This was the last sound Amber heard at the Bottom of the Vortex.
Now, the vortex formed from the overlapping and distortion of countless lights and shadows had completely solidified around her. Chaotic darkness shrouded everything as far as the eye could see beyond it. She had reached the bottom of this historical memory, and at the bottom of the vortex lay a hazy yet impassable barrier. She tried to move deeper into the vortex, trying to see what lay beyond that blurred obstruction—
That should have been a point in time even older than the Bottom of the Vortex, something that had happened before those enormous ancient beings held their final conversation. She pressed herself against the mistlike, dreamlike, yet insurmountable barrier with all her strength, and thought she could vaguely see crisscrossing gray-white lights and shadows. But when she blinked again, she found only darkness before her.
Just then, an immense pulling force suddenly came from behind her.
"Holy—" Amber only had time to cry out before she felt her entire body being forcibly dragged away from the vortex by that tremendous force. At the same time, she could feel the vortex itself rejecting her. Everything she saw rapidly blurred amid the motion, then gradually sank into darkness within that blur. The process might have lasted hours, or it might have lasted only an instant.
Amber realized that, at some point, her perception of time had been severely fractured. It felt as though she had lived through years more ancient than civilization itself, to the point where she could no longer accurately distinguish between these "brief moments." Yet before she could properly process that strange sensation, it was swiftly stripped from her soul. Her normal sense of time returned, and she once again felt... the sunlight of the