I didn't expect the door to still be intact.
It stood like a sore tooth jutting from the forest floor—tilted, metallic, half-swallowed by moss and time. Engraved above the frame, in a dead language the Grimoire translated for me, were three words:
"Seal the Echo."
None of the students could read it.
Lysaria, for once, hesitated to touch the metal.
"Is this it?" Roderick asked me. His voice was low, hoarse, like something in his throat knew better than to speak.
I nodded. "Bunker Seventeen. Military-grade research site. Supposedly decommissioned after the war."
"Supposedly?" Julien echoed.
I didn't reply. I was too busy unlocking the runes.
It wasn't a lock in the traditional sense—no key, no mechanism. The bunker responded to patterns. The old kind. The kind buried in the bones of the world before the gods found names.
My fingers traced them automatically, guided by memory and something darker. Something that remembered.
