Chapter 10: Where Voidlight Gathers
The portal spat Ruby and Lyra into darkness.
Not ordinary darkness—this was the pitch of anti-light, the absence of anything kind, known, or sane. Ruby didn't flinch. Her vision adapted within seconds. Not because of tech or enhancements, but because her Titan blood remembered this place. It remembered Miraxis Void, the ruin of a dead god's dream and the graveyard of forgotten warriors.
"Gravity's twisted," Lyra murmured, floating slightly as she tried to stabilize herself. Her boots crackled with phase clamps that barely clung to the floating debris around them.
"It's not twisted," Ruby said. "It's layered. Miraxis is stacked across eight collapse bands. If you move too fast in one, you could fall into another." She rotated midair and pointed toward a crumbling structure in the distance. "That's where we start."
The temple was ancient, older than Earth's first starships, older than recorded time in several universes. It floated like a broken jawbone across a sea of black voidlight, its shattered columns still humming with power. The coordinates Daken gave pulsed faintly from the archway.
They landed on the temple's edge in silence. Ruby scanned the entrance and adjusted her cloak, hiding the faint glow that still leaked from her shoulders where her Titan form had begun to resurface. The mark etched down her spine itched in warning.
"You okay?" Lyra asked, noticing the change.
"Doesn't matter," Ruby replied. "Keep your weapon charged. The breach isn't unguarded."
They stepped inside.
The air in the temple was heavy with memory. Not time—*memory*. Miraxis fed on thoughts, on impressions left behind by those who'd entered and failed to return. Voices whispered through the dust, fractured echoes of people long consumed. Ruby ignored them. She'd buried too many ghosts to start listening now.
Her leveling interface pulsed in the corner of her vision. A system alert flickered.
> **New Environment Anomaly Detected: MIRAXIS VOID**
> **Reputation Bonus Risk Level: S-Tier**
> **Optional Objective: Survive all eight collapse bands**
> **Core Objective: Anchor Titan Resonance - Node 1**
> **Rewards: Tier 4 Access Unlocked, Quantum Gear Potential, Unsealed Memory**
Unsealed memory.
That caught her attention.
They moved deeper, lightless torches flaring to life as they passed. Lyra's gun swept from left to right in slow, controlled arcs. The temple shifted beneath them, the floor rearranging into spirals that moved independently from the walls. Ruby adjusted her footing without thinking. The architecture of this place wasn't random—it reacted to her Titan blood.
And it didn't like her.
They reached the first chamber. A round, amphitheater-like space with a pulsing orb of black fire suspended above the center. Beneath it stood a figure.
Ruby's heart didn't skip. It stopped entirely.
He was tall, wrapped in ceremonial bindings of the Old Titans, his face obscured by a shattered helm that bore the mark of the Starborn—the faction that hunted her kind into extinction.
Lyra raised her weapon instinctively. "Who the hell is that?"
Ruby didn't answer. Her eyes locked on the warrior's stance. She remembered it. Not from books or bounty logs—but from her childhood. From the last time she saw her father.
"It's a memory," she said quietly. "Not real. Not entirely."
The figure moved.
Not fast. Just... *right*. As if he belonged in this place, like the void answered his footsteps.
Ruby stepped forward.
The figure raised its head. For the first time, she saw the remnants of a face beneath the helm—half-human, half-warped by voidlight. And then it spoke.
"Daughter of Orun. Bearer of the last Titan seed. You should not have come."
Ruby felt the words stab through her mind like knives. Not pain—recognition. This was a living echo. A shard of someone once real, preserved by the temple's hunger. Her father's last fight, encoded in resonance and rage.
"I'm not here for blessings," she said.
"You seek to claim what we buried," the figure said. "But you have not bled enough for it."
The black fire surged. The chamber locked shut. Lyra tried to fire, but her rounds disintegrated in the air.
"Ruby—"
"Don't. This is mine."
Ruby stepped into the ring.
The phantom didn't wait. It moved with brutal elegance, a style lost to time. Ruby ducked beneath a sweeping strike and countered with a pulse of pure kinetic force. The air rippled. Stone cracked. But the echo didn't stagger. It absorbed the blow and returned one threefold.
They clashed again. Power on power. Legacy on legacy.
With every strike, Ruby felt her Titan blood boil, her muscles pulling against human limits she no longer respected. Her cloak burned away. The markings on her arms flared to life—ancient glyphs of a lineage erased from most records.
"You've forgotten who we were," the echo hissed.
"No," Ruby said. "I *remembered* who I am."
She dropped her limiter.
Titan resonance exploded from her body in a shockwave that vaporized the amphitheater's edge. The orb above cracked, and the void screamed. The echo faltered for a moment—just enough. Ruby surged forward, a blur of wrath and light, and drove her palm into the figure's chest.
A flash.
A pulse.
And then silence.
The echo dissipated like dust into the air.
The black fire calmed. The chamber stilled. The orb condensed into a floating shard and drifted toward Ruby's hand.
> **Node 1 Anchored**
> **Titan Resonance Unlocked: Combat Memory (Orun Protocol)**
> **Reputation Tier Increased: Phantom Echo → Wraith Ascendant**
> **System Bonus: Void Channeling x1**
Ruby caught her breath, shoulders rising and falling as her skin slowly dimmed.
Lyra approached carefully. "Are you okay?"
"No," Ruby said. "But I'm getting stronger."
The temple groaned. The next collapse band aligned above them, a spiral of shifting stairways and memory fragments drifting in gravity-defying patterns.
"One down," Lyra muttered.
"Seven to go," Ruby replied.
They began to climb.
As they ascended, the temple began whispering again—fragments of names, faces Ruby hadn't thought about in years. Korynn. Jyn. Talus. People she'd failed. People who'd died because of who she was. The void didn't just want her power—it wanted her guilt.
She kept climbing.
At the top of the stairs, another gate loomed, carved with Titan runes that bled silver smoke.
Ruby paused and turned slightly. "If I don't make it through the next band…"
"You will," Lyra said.
"If I don't," Ruby continued, "take the shard and get out. Use it to warn the Anchors. The fracture is worse than I thought."
"I said *you will*," Lyra snapped. "Don't talk like you're some lost relic. You're not a myth, Ruby. You're a damn war machine wrapped in grief. Now move."
Ruby smiled faintly.
Then she pushed open the gate.
Inside was not another chamber.
It was a mirror.
And in it stood Ruby—fully transformed. No cloak, no filters, no restraint. Just glowing skin, Titan wings of fire, and eyes that burned like dying stars.
The reflection tilted its head.
And smiled.