Chapter 5 – The Aftermath

  Elian’s breath came in ragged gasps, though his chest—the Guardian’s chest—didn’t rise and fall like it should have. The body he occupied wasn’t flesh and blood. It was something else. Something vast, a, and heavy with a presehat didn’t belong to him.

  His hands—no, the Guardian’s cws——were slick with blood. Not his own. The beast y in ruin at his feet, its body torn apart, viscera staining the temple floor. The violence of it sied him. His stomach lurched at the realization.

  This wasn’t him.

  He could still hear the survivors, still feel their fear radiating like a pulse through the air. Their ons were raised. Their voices were hushed, frantic. He wao turn to them, to tell them that he was still Elian, still himself. But was he?

  The liween him and the Guardian pulsed, a deep, resonant hum that he could feel in his skull. It was strohan before. It wasn’t just a e—it ull. A gravity dragging him deeper into something he didn’t uand.

  A bullet ricocheted off his armored body, the sharp g cutting through the silence.

  “Hold your fire!” Rivera’s voiapped through the s. “Don’t provoke it!”

  It.

  Elian fli the word. Was that what he had bee to them? Just ahreat? Another monster lurking in the ruins?

  He tried to move, to take a step back, but the moment he did, the weight of the Guardian’s body fought him. His limbs moved slower than his thoughts, an unnatural dey between will and a.

  The link wasn’t just eg them. It was merging them.

  Panic surged through him. He had to get out. Now.

  Elian closed his eyes, tried to ter himself, tried to force his sciousness bato his real body. He willed himself to separate, to break free—but nothing happened.

  The Guardian’s presence held firm. It wasn’t letting him go.

  A deep, guttural sound rumbled from his chest. He hadn’t meant to make a noise, but it wasirely his own. It was like something in the Guardian was reag to his fear, feeding off it.

  “Step away!” a soldier barked. “Move, now!”

  They weren’t talking to Elian. They were talking to each other.

  They were retreating.

  He saw it in their eyes—the growing realization that they had no trol over what was happening. That whatever this was, whatever had taken root inside of him, it was beyond them.

  He o speak, to tell them he was still here, still in trol. But the words didn’t form properly. When they came, they were wrong.

  “Wait,” he tried to say, but his voice echoed through the Guardian’s body, deeper, reverberating like stone grinding against stohe sheer weight of the sou a shiver through the remaining soldiers.

  Miguel, the local guide, stepped forward, his expression unreadable. He wasn’t afraid in the same way the others were. He had seen something like this before.

  “You o let go,” Miguel said.

  Elian’s head soward him. “You think I don’t know that?” he wao snap back, but the words never came. Instead, his thoughts ed, tangled in the Guardian’s overwhelming presence.

  Miguel didn’t move closer. “Not with your body. With your mind.”

  Elian waue, but something about Miguel’s voice struck him—something familiar.

  Not his words. The way he said them.

  The link pulsed again, deeper this time, dragging him under.

  Then, like before, he fell.

  The Other Phe void stretched around him, vast and endless. The Guardian stood before him, but it was different now. Its form had shed its a stoerior, revealing its true self—a creature of obsidiaal and shifting light, t and unknowable. It regarded him with something that wasn’t quite reition, but wasn’t indiffereher.

  Elian could feel its thoughts, wordless but overwhelming. He tried to push back, to demand answers, but the Guardian didn’t respond. It simply watched.

  Waiting.

  For what? For him to surreo accept?

  The longer he resisted, the strohe pull became. He gritted his teeth, trying to fight against the sensation of being swallowed whole.

  “I’m not you,” he growled. “I don’t want this.”

  The Guardian tilted its head.

  The void shifted.

  And suddenly, he saw something—not a vision, but a memory. But it wasn’t his own.

  It was the Guardian’s.

  Ruins, much like this one, bathed in fire. Shadows moving through the smoke, figures both human and not. The feeling of loss, of something slipping away. The weight of an oath, a purpose left unfulfilled.

  The Guardian had been waiting. For turies.

  Waiting for him.

  Elian recoiled. “No.”

  The void trembled around him. The Guardian stepped forward. It wasn’t him a choice.

  It was g him.

  And then—

  Ba the TempleElian gasped as he was ripped bato reality. His vision blurred, flickeriween himself and the Guardian’s form. The link had weakened—but it wasn’t broken.

  He could feel his own body again, slumped at the base of the Guardian’s feet, unscious but intact. Relief crashed over him. He was still there.

  But he was also here.

  His hand—**his real hand—**twitched.

  Then, the Guardian stepped away from the corpse of the beast.

  It moved on its own.

  Elian was no longer inside of it.

  He was beside it.

  A, he could still feel its presenside his mind, inside his bones. He wasn’t just lio it. Something had ged.

  Miguel exhaled, looking at him—not in fear, but in uanding.

  “Elian,” Rivera called cautiously, her voice ced with uainty. “Are you… you again?”

  Elian swallowed hard. He felt split. As if his body was his own again, but his mind was no longer just his.

  He met her gaze and gave the only answer he could.

  “I don’t know.”