--- Somewhere, in a Heart Lab, late at night ---

It's been hours. The fans say everything is clean. The room says otherwise. Little grains of broken mechanisms are still hiding in corners. The pad where Feris fell has a new crease. I told maintenance to leave it for now. A scar belongs to the story.

I'm writing in this old book again. The first pages are messy pencil from when I was too young to understand this world. I used to write about rain and insects and what numbers felt like on my tongue. I used to write about my first days at the Lighthouse… Tonight I am writing about a girl who should have torn in half by Eon, and did not. If this entry goes to court one day, I will deny the handwriting is mine. If it goes to the grave with me, that would be neat and tidy. Life is not tidy.

Esen's pulses were stronger than I asked for at the end. Of course they were. He… He's a storm with good manners until you bump his shoulder. Hikari bumped it. Good girl. I would be lying if I said that I wanted that, and I would be half lying if I said I didn't. The instruments told me the limit. The girl's body told me a different limit. My fault? I didn't know which to trust.

The numbers won't stop replaying in my head. My hands keep drawing the curve of the line on my legs even as I write this. Flat, stubborn, then a tremor, then that fall. The console gave me the average load in neat units. The small display - the one I keep for myself. Equivalent Eon retained in tissue: five adult baselines.

Five. I said it out loud (Hope nobody heard me)

But Eon? It's obscene, beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Feris's body is a reservoir. Mine is a glass. Esen is a barrel. Raizen is a small factory - his capacity isn't too big, but the speed he's recovering... Woah. It's amazing. That guy never stops surprising me. If only I were his age…

I have to stop.

Alright. Let me write this without any romance. Eon improves physical performance. That is the clean sentence. A trained body can move past its locks. Four times baseline strength is routine for an average Vanguard with discipline. Reaction time narrows. Pain gets kicked out to a different room while you work. Tendons agree to things they usually refuse. It's not a miracle. It's not magic. It's… Something like a lever. The mind holds one end. The body holds the other. Eon is the weight you pull.

That is for basic use. For Eon Mastery? Things change.

You can use Eon into muscle and bone - making a superhuman of yourself for a few minutes.

You can shape it outside you until it gets an edge and becomes a weapon.

You can even order it to become a beast and it will give you the whole thing - claws, wings…

Ichiro asks the ground to be his arm and it obeys. Stones disagree with gravity for him. I still don't know how he does that without snapping in half. I cut the scans a hundred ways and all I get is the same strange gift: the luminite shard in his shoulder fused. It isn't a guest anymore. It sits there quietly like a second heart, and it beats Eon into him whether he wants it or not. That is why he spends energy like a rich fool - he has to. If he doesn't pour, it pools. When he sleeps, his fingers twitch, like a miner working in a dream. Yes, I threw a look on the cameras. Yes, at night, Esen sleeps with the plushie whale from Feris. Yes, he has nice muscles.

If I were writing this for a researcher, I would stop and put a diagram here. If I were writing this for Kori, I would stop and let the silence be the diagram. For me, I will write a small truth: Eon likes to be held by life. The stronger the body, the steadier the mind, the bigger the vessel. I have watched heroes pour it through broken ribs and it still obeyed. It's not fair. It's a scale. We pretend it is honor. It's simply strength.

Then we saw the thing I have been pretending not to think about for three hours. Eon can be pretty. Most days it is a helpful halo on a blade or a clean line along a runner's calf. Today it wasn't soft. The field broke off Feris, and I have to be honest with you – I always am – It was the prettiest thing I've seen in a while.

I am writing too much about the last ten minutes and not enough about the long road that brought us here. I am avoiding the part where I say I was shocked. Fine. I was shocked. I do not say that often. Shock is the thing you admit after the emergency. I never let it in while I am holding someone's life in numbers. After, I let it sit in my lap. It is heavy and childish. It reminds me I am not a machine.

We stopped pushing Eon into dead metal after a laboratory blew up. The papers called it a "containment failure." The truth is that we asked a living thing to sing through a throat of bolts. Luminite resonates. It's a quiet well. The purer the crystal, the steadier the pour. Those engineers and scientists thought that they could power an entire block. The first week was gentle. The second week hummed. The third week... No survivors. I was a teenager and I clipped the news for this very diary, long time ago. I remember writing "us, humans pushed too hard" in letters so neat I did not recognize myself.

That should have been the end of it.

Except the cavern we found in the mountain was wrong. The luminite there reacts the way a cat reacts to a string - too fast, too much, too happy. When I brushed one with simply my finger, it brightened and then glared. It was attention. It listened too well. You put a hand near and it came forward like a child does when you show it a game.

I have a dozen notes here and none of them are steady. One says "grave pillars." I am not going to explain those to this page. Not yet. Solomon would kill me. The memory makes my neck feel tight.

I promised myself this would not turn into a lecture on the Rust Room. It is a place and a rumor and a set of outcomes. That is all. I don't know what Kori does in there. I have eyes in the Underworks but there isn't any data. That facility is hidden well, what can I say? The door swallows people and returns them stronger. Those who come out are more themselves in one of two directions. They are the kind of powerful that holds a child's hand with two fingers and never squeezes. Or they are sharp in the wrong place – killing machines.

Kori is hard to like if you like easy people. I like her. We have argued with our eyes across glass. I flirt with her when I am bored and she pretends not to hear me because she is not bored and also because she prefers people who sleep at decent hours. Neither of us do. I respect her training more than I respect most systems. If you put Kori and a bad problem in a small room, the problem comes out beat up. I can still remember… Almost… What is it now? Ten? Twelve years? When we first met, her first day being in the Phalanx. Youngest of them, and definitely the most restless one. We've been best friends since.

It feels good to write like this. These days have been… Absolutely crazy. Even for me. Usually, I say that I'm crazier. But I couldn't levitate or blow up the Lighthouse. (No, I still don't know what caused it…)

I wrote earlier about Feris's insane Eon capacity. That might change as we drain and teach. It might be a transient state - trauma makes strange containers. Or it might just be who she is. I will treat it as real. For now.

I write about Ichiro's shoulder and I can feel the old lab tugging at me. The temptation is real. If a stone can become a heart, can a heart become a stone that sings on command…? No. No metaphor tonight. The rule stands. Eon prefers life. It takes instruction from a will, not a wire. The closer the thing is to a person, the more it listens. The farther, the more it sulks and then bites.

I keep circling the same impolite idea. If I strip the pretty words, it sounds like heresy and like common sense at the same time.

Maybe Eon was made for us.

I do not how. It acts like a language with only human mouths. Animals can shimmer for a second under it. But only people hold a conversation with it, and harness a fraction of its power. I keep testing this thesis and it keeps not-ruining my life. For now.

I will ask the Council to reopen research in a box with thick walls and better, more… Abstinent people. We'll work where the people are - in muscle, in scars, in breath - because that is where Eon sits and smiles like it has been waiting.

I'm supposed to end entries with what I will do next. My hands have to write reports. My shoulders want me to go home. I will do neither right now. I will sit with the machines until they sound like the lab again, not like a storm we accidentally invited inside.

Tomorrow I'll be polite. Tonight I will be honest.

Eon is not gentle. It can't be taught. It can be tricked for a moment. It can be learned.

But remember - it will always show its teeth. Today it let go. Today a girl fell and lived. Today was a miracle. But life taught me that death always hides behind every corner, in this cursed world.

I think the research must begin again. Carefully. Close to the chest. Refusing the old arrogance. Borrowing courage from the young. Accepting that the origin might never tell us its name.

I will keep you updated, my dear diary.

Your one and only, Alteea.

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