There was silence in the chamber, the type that gave off an eerie feeling in the air.
Ryu stared at the girl, Lira, whose body bore a twisted mirror of his mark. Her expression remained calm, but her voice trembled with something deeper than fear.
"I didn't ask for it," she said, her gaze never leaving his. "The gate opened under me, I fell through. I think... it left something behind."
She touched the scar beneath her ribs.
"I used to think it was part of me but now I know it's not."
Elyra stepped forward cautiously, studying the room and the constellations above but also the lines etched into the stone floor. She stopped at the edge of a circular depression near the centre.
"This is a seal."
Ryu turned toward her. "A gate?"
Elyra nodded slowly. "Or it could be a vault. Either way, it's not dormant. It's still listening."
Yan crouched beside one of the outer glyphs, brushing her fingers over the grooves in the attempt to uncover something helpful.
"These symbols aren't protective, they're repellent."
Kalavan drew one of his daggers and scanned the shadows around the chamber. "And yet here we are."
Lira stood slowly; her movements deliberate.
"I stayed because I was afraid to leave. Afraid it would follow."
"What is it?" Ryu asked.
She hesitated.
"When I crossed the gate... it was like walking through memory. But the memory wasn't mine. I saw worlds stretched thin and stars that had bled dry. I saw flames so vast and hot they had felt cold."
She looked at Ryu again.
"And I saw you, or someone wearing your mark. Falling backward into the stars."
The floor beneath the seal shuddered.
A deep, resonant pulse echoed through the room.
Ryu felt it through his bones.
The star-mark on his hand responded in alignment. The seal below him recognized him,
and the gate began to awaken.
Elyra stepped forward; brows furrowed. "If we leave it sealed it will call again. Another survivor. Another breach. Another Cassius."
"But if we open it?" Yan asked.
"Then we might gain some insight, it all depends on if we can handle this," Elyra replied.
Lira's voice was low. "It wants to be seen."
Ryu stood at the edge of the seal.
He reached out with his Qi cautious, controlled and the surface of the stone responded. Light traced the patterns in slow spirals, spinning outward. A memory returned to him, of the Hollow Beyond, and the chained eye that watched from a throne of stars.
This gate didn't just lead somewhere.
Ryu lowered his hand.
"We don't open it yet."
Elyra blinked. "Why?"
"Because it's not finished speaking."
Yan stood beside him. "Then we make it wait."
That night they camped within the temple.
No fire.
No light.
Lira remained near the chamber, asleep beneath the ceiling stars. Elyra kept watch. Kalavan stayed in the hall outside, cleaning up his weapons with slow, measured strokes.
Ryu sat near the edge of the seal; eyes fixed on the now-dormant pattern of glyphs.
Yan lay beside him half-awake.
"You could've opened it, couldn't you" she whispered.
"yeah, I know" he replied.
She reached over, touching his hand.
"I'm glad you didn't."
He looked at her. "So am I."
Far beneath the waves, the ancient presence waited.
And now it had heard something new.
A voice it hadn't known in eons.
A bearer.
By morning, the mist outside the temple had thickened.
The sea beyond its walls churned quietly, as if disturbed by dreams it no longer remembered.
Inside, Ryu stood with Elyra in the lower levels of the temple's archive chamber, an ancient vault sealed behind sliding slabs of petrified coral. Lira had led them here, wordless, as if guided by instinct rather than memory.
The doors had opened at Ryu's touch.
Inside were records.
But it wasn't all scrolls or books, like the normal method used for passing information, but walls, etched entirely in runic memory script, burned into metal and glass, glowing faintly with latent Qi.
Elyra stepped forward first, laying her hand against a curved panel.
The wall flickered to life.
Light burst upward in the form of living flame, shaped into moving glyphs and images. A visual echo.
Ryu watched as the room shifted.
A map, but not of their world, not entirely.
A lattice of stars, spirals, and gates.
At the centre: a flame.
Above it: nine names.
Below it: only one.
Each of the names was scratched out, scorched into oblivion.
Except the final one.
It was the first flame.
And beside it, a name in a language Ryu did not recognize but his mark responded to it.
A gentle burn in his hand, an echo.
Elyra read slowly, translating what she could.
"This is a memory tablet, this holds records and memories, but they are fragmented."
"The First Flame was the will of something bigger than this world."
"They followed through the gates, hoping to unify what the stars that had torn apart."
She paused.
"They didn't return."
Yan and Kalavan joined them as the images shifted again.
A group of nine stood in a ring around a burning seal hand extended, chanting. The light beneath them grew until it became a vortex of flame and shadow. Then…
The scene shattered.
One of the nine burned from within, consumed in a moment.
Another reached too far and became something else.
The rest? Fled through collapsing space leaving behind the flame they had tried to understand.
Ryu stepped closer.
The final image formed.
A gate closed. Anchored deep beneath waves. Surrounded by seals that shimmered with rotating constellations.
And above it, etched in ancient flame-script:
Let non awaken, the fire must return and the mark completed.
Elyra stepped back.
"The sea was sealed because of this." She gestured to the still-spinning image, " this was the thing the world couldn't afford to remember."
Yans eyes narrowed. "And now that seal's cracking."
Ryu looked at his hand.
The star-mark pulsed.
Once.
Softly.
Later, Lira sat beside him, quiet. She stared down at the glowing sea, visible through a wide window carved into the temple's lower level.
"I don't remember who I was before the gate," she said. "But I remember what it whispered when I passed through."
Ryu looked at her. "What did it say?"
She met his gaze.
"You are part of the kindling, but you are not the fire."
Outside the mist thickened and far below the temple, beneath the sea's floor, an old seal cracked, just slightly.
Just enough to let something smell the air.
The storm came in at dusk.
Thick sheets of rain swept over the sea, drawn in from all directions. Wind howled across the temple's open terraces, though no clouds were visible. The mist churned, hiding the stars.
Below the surface, the ocean trembled from something moving beneath it.
"We have to go down," Ryu said.
He stood at the edge of the central chamber, where the floor had shifted since their arrival. A ring of glyphs once dormant now rotated slowly, unlocking a spiral staircase that hadn't been there a day before.
Yan joined him, her phoenix-fire burning faintly around her shoulders. "You think the gate is beneath the temple?"
"I don't think it is," Ryu said. "I know it is."
Elyra checked the lining on her staff, reactivating its inner thread. "Then we go now, before it wakes fully."
Kalavan adjusted his blades. "Or worse before it invites something else through."
As the descent began Lira felt a memory creep through, pushed in my Qi that squeezed through the seal, her body felt pain as the memories intruded into her.
Nine seats gathered around the centre of a podium. The void of a white room with the nine that gathered, the nine who bore the mark.
They spoke amongst themselves until a man clad in white-silver and gold appeared in the centre of the podium, he spoke of the rifts scattered throughout the realms.
Action was taken with the nine, each channelling the power of their marks. Light shimmered and surged across their bodies as their respective seals ignited—stars, flame, tide, wind, stillness, and more. Energy arced between them like a constellation drawn in motion. For one moment unity became power, and through it one void was sealed.
The Void Emperor spoke, his form still half-obscured by his spatial abilities. "I will do what I can," he said. "But closing every rift across our worlds drains a vast amount of energy. Even the nine strongest among you can only seal one realm at a time. We must move carefully. The more power I use, the more they are drawn to our worlds."
A girl stepped forward; her voice as steady as it was soft. Her pale skin shimmered faintly, and her inverted mark glowed at the centre of her back, nine stars spinning around a black void. Her eyes, silver with a trace of teal, held both age and clarity. She wore robes of ocean-silk, layered and flowing like liquid starlight, trimmed with constellation-thread embroidery. Her bearing was that of royalty, because of how she dressed
"I agree," she said. "My world is stable. We will be ready to seal it again in two hundred years. I've been granted time and once I've recovered, I can help another realm in sixty."
Around her the others gave nods of consent or murmured responses in lost tongues. Plans were laid. Warnings exchanged. Then the space between them fractured and folded.
She returned alone.
The water shifted gently around her feet as she stepped into her palace. A vast structure of spiralling design, it rested at the centre of an ocean untouched by storms. The palace floated, not anchored by stone or steel, a matrix of layered Qi woven into its foundation like strands of light caused the floating of the palace. Its walls shimmered with blue and silver mineral veining, formed from moonstone, tempered coral, and space-infused quartz. Long, arched corridors extended into silence, each lined with channels of water that coiled through the air like strands of silk.
The ceiling was a dome of soft twilight, where stars moved not across the sky, but within it, always shifting alive.
She passed beneath them without looking up. The throne chamber welcomed her with soft light and gentle reflection. At its centre, a crescent-shaped seat of clear crystal and curved stone hovered just above a still mirror pool. Suspended fountains floated mid-air around it, releasing single drops that never hit the surface. Her steps made no sound on the glass-tiled floor.
The descent was steep.
The stone walls soon gave way to glassy tunnels, built from hardened coral fused with shell and crystallized Qi. The pressure increased as they went deeper both physically and spiritually. Their breath felt slower. The light dimmer.
And then they reached it.
The gate rested in a circular atrium at the very base of the temple's submerged core.
It was massive at least thirty paces across set into the floor like an ancient eye, closed and ringed with protective glyphs that spun independently.
The surrounding chamber vibrated with soft pulses of sound, like distant whale calls except they echoed from beneath the seal.
Elyra's eyes widened. "It's not just resonating."
"It's replying," Ryu said.
The glyphs flared suddenly.
Light spun outward from the gate's centre, then stopped.
A voice not heard, but felt pressed into each of them like the memory of heat:
" One has entered. The seal falters."
"Do you seek the flame, or the truth it hides?"
Yan flinched. "is that a warning?"
"No," Elyra whispered. "It's... asking."
Ryu stepped forward, standing over the gate. The mark on his hand glowed softly, responding not in resistance but recognition.
"Then we answer," he said.
He pressed his palm to the centre seal.
The gate shuddered.
The outer glyphs stopped spinning.
And the chamber went still.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then,
The floor split open.
The gate did not open vertically it peeled back, like petals folding outward, revealing a cylindrical descent shaft lined in ancient flame-metal, spiralling deep into black water.
But the water did not rise.
Instead, it waited a perfect circle of ocean separated from them by Qi alone.
At the bottom, lights moved, and something opened its eyes.
Ryu didn't move and neither did the others.
Because what they felt was presence.
Watching.
Measuring.
Remembering.
And then the voice returned, no longer cold.
It was curious.
"So the bearer walks again."