A colossal thunderclap echoed throughout Inhevaen. It was the Dome. The tolling of a cosmic bell. The vibration that followed crushed the elders against the ground. Many vomited blood. Young people who had already awakened fell unconscious. The pressure was total—as if a titanic hand pushed them from the firmament.
The sound was unlike anything recorded in living memory—a resonance that seemed to emanate from the very fabric of the Dome itself. It wasn't merely loud; it was fundamentally disruptive to the magical frequencies that permeated Inhevaen. Elders with decades of magical experience found their carefully cultivated control shattered in an instant, their bodies responding to the overwhelming vibration with physical rejection.
Inside the now-ruined shield, the young people in the process of awakening were hit full force. The vibrations penetrated their bodies and minds like living blades. Those destined to awaken only one gift began to manifest others... and more others. Some fainted upon reaching the second. Others at the third. Two reached the fourth. One young woman awakened five gifts. Their bodies and minds being refined to the limit of the limit.
The Dome's intervention in the Awakening ceremony was unprecedented. The ancient texts spoke of the Dome as a passive barrier, a protective shell to shield Inhevaen from external threats. Yet now it seemed to be acting with purpose and direction, actively reshaping the magical potential of the initiates in defiance of their natural limitations.
For generations, the Olkhar had been experiencing a steady decline in their magical potency, with fewer gifts manifesting in each new generation. This sudden reversa— multiple gifts awakening where only one would have naturally occurred—suggested a deliberate correction, as if the Dome itself was responding to some critical threshold being crossed.
When all had succumbed, only Karel remained. He writhed on his knees, his mind and body consumed by energy. He didn't know it, but six gifts vibrated in his essence—and above them emerged a seventh force, pulsing in harmony.
Unlike the other initiates, whose bodies fought against the overwhelming influx of magical energy, Karel's system seemed designed to channel it. Each gift that awakened within him didn't compete with the others but rather complemented them, creating a synergy that allowed him to remain conscious far beyond what should have been possible.
The pain exploded inside him. But, instead of yielding, something blossomed. His vision sharpened. He perceived the flows around him, sparks of magic dancing in the air. When he looked at the Dome... the Dome looked back. His mind contorted in agony. His body and mind yielded. Something took control.
The sensation of the Dome's awareness focusing on him was overwhelming. It wasn't simply that he could see the Dome—countless Verithil seers could do that—but that he could feel its consciousness, ancient and vast, suddenly aware of him as an individual.
The connection formed was bidirectional, a channel through which information and energy could flow both ways.
In that moment of connection, Karel glimpsed fragments of knowledge no mortal was meant to possess: the true nature of the Dome's creation, the cycles of awakening and dormancy it had experienced over millennia, and most terrifyingly, the threats that lurked beyond its protective barrier—entities of such alien nature that merely perceiving them threatened to shatter his sanity.
His body rose and looked to the sky. And beyond—to the vault of the Dome. Golden eyes.
His gifts activated one by one. They resonated in the newly awakened body. The body was Karel's. But there, for an instant, dwelled something new. The golden eyes moved from the sky to the black fissure, where something lurked from the other side.
"Your intervention will not be tolerated, son of Chaos," said Karel, with a hoarse and vibrant voice.
The voice that emerged from Karel's throat was layered with harmonics impossible for a human vocal apparatus to produce naturally. It resonated with the same frequency as the Dome itself, creating sympathetic vibrations in the crystal obelisks surrounding the Awakening Circle. Those conscious enough to witness it later described feeling the words rather than hearing them, as if the meaning bypassed their ears entirely and manifested directly in their minds.
With a gesture, all the vibrations emitted by the Dome obeyed his call. The energy flew like guided missiles, hitting the Children of Silence one by one. Each blow vaporized the essence of the void. Only flesh and stone remained—which fell, inert, to the ground.
Karel's control over the Dome's energy was absolute and instinctive. Where the elders had spent decades learning to channel small fragments of magical energy with precise control, he commanded vast waves of power with simple gestures. The energy responded to his will as if it were an extension of his own body, targeting the corrupted essence within each Child of Silence with surgical precision.
The Children of Silence, despite their fearsome appearance and overwhelming numbers, found themselves suddenly defenseless. The void energy that animated them—energy stolen from the Dead Zones and shaped by the will of their distant master—was precisely the type of corruption the Dome had been designed to neutralize. In Karel's hands, this function was amplified beyond all known limits.
When the last abomination fell, Karel's eyes, fixed on the fissure, glowed. All the energy of the mountain concentrated there, like a furious wave of ancestral vibrations.
The fissure resisted. Crackling black energy against the vibrations of the air. The impasse held for a short time. The energies that rubbed against each other emitted rays and static around. A deafening sound was emitted. As if reality itself was about to break.
The confrontation between Karel's channeled Dome energy and the entity beyond the fissure created visible distortions in the fabric of reality. The air around the tear shimmered and warped, colors shifting into spectra no human eye was meant to perceive. Those elders who had retained consciousness felt a deep, primal fear—not just of the entity beyond but of the fundamental wrongness of its intrusion into their world.