” This alone made Sami realize that this place transcended everything he had imagined.
Lisasara gestured toward the throne.
“Sit.”
Sami took his first steps toward it.
He felt an incredible weight in every muscle of his body.
The closer he got, the greater the pressure on his soul, as if the throne itself were testing his essence.
He reached it, turned, and sat.
The moment he touched the cold stone, something strange happened.
He had expected a surge of power, a flood of memories, or even excruciating pain.
But nothing happened.
Only…
“…Wrong,” he heard Lisasara’s voice from afar, as if coming from the depths of a well.
Sami stood up, his confusion mounting.
“…”
“Sit.”
He sat again.
“Wrong.”
He stands.
He sits.
“Wrong.”
The process repeated.
Ten times.
Thirty.
Sixty.
A hundred times.
His body, exhausted from yesterday’s battle, began to cry out, and his mind began to boil with frustration.
“Fine…” Sami exhaled, his breath turning white in the cold air.
“Then tell me! What am I doing wrong? Is this not the Emperor’s throne?”
Lisasara walked toward the throne.
She didn’t look at Sami, but ran her delicate hand over its rough black armrest.
A faint scratching sound echoed in the silent hall.
Sami looked at her in shock, his lips parted.
Lisasara continued, gesturing to the floor in front of the throne: “And that is why…” she raised her gaze to him sharply, “…you went to it.”
She paused for a second to let her words settle in his mind.
Then she said: “The Emperor… does not go to the throne.”
She stopped, the last word echoing in the hall: “…The throne… is what waits for the Emperor.”
Something inside Sami shivered, deep in his soul.
As if an ancient lock had been broken, as if a truth his conscious mind had refused to believe had finally surfaced.
Lisasara turned her back to him and walked slowly toward the wide steps leading to the throne, where she used to stand like a shadow to the ruler.
She sat there in a royal manner and gestured for Sami to sit before her on the lower steps, his face toward her and the throne behind him.
“Tell me, Sami…” she asked, her voice lacking the warmth he was accustomed to.
“What is the meaning… of a King?”
Sami answered after a thought, his voice confident yet hollow: “Someone who rules. Manages the country. Protects the people.”
Lisasara shook her head slowly, her silver hair swaying.
“That is the answer of an employee, Sami. The answer of a bureaucrat.”
He heard a muffled, suppressed laugh from Lyra.
But Valdrak, with his usual solemnity, whispered to himself: “It has begun.”
Lisasara took a deep breath, as if summoning memories a thousand years old.
Then she said, every word emerging slowly and with weight, charged with terrifying emotional power: “The Emperor… is not an employee who manages a state.”
Then she uttered the sentence that Kailith had said before him, which had shaken the walls of history: “The king must be greedier than any other.”
Everyone fell silent.
The English words echoed in the stone hall, carrying more weight than any language in the world.
Sami, who did not fully understand the meaning of the word, frowned in distress.
“Greedy?”
Lisasara smiled—a painful, sad, and proud smile all at once.
“Yes, Sami. Greedy.”
Then she approached him, looking directly into his eyes, her own shining with a terrifying intelligence.
“But humans, throughout the past thousand years, have misunderstood this word.”
She pointed to the dark ceiling of the hall, then to the floor, as if mapping the boundaries of the universe.
“Greed is not wanting more money. Nor greater power. Nor subjugating the world to your will.”
She placed her warm hand, with unexpected gentleness, over Sami’s heart.
“A true Emperor…” her lips trembled slightly, “…must be the greediest of all for dreams.”
She closed her eyes, as if seeing a vision from the distant past.
“If his people dreamed of only one city to protect them from monsters…” she opened her eyes, her gaze piercing Sami, “…he dreams of an entire continent, free of monsters, where everyone lives in peace.”
“If they only wanted to end a border war…” Lisasara continued, heat in her voice, “…he wants to end wars themselves. Forever.”
“If they only wished for their children to live to adulthood…” she looked at him with reproach and pride, “…he wants a future where no child knows the meaning of fear, hunger, or loss.”
“If your dream is equal to the dream of any other person…” she enunciated every word, every syllable, with crystalline clarity, “…then you do not deserve to be Emperor.”
Sami, sinking under the weight of his mentor’s words, asked, his voice barely audible: “…And was Kailith like this?”
Everyone in the hall went silent.
Even Lyra, the troublemaker, stood still, her red eyes fixed on the throne with terrifying seriousness.
Lisasara raised her head, looking at the black throne for a long time, with a smile filled with bitterness and nostalgia.
“He was the greediest human I have ever known.”
Sami fell silent, conflicted emotions sweeping over him.
“He wanted to save everyone…” Lisasara whispered, unshed tears shimmering in her silver eyes, “…the soldiers on the front lines, the children in the shelters, the humiliated enemies, and even…” she turned to him, her gaze deep, “…even the monsters they exterminated.”
“And that is why…” she shook her head slowly, “…he lost everything.”
Sami remained silent, analyzing what he had heard.
The bitter truth was unfolding before him.
“So…” he whispered, “…he was wrong.”
For the first time since the training began, since they descended into this darkness, Lisasara smiled a genuine, complete smile.
“Finally…” she whispered, as if talking to herself, “…you have started asking the right questions.”
Then she reached into her cloak and pulled out a scroll made of a strange material, resembling woven metal, older than anything Sami had seen in the Royal Library or the Academy archives.
The paper was not paper, and the writing upon it, with its glowing golden symbols, resembled no currently known language.
Sami looked at it, overwhelming amazement in his eyes.
Lisasara shook her head, her gaze filled with sacred reverence.
“Older.”
“Before the Empire…” she added, every word heavy with meaning, “…before the academies, before humans knew the meaning of alliances and continents.”
“Before the word Aura even existed.”
A deafening silence fell over the colossal hall, as if the world itself had stopped to listen to her words.
“A thousand years ago…” she said quietly, her eyes shining in the darkness, “…no one used Aura.”
“Because it did not exist.”
Then she wrote with her finger on the stone floor, slowly and carefully, a single four-letter word.
Golden letters that lit up the dark hall like stars that had fallen from the sky.
A I O N
The air around the golden letters shivered, as if breathing.
She looked at Sami, her face now bearing an expression of absolute seriousness.
“This…” she whispered, “…is the true name of power.”
“Not Aura.”
“Aura is merely a weak, truncated, distorted version that humans created after they lost the Origin, after they forgot how to perceive the Truth.”
Lisasara drew a large, giant circle with her hands, nearly filling the hall.
Then she drew an infinitesimal point inside it.
“If Aion were an ocean…” she whispered, pointing to the large circle, “…then all of Aura…” she pointed to the small point, “…is nothing but a single stray drop in that ocean.”
Then she added, her voice carrying a hidden warning: “People today think they are using power; they take pride in the level of their aura and their purity.”
“But in reality…” she said, every word a knife in Sami’s imagination, “…they are using only its shadow.”
She reached out and gave the ancient metal scroll to Sami.
“Read.”
Sami tried to focus on the golden writing.
He looked at it with his eyes, trying to decipher its strange symbols, to read its complex patterns.
Nothing.
He did not understand.
“…”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
He gathered his soul, summoned every part of his being.
He remembered her last words: “Do not read with your eyes… but with your will.”
The hall went silent, as if time had stopped.
Seconds, minutes, hours passed?
Sami was in a state of absolute focus, transcending his body, his soul, and his material mind, plunging into the depths of his being, searching for that will Lisasara had spoken of.
And suddenly…
Deep in the darkness of his soul, the golden letters on the scroll began to glow.
Not as physical light, but as the revelation of a truth that had been asleep, as the awakening of a meaning that had been hidden.
The golden symbols changed.
They transformed.
They reshaped themselves to become understandable to his soul.
Then, with a silent voice echoing only within his consciousness, the first sentence of the forgotten language of Aion appeared.
“Will… precedes power.”
As his material mind translated this sentence, the air in the hall shuddered.
And for the first time, no Aura poured out of Sami, no halo formed, no Domain appeared.
Instead, something deeper occurred, something more primal.
Something no one present felt… but everyone saw.
Behind Sami, in the pitch-black darkness, thin golden threads began to appear, so fine they were almost invisible, extending upward until they vanished into the vastness of the hall, like the roots of a cosmic tree waking from a deep slumber.
It was as if the laws of the world themselves, the laws of existence itself, were beginning to remember an ancient name, a name the universe had begun to whisper.
Valdrak smiled—a smile of pride and satisfaction at seeing the beginning of the return of the Origin.
Elysion closed his book permanently and returned it to his spiritual void, knowing that the time for reading had passed, and the time for action had arrived.
Seraphine, her face as calm as a lake, whispered words of welcome, as if receiving a newborn: “It has begun.”
As for Lisasara, who had waited a thousand years for this moment, she looked at Sami, sitting before the throne, with unspeakable pride—a mixture of joy, pain, and farewell.
And she said, in a voice quiet, majestic, and reassuring:
“Welcome…” she bowed her head in respect to him, and to what he represented, “…to the beginning of the path of Aion.”