Andersson blinked. "Join?" The word stuck in his throat. It could mean anything—and none of the possibilities sat comfortably. "I—I don't even know what that means."

Reece let out a strained laugh and took an instinctive step back. "Okay, hold up. Join how? Because that sounds way too intimate for my liking."

Siona didn't flinch. "She does not seek your body or your mind. She seeks your presence—to feel as she feels, to see as she sees."

Siona stepped closer, lifting a hand near Andersson's chest—not touching, but close enough that the space between them seemed to hum with invisible charge. He could feel it, that subtle heat radiating from her presence, not physical, not psychic, but something more elemental. Her gaze never wavered.

Andersson's throat felt tight. "What will happen to me?"

Siona paused—not to build suspense, but to offer only what she could be certain of. "In truth, I do not know," she said at last. "Vhenasul has never joined with anyone in recorded memory."

Reece's brow furrowed. "Not even you?"

"I am merely a vessel," she replied. "Vhenasul speaks through me—but our minds have never touched."

There was a moment of silence, then Davrin stepped forward from where he had been quietly observing. His voice was low, but carried through the chamber with unexpected resonance.

"It is the highest honor."

Andersson turned slightly at the sound, noting the shift in Davrin's posture—the same quiet reverence he'd seen when they first approached the heart of the tree, but deeper now, almost personal.

Behind them, the crowd had grown. The space was no longer empty. Elarin were gathering along the perimeter of the chamber, drawn not by spectacle, but by gravity—some invisible pull that told them something unprecedented was unfolding. They came not with noise or fanfare, but in silence, as if they were witnessing a sacred moment written long before their time.

Hale stepped forward, her voice low but firm. "Captain, I don't think this is a good idea. We have no way of knowing what this will do to you."

"I agree," Reece added, the usual edge in his voice now taut with concern. "This could seriously mess you up."

Siona's gaze remained steady, unshaken. "No harm will come to you," she said. "That, I can promise. The only discomfort will come from understanding."

Reece scoffed. "Yeah, that clears it right up."

"You're asking a lot," Hale said, crossing her arms. "And offering nothing to make us believe it's safe."

Before the tension could build further, Andersson lifted both hands—calm, measured. A silent plea to stand down.

He was sharply aware of the eyes behind them. The gathering crowd had grown, quiet but intent, like a forest leaning closer to listen.

Andersson turned toward Siona, his voice quieter now, shaded with something between caution and resignation. "What does she want from me?"

"To share," Siona said, her tone as steady as ever. "Knowledge. Understanding. Emotion."

He glanced back at Hale and Reece, his expression unreadable but calm. "It's okay. If I'm who they say I am… then I guess this was always going to happen."

Hale took a step forward, jaw clenched. "And what if you're not?"

Andersson exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh. "Then I guess we're about to find out."

Reece moved before he could think better of it, grabbing Andersson's hand. "Are you sure about this?"

Andersson met his eyes and gave his hand a quick, firm squeeze. "I think so. Just keep an eye on me. If I start sprouting branches… try and pull me back."

Reece's mouth twitched into a half-smile—strained, reluctant. "That's not even remotely funny."

Andersson drew in a breath, squaring his shoulders. "Well," he said, glancing once more at Hale and Reece, "I guess we better get this over with."

Siona inclined her head. "Come."

She gestured toward the base of Vhenasul, and Andersson stepped forward. With each stride, the air seemed to change—thicker, more present. A gentle pull pressed at the back of his mind, not forceful, but insistent, like a tide drawing him inward. He didn't need direction. Somehow, he knew exactly where to stand.

As he came to a halt at the center of the root-ringed hollow, Siona stepped close. Her hands rose, steady and slow, until they cupped either side of his face. Her touch was cool and dry, the texture of her skin rough like ancient bark. The contrast was jarring—her fingers ringed in cold metal, the jeweled bands biting slightly against the warmth of his skin.

Andersson didn't flinch. He only breathed—and waited.

As Siona inhaled, a slow, measured breath that seemed to ripple through the very air around them, Andersson closed his eyes.

The forest responded.

From the base of Vhenasul, the silver and amber veins pulsed with new light—faint at first, then building. Energy surged through the roots, coursing down the sprawling network of vines that threaded through the forest floor. It moved like blood through a living body, glowing brighter with each second, each breath. The ground beneath their feet seemed to come alive, humming with rhythm and purpose, as if the entire forest had begun to breathe with them.

Reece and Hale exchanged uneasy glances, the same thought flickering between them without a word: whatever was happening, it had already moved beyond anything they could stop.

The light intensified.

Threads of silver and gold snaked up through the vines, swirling around Andersson and Siona in rising spirals. It wasn't chaotic—it was deliberate, as if drawn by invisible hands. The energy flowed through Siona's palms where they touched his face, arcing into him with a radiant pulse. Andersson's body tensed.

Then Siona released him.

She stepped back with quiet grace, head bowed, hands clasped before her as if in prayer, as though her part had ended.

Andersson didn't fall.

He rose.

Slowly, impossibly, he lifted from the forest floor—suspended in the center of the radiant current. His head tilted back, mouth slightly open, eyes closed but drawn upward as though trying to see something just out of reach. His arms hung behind him, taut and unmoving, as the energy cocooned him in golden fire and silver thread, pulsing in rhythm with something vast and unseen.

Reece jerked forward instinctively, a sharp breath catching in his throat as he moved to run toward Andersson.

But Hale was faster.

She reached out and grabbed his arm, holding him back with more force than she meant to. "Reece—no," she said, her voice tight, eyes locked on the spectacle before them.

He struggled for half a heartbeat, then stilled. Whatever was happening to Andersson now—whatever Vhenasul had begun—they were no longer part of it. They couldn't protect him. They couldn't reach him.

And if they tried, they might only make it worse.

Andersson's mind drifted into silence, a vast and depthless stillness. Thought dissolved. Time slowed. There was no sound, no sensation—only presence. She was there. Not speaking, not commanding, just being. Immense. Watching. Waiting. Her consciousness brushed against his own like wind through ancient branches—subtle, but undeniable.

Vhenasul was not inside him, but around him. Through him. Their thoughts did not intertwine—they coexisted. And yet, something passed between them. Understanding. Recognition. An impression that she had always known him, even before he knew himself.

Then came the break.

A crack in the stillness, and a vision surged forward—raw, immediate, and absolute. It wasn't sight. It wasn't even memory. It was feeling.

He was in Arlathan. He didn't know how he knew—it was just true, the way gravity was true. The ground beneath him carried the taste of something ruined. The air choked with despair. He couldn't see the creatures, but he felt them—pressing in from every direction, a crawling tide of hunger and decay. Their essence radiated up through the land like rot in soil. Ancient. Wrong. The last blight.

It wasn't a battle. It was an extinction.

He could feel the Shemlen faltering, not in screams but in silence. One by one, their lights went out—snuffed like candles in a storm. The world did not end with fire, but with absence. With loss.

And beneath it all, deeper than the dark, there was something else. A mind. Coiled. Watching.

It did not reveal itself, but he could feel its shape—hollow, vast, and filled with rage that had no voice. Its presence wasn't a whisper, but a pressure. Heavy. Ancient. Saturated with hatred, not just for life, but for the idea of it. Andersson couldn't name it, but he knew it was the architect of the horror he was witnessing. It had no face, and yet it stared back at him.

Andersson felt the last of the Shemlen vanish beneath that gaze, and for a moment, he could no longer tell where the vision ended, and he began.

The vision shifted. The sharp, aching silence of death gave way to something crueler—something that still lived.

Andersson stood in Brelen. Not the Brelen he had seen with his own eyes, but one stripped of dignity and color. The land was raw, its soil torn open, its once-proud forests reduced to brittle stumps and blackened hollows. Wind carried ash instead of pollen. The rivers, once lifelines, now ran slow and thick—sluggish with waste, choked by greed.

And the people…

He saw them. Elarin herded like animals—hands bound, eyes hollow. Families torn apart in the shadow of cold, mechanical vessels. Some were marched in long lines toward iron platforms, while others were already confined—caged in glowing fields of containment, marked for transport to places he could not see. Entire communities fractured in a heartbeat, their voices silenced beneath commands in languages not their own.

Children cried, their small faces smeared with soot and fear, but no one came for them.

He saw one—a boy, barely older than ten—dragged from his mother's arms by faceless figures clad in armor that shimmered like obsidian. The child kicked, screamed, pleaded in a tongue that felt sacred, but it made no difference. He was pinned, and a metal device—part branding iron, part ceremonial blade—was pressed to the skin across his face and neck.

Lines of glowing lyrium etched itself into his flesh, pulsing violently, too bright, too fast. Not the gentle shimmer of reverence that marked the Seer. This was domination. Control. A leash disguised as a symbol.

The child screamed until he couldn't, his voice swallowed by the machine. When they let him go, he didn't move. He just lay there, eyes wide, glowing lines burned into his skin like a curse.

Andersson felt it—the violation, the pain, not just of the child, but of the land itself. Vhenasul mourned through him. He felt her grief as if it were his own. It wasn't just the trees that had been cut down. It was hope. Culture. Future.

And behind it all—again, just beyond the veil—he sensed the presence. That same dark will. It didn't need to raise a hand. It moved others like pieces on a board. Cold. Calculating. A rot behind the mask of civilization.

Andersson's pulse thundered in his ears. This wasn't a vision—it was an inheritance. A history burned into the roots of the world, and now etched into him.

The scene fractured once more.

The ruined forests and broken children gave way to firelight and fanatics.

He was no longer in Brelen. The world had shifted—civilizations now cloaked in banners, their streets echoing not with laughter, but with chants. Andersson stood in a city built of spires and sermons, where belief had become law and law had become a weapon.

He saw faces contorted not by rage, but by certainty. Holy wars waged in the name of righteousness. Crusaders cloaked in divine authority, cutting down those who dared to question. In great squares and under towering statues, men and women were executed publicly—hung, burned, broken—for worshipping the wrong shape of the same god.

The rise of a prophet. A woman with fire in her voice and tragedy in her shadow. Andraste. Her name spoken like salvation, her death mourned like myth—but Andersson saw the divergence too. The split in the road. The fracture of faith.

One path claimed purity through domination. The other, rebellion through martyrdom.

He watched the Chantry tear itself in two. One branch cloaked in crimson robes and steel authority. The other wrapped in quiet defiance, burning in secret until the world caught flame. Each side believing itself the savior. Each side becoming the executioner.

Towers rose, then fell. Books burned. Truth rewritten. And every time the dust began to settle, the same thing happened again. The cycle. The purge. The silencing.

And in every moment—every upheaval—he felt it again.

That presence.

Never at the forefront, never claiming a throne—but always near. A whisper in the ear of kings, a shadow behind the pulpit. It did not crave worship. It did not demand loyalty. It only wanted division. Chaos. Control.

It had no face, but Andersson knew its shape by now: the silence just before a scream. The stillness just before a knife.

It had always been there. Feeding on the blind faith of the many, and the ambitions of the few. Watching Thedas devour itself one holy crusade at a time.

The fires faded, and for a heartbeat, there was silence. Then the world shook.

Sand swept across Andersson's vision, and he was no longer in cities of faith and gallows, but on a sun-scorched coastline. The sea roared in his ears—furious and endless—as black ships appeared on the horizon like harbingers of some forgotten curse.

They did not come with diplomacy. There were no envoys. No language. No mercy.

The Qunari arrived like a plague.

At first, they were nothing more than wild animals—hulking figures who spoke in growls, their eyes devoid of empathy. Their limbs moved with brutal precision, every strike measured, every life taken without hesitation. The first encounters were not battles. They were massacres. Entire settlements vanished overnight, wiped from the land with the same indifference one might swat an insect.

Andersson saw them grow.

Their numbers multiplied. Their weapons sharpened. Their chaos gave way to structure—military order emerging like bone from blood. They advanced not like people but like a philosophy made manifest. Each victory was not claimed—it was imposed. Cities fell beneath their heel, their names forgotten before their ashes cooled. The people of Thedas were not conquered; they were corrected, rewritten, erased.

And still… the figure lingered.

In the distance, always just beyond reach, it watched.

It did not direct the Qunari, did not lead their charge. It simply observed. And Andersson felt its satisfaction, like a parasite gorging on entropy. It fed on the disarray. On the fear. On the way the Qunari reduced nations to trembling relics of themselves.

They were not its tool. They were its distraction.

And while Thedas bled beneath foreign boots, the figure remained in shadow—content to let the world destroy itself while it waited for the next fracture.

The vision twisted again—light bending in on itself—until Andersson stood amid the ruin of another age.

He was on a battlefield, but not one written in any history book. No blightspawn clawed from the dirt, no twisted creatures plagued the land. The destruction came not from below, but above.

He looked up—and the sky was aflame.

Shadows, vast and burning, fell like omens. Descended through clouds already torn by lightning. They came like prophecy, like judgement. And all around him stood beings—not Thedan as he knew them, not of any race that still walked the world. They emanated presence, a kind of precision that went beyond strength. He felt it in their stillness—the weight of strategy, discipline, intellect sharpened into something unyielding. They were not born of this world, but they had claimed it.

And they were dying.

The land cracked beneath the force of the invasion. Mountains shattered, oceans boiled. Cities vanished not over centuries, but in seconds. An extinction. And yet, even in that moment of annihilation, Andersson could feel Vhenasul—she had been there. She had witnessed this. She had mourned it.

But she had not been alone.

In the periphery of the destruction, the figure remained—ever constant, ever watching. Not orchestrating the event… but somehow always there when the blade fell. Feeding from it. Learning from it. Shaping it.

It did not end.

The vision fractured again, shattering like stained glass. And then he saw more. A thousand ages, each ending in fire. Civilizations built to reach the stars, crushed under forces they could not name. Each time, the same pattern. A new rise. A new fall. And each time, that same presence loomed just beyond the reach of reason—never the architect of ruin, but its constant companion.

Andersson felt the truth rise in him like instinct, like memory that was never his.

He knew who the figure was. Corypheus.

Not by name, but by nature. He had felt him throughout the visions, in the cold hollowness that clung to the final breath of the last shemlen, in the background of every cruelty that had hollowed out the world. The manipulator. The devourer. The one who pulled threads from the dark to watch kingdoms unravel.

Not merely present—embedded. A constant in Thedas' cycles of destruction, always watching, always feeding. He had been here nearly as long as Vhenasul. And he was still here. Hidden. Waiting.

But he wasn't alone.

There was something else. A second presence—not malevolent, not divine. Older than Vhenasul herself. It did not speak, yet its awareness folded around Andersson like a protective veil. It had watched with Vhenasul, suffered with her, mourned as she mourned—but it did not break. It endured.

Andersson didn't know what it was. Only that it was still here—and that it had always been with her.

Then the vision broke.

He fell, the ground rising to meet him with a sudden, breathless finality. The gold and silver light that had wrapped around him dissolved into the vines, their glow retreating as if the forest had exhaled.

Andersson lay at the center of the clearing, unmoving, the forest holding its breath around him.

No one spoke. Not even the trees dared.