The sacred flames burned unevenly.
What should have been a steady corona of holy fire—ringing the dome above the altar in a perfect circle—now sputtered in staccato pulses, like a candle choking on its own wax. The carved runes in the obsidian walls glowed faintly, their lines no longer humming in harmony but… discordant.
Prexie Ash stood at the altar in silence, her robes the color of dried blood and soot. Her hands were raised, palms outward, fingers crooked in a rite meant to steady the sacred breath of flame. But the fire did not answer.
Her lips moved in soundless prayer. She did not blink.
The assembled sisters knelt behind her in rows of shadowed reverence, their heads bowed low, their veils trembling in the shifting heat. And still—the flame flickered.
Then came the footsteps.
Not rushed. Not hesitant. Just quiet. Controlled. A whisper made flesh.
Prexie Echo stepped into the dome like a question slipping beneath a locked door. She wore no shoes—her bare feet moved soundlessly over the blackstone mosaic, each step sending faint pulses across the floor's ink-lined wards. The mask she wore was silver and narrow, split down the center by a single crack.
"Ash," she said softly. "We have a problem."
Ash lowered her hands.
The flames dimmed further—almost as if relieved.
Echo moved closer, extending a single scroll bound in grey twine. Her voice was calm, but behind the mask, her breath came tight.
"One of the lesser priests was caught at dawn," she continued. "In the archive vault. He was… altering route permissions. Forging supply movements. The seal he used—"
She loosened the scroll. The wax was cracked, but the symbol was still clear: the Vaelmont sun, entwined with the fractured ring once used by Luceris during his campaigns.
Ash's expression didn't change.
"Where is he now?"
Echo tilted her head. "Below. He's… speaking. But not to us."
Ash turned on her heel. Her cloak of ash threads dragged along the floor like smoke unwilling to rise. "Bring him up."
The center of the dome opened with a soft hiss, a spiral of blackstone tiles parting inwards like petals. Two temple guards emerged—dragging between them a thin, trembling figure in tattered robes. His eyes were wild. His lips moved constantly.
No sound came out.
They dropped him at the foot of the altar.
Ash stepped forward, slow and precise. The flames guttered again above her.
"What is your name?" she asked.
The man twitched, head jerking once, twice. Then his mouth opened—too wide—and a series of guttural, hissing syllables spilled out like steam escaping a cracked pipe.
Runes on the far wall flickered. One of them cracked straight through its centerline with a brittle snap.
Echo flinched.
Ash did not.
She lowered herself to one knee, meeting the priest's shivering eyes. "This is not theft," she said quietly.
Her hand hovered above his brow. "It's infection."
Echo moved beside her, her voice a ripple in the dark.
"Or corruption," she said, "disguised as loyalty."
The priest went suddenly still. His mouth hung open, no longer forming words. One last breath escaped—long, thin, and cold.
Then he collapsed.
The rune above them went dark.
The priest's body had barely cooled before silence reclaimed the dome.But the runes did not relight.
They flickered—dim, strained—as if what had passed between the altar and the cracked rune still whispered through the walls.
That night, in chambers deeper than stone, the whisper took form.And Echo followed it.
Echo stood alone in the Circle of Ink.
The chamber was round and windowless, its only light filtered through narrow slits along the upper archways, casting slow-moving shadows like veins across the walls. Books lined the shelves—untranslated, unspoken—each bound in materials no one dared question. This was not a room for prayer. It was a room for remembering things too dangerous to speak aloud.
At the center stood the Mirror of Dissolution—a flat obsidian slab filled with liquid ink that never stilled.
She approached it barefoot.
Her reflection stared back, fractured by the ink's slow undulations. Her mask had been removed, set carefully on a pedestal behind her. What remained was a face carved in discipline: sharp angles, hollow cheeks, eyes the color of untouched snow. Eyes that had stared into too many futures.
She lowered herself to her knees.
The ink did not ripple.
A moment passed. Then two.
Then the whispers began.
Faint at first—too faint to catch words. But enough to steal the breath from the room. Echo inhaled once, deeply, and pressed her fingers to the surface of the ink.
Mist bled up around the edges of the slab.
A shape began to form.
Not a figure. Not yet. A fracture— a slow, spreading crack in the reflection itself. And beyond it… dust. Not ash, not smoke. Dust like dried bones ground fine. It billowed outward, curling into the shape of towers falling, prayers breaking mid-word, and a scream that rang through silence like a note held too long.
Her eyes widened.
Valaris was crumbling.
But not to fire.
Not to siege.
To something deeper.
In the ink, a single symbol emerged.
A circle. Fractured. Lined with sigils she hadn't seen since the founding texts of the Temple—scripts meant to ward off ancient echoes. One of them bled into gold, flickering like an eye.
Then she saw him.
Not fully.
Not his body. Not his voice.
Just the echo of Luceris. Standing where the fracture widened.
And the mist around him answered.
Echo ripped her hand back. Ink splashed across the stone. Her breath caught sharp in her chest.
She didn't scream.
But she wanted to.
Ash entered the room in silence, her robes whispering against the floor. She didn't speak, didn't question. She only stared at the ink now trailing down the edges of the pedestal—thin rivulets like veins of shadow.
Echo stood slowly, hands trembling.
"It's happening," she whispered.
Ash stepped closer. "What did you see?"
"Not a betrayal." Her voice was dry. "Not even treason."
"Then what?"
Echo met her gaze, voice hollow as wind through bone.
"Something worse."
Echo fled the Circle, ink still clinging to her hands, the whisper still fresh behind her eyes.
The ink did not still.
Even long after Echo had fled the circle, it rippled faintly, as if the fracture she'd glimpsed refused to be forgotten.
And somewhere above, beneath twisted trees long blackened by fire, Prexie Ash felt the weight of a question no flame could answer.
Each step stirred the soft crunch of bone-char beneath her sandals. Here, no flowers grew. Only offerings remained — iron nails, old prayers etched in bloodwood, braids of burnt silk left by supplicants who begged for mercy and never returned.
At the center stood the statue of the First Prexie, her face weathered smooth by time and wind, arms outstretched as if to hold the sky itself. Beneath her feet, the basin of sacred ash lay dry. No visions stirred in its dust anymore.
Ash stopped before her.
Her cloak curled faintly in the breeze, a slow dance of weight and age. She folded her hands before her and spoke—not aloud, not in chant, but in the quiet voice she once used as a girl, before titles buried truth.
"Do we still serve you?" she asked. "Or have we simply become keepers of memory, burning incense in a tomb?"
The wind did not answer. Nor did the earth. Only the hush of distant bells and the low groan of temple stone shifting under the weight of age.
She lifted her gaze to the Prexie's outstretched hands.
"Have we clung too long to a truth that no longer listens?"
Behind her, soft footsteps disturbed the quiet.
Ash turned.
A novice stood at the garden's edge — no older than sixteen, robes too large for her shoulders, fingers twisted in the folds of her sleeves. Her eyes were wide, not with fear… but with something else. Wonder twisted into dread.
"I shouldn't be here," the girl said.
Ash gave her silence. Permission.
The novice swallowed.
"I was in the reflection pool, Prexie. I saw… not a man. A shape. But it had Luceris' eyes. And it looked through me."
Ash's eyes narrowed. "And what did it say?"
The novice trembled.
"Nothing. But the water moved wrong. Like it breathed. Like it waited."
A pause.
Ash stepped forward, brushing a thumb across the girl's brow — not as comfort, but as command. "Forget it," she said softly.
"But—"
"Forget it."
The girl bowed low, fear rising again, and fled into the shadows of the corridor.
Left alone once more, Ash turned back to the First Prexie.
But her question — Have we clung too long? — felt heavier now.
In the silence that followed, the whisper Echo had spoken earlier stirred again in her thoughts. Not memory. Not madness. A warning:
"The breath awakens."
And for the first time in years, Prexie Ash did not pray.
She simply stood very still.
And listened.
The garden gave no answers.
The First Prexie's stone eyes stared skyward, but the sky no longer spoke.Only the ground whispered now—beneath the wards, beneath the altar, beneath the faith they'd built like armor.
So Ash descended.
And in a room where only truths dared gather, Echo waited.
The door sealed behind them with a hush.
Not a clang. Not a click. Just absence — as if sound itself refused to linger in this place.
Prexie Ash moved, her cloak brushing across old dust. The glow of the runes cast no shadows, only a dim shimmer that made her hands look older, bonier, less human.
Across from her, Echo waited — already seated, fingers steepled, expression unreadable.
Ash did not sit.
"Speak," she said.
Echo's voice was low, shaped for this chamber. "The rites falter. The outer circles flicker when they should burn. And the flame… the flame listened to nothing today."
Ash's jaw tightened, but she said nothing.
Echo leaned forward slightly. "You saw the novice. You heard her words."
"I told her to forget them."
"You didn't," Echo said. "You told her to act like she did."
Ash looked away. One hand hovered above the warded stone of the table, as if expecting it to flare in warning. It did not.
Silence held, thick and thickening.
Finally, Echo spoke again. "Luceris is not what he was."
Ash turned back. "He returned under somebody else his banner."
"And yet the runes crack at his name," Echo whispered. "And the mist stirred on the night he stepped through the gate."
A breath. A choice.
"If Morveth will not see it," Echo continued, "then we must prepare alone."
Ash lowered herself slowly into the second seat.
For a long moment, they said nothing. Only the hum of the runes filled the air — and even that felt fainter than it had once been.
Then Ash nodded once.
"Summon the Prexie of Ink."
Echo's lips twitched — not a smile. More a line of quiet resolve.
"The fracture deepens," she said.
Ash answered without blinking. "Then we speak before it swallows us."
And in the dark, as the runes pulsed like a dying heartbeat, two of the Five turned silently against their center.