The tunnels twisted like nerves beneath the mountain, every wall humming with buried threads. Kael moved through them with Lira on his right and Corren covering the rear. Their steps echoed too loudly, though none of them dared slow.
Then it happened.
The first creature stepped into view without sound.
At first glance, it looked human—a man, middle-aged, his clothing tattered, face slack with exhaustion. But as he stepped into the phosphorescent light, his skin flickered. For a second, Kael saw not one face but three—overlaid like sketches on parchment. All different ages. All screaming silently.
"Fracture," Lira whispered. "He's... overwritten."
The man lunged.
Kael dodged, barely, as the attacker's arm passed through stone like mist, then solidified again mid-swing. A scream followed—not from the man's mouth, but from the air around him. It was someone else's voice. A child's. A woman's. A memory.
Corren was already moving. He swept forward, blade flashing, slicing clean through the man's shoulder. But the wound didn't bleed—it unraveled. Threads of thought spilled out, flickering with pieces of recollection: a birth, a betrayal, a door that never opened.
Another figure appeared from the wall—this one barely formed, more echo than flesh. It attacked Lira with an outstretched hand that disintegrated as she parried it with a charged glyph rod.
"They're not alive in the way we think," she said between strikes. "They're made of collapsed identities. Broken loops."
"They were people," Kael said, voice tight. "They still are."
One of the creatures lunged at him, shrieking in three different languages.
Kael raised his hand.
He didn't cast.
He remembered.
The world rippled.
Threads around the creature slowed. Kael reached into the memory fracture—not to attack, but to stabilize. He drew a single memory forward. A name. A moment of peace. He fixed it in place, like pinning a page in a book.
The creature stopped.
Its body convulsed, then faded, not violently but softly, as though released.
Kael turned to the others.
"I can fix them."
Corren stared. "That wasn't suppression."
"No," Kael said. "It was clarity."
More shadows stirred ahead.
Dozens.
Kael stepped forward, eyes alight with a strange, pulsing glow.
"Stay behind me."