Elin told him what she knew.
It wasn't much. She was upfront about that - delivered the caveat before the content, the way someone hands you a small box and says "don't get excited" before you open it. The information available on the staff was fragmentary, secondhand, and built from observations rather than research. Nobody had studied it properly. Nobody who'd gotten close enough to study it had stayed close long enough to produce results.
…Except for Eiden himself.
"It's a different kind of Eon" she said. The dragon had leveled out, cruising at a comfortable altitude below the cloud layer, the four wings beating in the slow, steady rhythm of a creature that was no longer fleeing or chasing but simply flying. Elin sat sideways on the neck ridges, one leg tucked beneath her, the other dangling, her posture so casual she might have been sitting on a park bench. "Not the kind of Eon we already know. Something adjacent to it - using the same thing, maybe, or occupying the same space, but behaving differently. The way a river and a flood use the same riverbed but aren't the same thing."
Raizen listened. The wind at this altitude was steady rather than violent, cold but manageable, carrying the smell of wet forest and the faint metallic trace of the cloud layer above.
"The reports I've seen - and they're thin, Raizen, really thin, barely more than field notes – describe one or two effects, max." Elin held up one finger. "First: it made Nyxes freeze. Not slow down, not hesitate. Freeze. Complete motor cessation, instantaneous, affecting every Nyx within a certain radius of the staff's activation. They stop moving. Stop attacking. Stop existing as threats, for as long as the effect holds."
She held up a second finger.
"Second: it kills. Fast. Not combat-fast, not technique-fast. Faster than that. Whatever the staff's energy does when it's directed at a target, the result is immediate and total. Life just... Leaves. Like pulling a plug from a socket."
"…Just like you did with that forest…" Raizen mumbled, looking down for the strips of grayscale ground next to the rainforest. The one Elin emptied of life for enough power to take on the Beast Sovereign and become the Sky Sovereign.
Elin's eyes snapped to Raizen. "NO."
She rapidly breathed a few seconds, trying to calm herself down from the grave accusation. "That was stealing Eon. That – whatever the staff did – was steal life itself."
She lowered her hand. Looked at it for a moment - her own fingers, the leather guards on her forearms, the casual strength of someone who'd spent years learning to fight and had just described a weapon that made fighting irrelevant.
"I still don't know if that includes Eon or not."
"What do you mean?" Raizen tilted his head.
"At the academy – at every academy in the world, actually – you're all being taught that Eon is life. That it's what keeps our bodies going."
"…And isn't that the truth?"
Elin turned towards Raizen with her full body now. "All of my years of selfish research… No fancy equipment like the Echelon or labs like Kelperion… I learned that Eon is something else."
Raizen tilted his head even more, but he didn't push.
Elin went on. "Eon is something like a second heartbeat. Channeled through you…"
"That doesn't make sense." Raizen interrupted her. "Eon is energy produced by the human body. What you're saying just contradicts that."
"I know what you mean, but what if-" Elin stopped mid-sentence, and decided it wasn't worth saying anymore. "Nevermind. That's just what I know" she said. "And what I told you about the staff - that's all anyone seems to know. Where it came from, how it works, why it does what it does - nobody has answers. The Echelon has theories, probably. Eiden definitely has theories. But theories and answers aren't the same thing."
She said the last part with a half-smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. The disappointment from earlier was still there, sitting beneath the surface - the specific weight of someone who'd come a long way to see something up close and would be leaving without having seen it.
Raizen turned the information over. Something that froze Nyxes and stole life. A strange type of Eon.
He thought about Eiden's hand. The dark lines. The golden veins. The second heartbeat, independent of the host, growing slowly.
Elin watched him think. She gave him time - more time than her usual patience allotted, which told Raizen that she understood the weight of what she'd just described, even if she'd delivered it casually. Then she straightened up, pushed her hair back from her face with both hands, and something in her posture shifted from informant back to pilot.
"Well" she said, her voice brightening by a full degree, the dark undercurrent receding behind the warm surface. "If you're already up here, and we've already done all this -" She gestured vaguely behind them, encompassing the entire night - the chase, the clouds, the drones, the rescue, the conversation about weapons that stopped life. "- we should at least have a bit of fun."
She leaned forward and pressed her hand against the dragon's neck, and the creature banked eastward with the smooth, unhurried grace of something that enjoyed flying the way fish enjoyed water - not as an ability but as a state of being.
They flew.
The forest canopy spread beneath them, vast and dark and textured under the cloud glow, and as the dragon carried them away from Ukai's amber cluster the landscape began to change. The dense, ancient trunks of the rainforest thinned gradually, the canopy lowering, the gaps between trees widening until the ground became visible between them - dark soil, moss, the silver thread of a stream catching the white light from above.
Then the trees ended.
The transition was abrupt - one moment forest, the next nothing. The canopy stopped at a line so clean it looked drawn, and beyond it the land opened into plains that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Flat, wide, covered in grass that the cloud glow turned silver. The wind moved through it in visible waves, the blades bending and releasing in slow, rolling patterns that made the entire plain look like a living thing breathing in its sleep.
Raizen had never seen land this open. His entire life had been enclosed - the Underworks, the Academy, the cities, the forests. Space without walls, without ceilings, without the constant vertical architecture of human habitation, was something he'd understood conceptually but never experienced physically. The scale of it pressed against his chest, not unpleasantly, the way deep water presses against a swimmer who's just discovered there's no bottom.
The dragon flew low over the grass, its wingtips nearly touching the silver tips of the tallest blades, and Raizen watched his own shadow race across the plain beneath them, distorted and enormous, a dark shape in a field of light.
Then the plains gave way to something else.
A strip of barren land - wide, maybe a couple of kilometer across, running perpendicular to their flight path. The grass stopped and the soil changed, becoming dry, pale and cracked, the surface scored with fissures that formed geometric patterns in the hardened earth. Nothing grew here. The barren strip cut across the landscape like a scar, separating the living plains from whatever lay beyond.
And the big ravine. Raizen almost laughed when he saw it, remembering when Esen blew up a geyser below and flew up in the air.
The dragon flew on. The dead strip disappeared behind them, then the air changed. Raizen smelled it - salt, vast and wet.
The ocean.
It appeared between the trees as flashes of reflected light - brief, bright, caught between trunks - the forest ended and the water was everywhere. Flat, dark and enormous, stretching outward until it met the glowing sky at a line so distant it blurred. The cloud glow reflected off its surface in a single, unbroken sheet of pale white, turning the ocean into a mirror that held the sky inside itself.
The dragon descended, skimming the surface, its wingbeats sending small waves radiating outward across the glassy water. Raizen could see the coastline curving away in both directions, and the shores weren't uniform. They changed - dramatically, impossibly, as if the ocean met a different country every few hundreds of kilometers.
To the west, the sand seemed black. Dark as charcoal, dark as the lizard's scales, stretching in a smooth, wide beach that absorbed the cloud glow rather than reflecting it. The black sand touched the white-lit water in a contrast so sharp it looked like a border between two worlds.
Further south, the shore became rock - deep red, layered in strata that rose from the waterline in stacked layers. The red was rich and warm even under the cloud glow's white wash, and the rock formations jutted outward into the water in formations that looked deliberate rather than geological, as if someone had placed them.
And beyond the red rocks, further still, barely visible at the edge of Raizen's vision - a shore that shone. The surface catching the cloud glow and throwing it back with an intensity that the sand and the rock didn't match, as if the shore itself was made of something reflective. Glass, maybe. Or crystal. Or something that didn't have a name in any language Raizen spoke. It glittered in the distance like a line of crushed light drawn between the dark water and the glowing sky.
Different shores. Different worlds, separated by hundreds of kilometers but connected by the same water.
The dragon climbed. Elin guided it upward, gaining altitude, the ocean falling away beneath them as they rose back toward cruising height. The wind freshened. The temperature dropped. The coastline shrank, and the broader geography of the region became visible - the ocean, the varied shores way apart, the rainforest, the barren scar, the plains, and Ukai far behind them.
Raizen looked ahead. Past the ocean, past the glittering shore, past the curve of the coastline as it bent northward. Something was there, at the very edge of visibility, where the dark water met the dark sky and the cloud glow thinned to almost nothing.
Shapes.
Small from this distance - barely distinguishable from the horizon, easy to mistake for clouds or tricks of light or the kind of visual artifacts that exhausted eyes produce when they've been open too long. But they weren't clouds. They were too solid, too defined, too still. They sat in the air above the ocean's surface, separated from the water below by a gap that meant they weren't islands in the traditional sense.
They were floating.
Dark masses, suspended in the sky, their undersides irregular, hanging above the ocean at an altitude that placed them a few hundred meters below cloud layer's lower edge. Some were large enough to hold structures - Raizen thought he could see lines and angles on their surfaces that might have been buildings, but the distance made certainty impossible. Others were smaller, scattered around the larger ones like debris orbiting a wreck.
His eyes widened.
Those were the floating islands.
...Where the Anathema fragment Ignorance was waiting.
