You landed softly, the crowbar reappearing in your hand, humming with a new power. The forge was silent once more, the servitors whirring back to life, their mechanical movements oblivious to the cosmic battle that had just transpired.
Yaldabaoth stood still, its faceless helm turned toward you, not in anger, but in what could only be described as a satisfied nod.
“Excellent,” it said without words. “You have proven you can command your selves. But what if you cannot command the field of battle?”
The ancient entity's hands lowered, and the very ground of the forge began to tear, not with fire or light, but with the emergence of a new reality. The red plains of Mars melted away, replaced by the suffocating, toxic atmosphere of Xen, with its floating platforms and humming creatures. The battle was no longer just in the forge. The battle was in your mind.
The forge floor, a landscape of scorched plasteel and arcane machinery, seemed to hold its breath. Cawl's terrified sputtering was a distant, forgotten sound, lost in the new, suffocating silence. Yaldabaoth’s gaze was a palpable weight, an ancient awareness that pierced through the composite of your being. It was an awareness not of the present, but of an infinitely long past and an incomprehensibly vast future.
“I remember you,” it had said. Not to Cawl, not to the Mechanicum, but to you. The words, echoing without sound, were a key turning in a lock you hadn't known existed. You felt the raw, untamed landscapes of Tang Sanzang's enlightenment, the cold, calculated corridors of Black Mesa, the sickening rip of a portal opening to Xen. Every single step, every choice, every battle fought across countless lifetimes had been a single, inexorable path leading here.