Vel'Thara breathed again. Ragged, labored breaths that rattled through its shattered halls. The academy's wounds were far from healed: Spiral fractures pulsed beneath fresh wards like infected veins, and glyphs flickered at the edges of vision, phantom scribbles that vanished when stared at directly. Reality itself had grown thin, a moth-eaten tapestry where hallways stretched too long and windows reflected stars that didn't exist.
Kael stood atop the broken western battlement, the wind tugging at his threadbare cloak. Below, the forests lay blackened and skeletal, their branches clawing at a sky still stained by the Shepherd's siege. A month had passed. Thirty-nine graves dug. Fifty names carved into the Remembrance Wall. Souls lost to ash and fractured memory.
Some nights, he swore he heard them whispering.
The Survivors
Claire drilled recruits in the eastern field, her splinted arm a stark white against her soot-stained tunic. "Again!" she barked as a novice faltered, their wooden stave slipping from trembling hands. Her ferocity was a mask; Kael had seen her late at night, kneeling by the Heartfire, tracing the names of the dead with ash-stained fingers.
Lira prowled the borders, her glaive gleaming like a sliver of moonlight. She spoke little, but her eyes missed nothing, the tremor in a sentry's grip, the flicker of a weakening ward. Sylva and Tiv mapped anomaly zones, their arguments echoing through the courtyards. "It's a resonance echo, not a fracture!" Tiv insisted, waving a scanner. "Tell that to the Spiral seed growing under your boots," Sylva shot back, her blade unsheathed.
Jace hunched over suppression crystals, muttering half-lullabies as he worked. The songs were his sister's, Kael knew, a girl swallowed by the Spiral's first bloom.
Coren watched. Cataloged. Waited. His journals bulged with sketches of glyphs and dead eyes.
And Kael?
Anchor.
Not hero. Not savior. Just the axis around which their oaths spun. He hated the weight of their hope, the way their eyes clung to him like drowning men to driftwood.
The Messenger
She arrived at dawn, stepping through the breachfield where the air rippled like water over glass. Her red armor was scorched, her lance crusted with dried ichor. Silver Lance Eirien's second-in-command, a woman known only as Veyra, her face a patchwork of scars and resolve.
She said nothing. Simply pressed a scroll into Kael's hands, its seal stamped with Vel'Thara's Broken Flame.
The parchment hissed as he unrolled it, the ink shimmering faintly. Ki-infused, urgent.
Mission orders: Eastern ruins. Anomaly signs escalating. Spiral glyphs… different. Bridges.
"Bridges between what?" Lira asked, her breath cool against his neck.
Kael didn't answer. The word conjured images of the Shepherd's fissures, of realities torn open like poorly stitched wounds.
The Forgotten City
Far from Vel'Thara, Raka wandered the corpse of a city long abandoned. Ash coated the streets like funeral shroud, and the air tasted of rust and regret. Spiral trails flickered at the edge of sight. Not the ravenous corruption of Vel'Thara's siege, but whispers. Ghosts of ghosts.
He moved silently, his footsteps as light as the dust he disturbed. Memories returned in fragments:
- A knife's hilt, warm in his palm.
- A child's laughter, smothered by smoke.
- The taste of blood, his own or another's, he couldn't tell.
He found glyphs etched into doorframes, their edges blurred as if eroded by time. Ash piles mimicked human shapes. A mother cradling empty air, a soldier mid-charge. Footsteps began but never ended, fading into walls or vanishing mid-stride.
The city was dead. But beneath its corpse, something stirred.
At night, he dreamt of the voice:
"Papa, come on!"
A girl's voice, frayed at the edges. Familiar. Terrifying.
The Mission
Kael assembled his team in the shadow of the eastern gate:
- Lira, glaive polished to a murderous gleam.
- Claire, daggers already unsheathed, her splint reforged into a weapon.
- Sylva, tracking lenses strapped over her eyes, her blade hungry.
- Tiv and Jace, arms laden with scanners and suppression gear.
"Contain the breach. Seal it. Burn it if you must," the Judge had ordered, his voice a dry rasp. But Kael saw the unspoken warning in his milky eye: Fail, and the Spiral devours us all.
The eastern ruins were worse than they'd feared. Ash winds screamed like vengeful spirits, and glyph vines coiled around crumbling stone, their thorns dripping faint luminescence. At the collapse's heart stood the bridge. Not built, but grown. It's arch twisted like a spine, its surface shimmering with half-formed glyphs.
Claire edged forward, her boot sinking into ash. "We sealed every fracture," she muttered, her voice fraying at the edges.
"We did," Kael said.
"Then what is this?"
The bridge pulsed. Not the Spiral's familiar rot, but a low, resonant hum. A call.
Tiv scanned the glyphs, his face paling. "Not decay markers… searching patterns."
"Searching for what?" Sylva hissed.
Tiv pointed to the apex, where a single word smoldered in ash:
Return.
The Pull
Far away, Raka pressed his palm to a cracked emblem on a burned home. The Spiral glyph beneath it flared, searing his skin.
The bridge's pull was instant, a hook in his ribs, yanking him forward. His flame surged, no longer the dying ember he'd nursed for years, but a wildfire.
He stepped into the ash-laden wind.
The world tilted.
The Threshold
At the bridge, Kael felt the shift first. A vibration in his teeth, a pressure behind his eyes. Lira cursed. Claire snarled. Tiv's scanners shrieked.
The bridge shuddered. Split.
A figure emerged. Shadow and flame, unraveling at the edges.
Raka fell to his knees, steam rising from his skin. His eyes met Kael's, and in that moment, the flame inside them both recognized.