Vel'Thara – Healing Chambers (Night)
The word clung to the air like a ghost.
"Papa."
Raka froze, the voice still echoing in his skull. It hadn't come from the halls, nor from the fever-dreams that haunted his broken sleep. It had been here. Inside the chamber. Inside him.
He rose from the bench beside Lorr's still form, joints stiff, the suppression field pressing like wet cloth against his skin. His breath fogged faintly, though the chamber wasn't cold.
"Not real," he murmured. But even his voice felt borrowed.
Lorr lay unmoving on the crystal bed, faint Ki-threads coiling around him like mist. The old soldier's pulse flickered steady, but shallow. Still dreaming. Still gone.
The silence that followed was worse than the voice. Dense. Watching.
Raka turned toward the ward's inner wall, eyes narrowing. The glyphs etched into the chamber's foundation shimmered, ever so faintly.
Not gold. Not Spiral crimson. Something in between. They pulsed once, then stilled.
He blinked. Gone.
Academy Courtyard (Shortly After Midnight)
The rain had stopped, but the stone still wept.
Claire moved like a shadow across the courtyard, her boots making no sound despite the puddles. She paused beneath the fractured sky and looked up. No stars, just the dull red glow of the old wounds. Leaking Spiral shimmer through the cracks in the world.
She didn't like silence. Not here.
Behind her, Kael emerged from the eastern corridor, shoulders tense.
"You feel that?" he asked.
Claire didn't answer immediately. "What?"
He frowned. "Like the ground… breathing."
They both turned toward the western wing.
Vault Echo – Lower Western Wing
The scouts had found it two hours ago.
A faint tremor. A crack in the stone floor of the old sparring vault. Beneath it, not soil and not stone, but a cavity. Hollow and wide.
Now, Lira stood watch at the edge of the breach, her glaive humming softly. Tiv adjusted the array anchors, his mouth pressed into a grim line.
"We sealed this floor after the siege," he said. "No openings. No tunnels."
"Looks like something opened it back," Lira replied.
Jace joined them, lugging suppression rods over his shoulder. "We going down there?"
"Not until Kael gives the word."
They waited. And beneath the stone, something exhaled.
Healing Chambers – Later
Raka paced the edge of the room like a caged animal. He hated this body. Too young. Too weak. No Ki, no flame. Just fragments.
Ghosts.
He stared again at Lorr. The old warrior hadn't moved, but his expression had changed subtly. Lips parted. Eyebrows tensed.
Then... Lorr's chest jerked. Not a full breath. Just a twitch. Enough to send a spike of pressure through the chamber. Raka felt it in his ribs where the Spiral Seed pulsed like a second heart.
The glyphs on the wall blinked again. And then Lorr spoke.bNot in his voice. But in the child's.
"She's waiting, Papa."
The War Room – Moments Later
Kael slammed the scroll onto the table. Ink bled across the parchment from a fracture in the seal.
"A glyph breach in the western vault. No Spiral flare, but distortion fields are rising. Pressure's building underneath."
Claire's eyes narrowed. "How deep?"
"Unknown. But something's pushing up."
Sylva entered, tossing a cracked lens onto the table. "The lower vaults are resonating again. Like they're being… tuned."
Kael looked around at the room. Fighters barely standing, glyph crafters running on fumes, an academy built on wounded stone.
And Raka who stepped through the war room doors, pale and silent.
Kael's gaze met his.
"What did you hear?" he asked quietly.
Raka's voice was flat. "A warning."
"From what?"
Raka looked past them all, toward the vault.
"Not what. Who."
The Vault Perimeter – One Hour Before Dawn
The old sparring vault had become a scar. Not a ruin, not a chamber but a wound. The cracked stone floor now gaped in a perfect spiral, each edge rimmed with fading glyph light, like the ridges of a colossal iris. As though the academy itself had blinked.
Tiv's voice was thin. "This isn't natural Spiral bloom. These glyphs… they're patterned."
Jace swept his scanner again. "I keep seeing recursion signatures like a call-and-response between layers."
Kael stared down into the abyss. The drop was shallow at first, fifteen feet maybe, but then it curved into something far deeper, a hollow descending like a coiled throat into the earth.
Claire crouched, running her fingers just above the glowing edge. Her breath hitched.
"Feel that?" she asked. "It's… humming. Not Ki. Not Spiral. Something colder."
Kael didn't answer. He felt it too.
Behind them, the stone vibrated, barely perceptible. But it wasn't a tremor. It was a heartbeat.
Raka's Descent
The rope rasped against his palms. The deeper he went, the quieter the world became.
The glyphs in the walls didn't glow anymore. They listened. As though recording him. As though remembering him.
Raka didn't speak. He didn't need to. The Spiral Seed in his chest grew heavier the deeper he climbed, like a tether dragging his soul downward. His vision wavered. Sometimes the walls shimmered with golden script, sometimes with red. Sometimes both, layered. Memory, rewritten.
A whisper stirred the air beside his ear:
"You left me."
He stopped. His fingers clenched the rope hard.
Not Spiral hallucination. Not the scout's memory. This voice was older. It was his.
The Chamber Below
Raka reached the bottom. It wasn't a cave. It was a room. Built. Geometric.
Ancient stone domed overhead, cracked with age and heat. Pillars lined the edges, half-melted, fused with Spiral residue. And in the center, a glyph altar, etched with the serpent and moon symbol.
The one on the dagger. The one in his dreams.
He stepped closer. And the glyphs ignited. Not with fire but with static.
A child's giggle crackled across the room, distorted like a broken speaker. Raka's knees buckled.
Then... "Papa… don't forget again."
The altar split.
A scream. Not loud but deep like tectonic grief tore through the floor and up the vault walls. Glyph light burst in spirals, throwing him back.
Surface – The Collapse
Above, Kael reeled as the floor quaked. Jace yelled something. Tiv's stabilizers shattered with a spray of sparks.
"Seal it!" Lira barked. "NOW!"
Kael drew his blade. "Where's Raka?"
"Still below!"
A rumble split the air.
Too late.
The breach caved in stone collapsing in folds like a dying lung. Dust and glyphlight erupted in a spiral of sparks.
And then... Silence.
Buried
Raka couldn't move.
Stone pressed against his legs. Blood trickled from his temple. The altar glowed inches away, pulsing slow and steady.
He reached out.
The glyphs brightened under his touch then darkened. They receded into the stone like ink soaking into cloth.
And a voice. Quiet and mournful but not a child's voice. It rose from below the earth.
"You've buried us all, Raka. Again."
He remembered her name.
Sereth.
And then the world went black.