The glacier was ancient.
Older than most civilizations still remembered, older even than the First Sealing War. Its blue-white surface stretched endlessly, dotted by crags of exposed stone and time-bleached bones—creatures and travelers both claimed by its quiet hunger.
But it was the wind that warned them.
Not with sound, but absence. The world ahead had gone too still, too quiet, as if even the air refused to carry breath across that threshold.
Cael and Mireth stood before the jagged rise of black stone. It pierced the ice like a broken tooth—an obelisk, half-sunken, leaning slightly, its top sheared off by some ancient force. It was unmistakably unnatural.
Its surface was carved with glyphs.
But not Essentia glyphs.
Not glowing constructs shaped from mana like those Cael had studied. These were etched deep into stone—brutal, uneven lines gouged with primitive tools or clawed fingers. The shapes seemed half-formed, rejecting symmetry, defying any readable logic.
Mireth immediately recoiled.
"Don't," she said sharply. "Those aren't ours."
Cael knelt anyway.
He traced a finger along one of the symbols. It was cold—too cold for stone.
"They feel… heavy," he murmured. "Like they're sinking through my thoughts."
"They're dead glyphs," Mireth said. "Words that predate spoken language. Proto-Essentia. The kind of marks left behind by the first beings to wield will without wisdom."
Cael stared deeper. The glyphs didn't sit still. His eyes told him they were carved in one shape—his mind told him another.
"Why would someone carve these by hand?" he asked.
"No one sane would," she said. "Which means someone had to. Or something else made them."
A glyph near the base caught Cael's attention.
It resembled a twisting coil, like a serpent swallowing its own head, but wrong—its mouth didn't close. Its body frayed into smaller lines that danced around it like parasites orbiting a corpse.
His breath hitched.
It wasn't just a symbol.
It was a name.
He didn't understand how he knew. Only that his tongue began moving before he could stop it.
"Thir-Ahk-Re'el."
The moment the word left his lips, reality buckled.
It wasn't an explosion or a sound—but a semantic collapse. Snowflakes froze mid-air. The glacier shimmered, its white sheen replaced for a heartbeat by a mirror-dark reflection of itself, like the world had blinked into another version of the same scene.
The glyphs glowed. Not with light—but with recognition.
From the heart of the obelisk, a fissure tore open—silent and vertical, like the parting of a curtain between two incompatible truths.
And something stepped through.
It didn't walk. It unfolded.
A being of contradiction. Its form was humanoid but skinless—veins pulsed with glyph-light, bones shimmered with fractal inscriptions, and around its head floated shifting runes like a crown of broken meaning.
Its chest was marked by a single brand: the very glyph Cael had spoken aloud.
It stared at him with hollow sockets where its eyes should have been.
And Cael knew it immediately.
It was him.
A version of him that had crossed too far.
A Cael who had embraced the dead glyphs, rewritten his soul, and become not a man—but an interface. A vessel through which forgotten meanings could once again be spoken into being.
Mireth stood frozen. Her hand was on her blade, but she didn't draw.
The figure raised a hand.
Not in threat—but in offering.
Cael reached halfway—then stopped. His own glyphs on his arm began to stir, reacting, glowing faintly with dark purple and inverted blue.
He stepped back.
The figure tilted its head. Then, without expression or sound, it turned and walked back into the fissure.
The crack sealed behind it.
And the world resumed.
The wind returned. Snow fell. The obelisk no longer glowed—but the glyphs remained.
Cael sank to his knees.
Mireth exhaled, slowly.
"You saw it too," he said.
She nodded.
Cael whispered, "It wasn't just a glyph. It was a door. A future I could become."
Mireth stared at him for a long moment. "And what stopped you from stepping through?"
"I'm not ready to disappear," he said. "Not yet."
But even as he said it, he felt the pull.
The glyph was inside him now.
Waiting.